Tabs Webinar - Building an Agile Finance Team

Hey Cameron, how are you?

I'm great, Ali, how are you?

I'm doing great. I'm, I'm really excited to have this conversation today and it's perfect timing just as we're heading into deep Q4 in 2024. I think a lot of folks are just excited to hear about how really experienced finance leaders like yourself are just thinking about building an agile finance organization. So thank you so much for making the time.

Happy to. We're shaking off the Thanksgiving kind of cobwebs and the turkey and we're ready to get back at it. So happy to be here.

100%. So for you to make that time on that Monday, which is one of the hardest, but I'm sure we'll make this a fun and entertaining discussion. Just to kick off for our listeners today, just intro on myself. I'm CEO, founder of Tabs, which is building the first purpose-built AR platform, accounts receivable, looking to put the entire workflow on autopilot. So really appreciate folks making the time. Cameron, more importantly, would love if you can just kick off with a quick introduction on yourself. I'm really excited to have you. I've learned so much from you throughout the year. You're one of the few finance leaders that I know who's had such a diverse background, both on the investor side as well as the operator side, but would love to just hand it over to you for a second to give a little bit of background on yourself to the team. Let's start.

So yeah, so I'm Cameron Erzai, I'm CFO of Verkada. We're an 1,800-person physical security technology business. So we make video security cameras, access control systems, alarms, all sort of software-enabled for commercial businesses. So physical, you know, everything from hospitals and banks to schools and warehouses. I started my career very opposite of this. I was a management consultant at McKinsey. I was an investor for a while, so a long-short hedge fund for several years. Realized I didn't really love long-short investing. I think for finance folks, you love the numbers. It seems like a very attractive side of the table to be on, to be the one with the money, but it can get very boring because you just rinse, repeat, and very surface level, and I like to dig into stuff. I ended up doing a number of kind of COO-type roles actually, sort of post my investment career, you know, 8-person startup all the way to, you know, I spent a number of years at BlackRock, almost 9 years at BlackRock, kind of working on new business ventures for BlackRock and that sort of enterprise B2B SaaS space. So I came here now, I think I just crossed 4 years and I'm, you know, leading and growing some of the sort of COO-like teams here. But, you know, mostly, you know, building and growing the finance function.

Now, I think that's one of the really interesting things about your background, Cameron. Obviously, the variety of experiences from large, like very known flagship brands to the startup side, and then also having that balance of obviously being a CFO, but being very ingrained on the operations side and the operating side of the business. So, Appreciate your perspective today. I think just to kick off, I appreciate you covering a little bit high level of Verkada's business model, which we've talked about is so exciting given the hardware, software, services channel, all of the really exciting parts of running a finance team. Just high level for our users to understand, like, what does finance and biz ops really entail at Verkada? Like, what's the overall kind of structure and kind of how have you kind of defined success and what type of measurement have you put in to help kind of put in that infrastructure?

I mean, look, you know, I think fundamentally, whether you're in a sort of CFO or really like COO role, you know, the biggest driver, the kind of the North Star is like, you know, efficiency of growth or efficient growth, right? And so for me, that's, you know, I have a number of different teams that sort of approach that kind of concept of what is efficiency, right? And, you know, supporting growth there. So I've got an accounting team that thinks very much about efficient growth as, well, it's got to be precise and it's got to be accurate but also fast. So you think of speed of close, you think of speed of audits, you can actually spend your time not just arguing with auditors but also helping grow the business. I have a number of operational teams like IT or real estate and workplace or my accounts payable team where we think about that as how do I enable the business to grow as quickly as possible. And so one of my big metrics there is just NPS scores. Like we will do quarterly NPS surveys internally of all of our kind of internal support functions. So that includes IT, includes finance, includes HR, right? Includes legal, really as a way to sort of say like, hey, you know, are we, are we actually operating in a way that's sort of effective for the, for the business? So, and then, you know, you get into other teams where efficient growth is more like, okay, how do I support you almost like an internal consultant or as like a finance partner, like our strategic finance team would be an example of that. So, you know, there are like lots of different ways I go about it, but fundamentally I sort of look at it as the, you know, finance and the goal is like maximizing efficiency of the business.

Yeah. Cameron, do you think— so two really interesting things just to kind of unpack there that I think are really unique with how you've built your team. One is just some of the more operational components, like how, how much of that is given your unique background, having played the COO and being comfortable with some of the non-core finance functions, and how much of that is just you looking at building the most efficient, agile team and realizing there are certain operational teams that are better suited to sit under the office of the CFO versus other functions. Like, how have you found kind of that balance in building the optimal, like, functionalization under you?

Well, I, you know, what I would say there is that it's a broader kind of comment on, like, what is the role of the CFO, right? I think historically, if we rewind the clock, you know, at least 20 years or 30 years, you know, vast majority of CFOs were CPAs. And, you know, a significant portion of the work was accounting, aka backwards-looking kind of forecasting, you know, FP&A. And you know, when you're doing forecasting, a lot of that has to do with just making sure that people don't spend a lot of money. I think, you know, in a growth business in particular, and this is very different if I was CFO of a sort of a private equity-owned business that was trying to cut costs and fundamentally was in a lower growth environment. I think in a growth-oriented business, your job is to figure out how do I spend money smartly? How do I spend money wisely? In fact, I interviewed somebody who does procurement at a company and she renamed the function spend money wisely. That was the name of the function, right? It wasn't procurement or purchasing. It was spend money wisely. And I thought that was a really good way to think about it because fundamentally that is all sort of a CFO role should be doing, which is if you were in a high-growth business, wherever we are in the economic cycle, push comes to shove, a high-growth technology business needs to be high growth. And so I think of like the operational engagement is just as a function of, look, anybody can kind of go out there and say cut your budget is 10% or 20% or 30% and just kind of be grumpy about it. Right? I think that the real value is, okay, we want to like figure out where it makes sense to spend the money and then like, how do I partner with the people to do that?

No, that's super interesting. Second thing, just, just for our users, I think, or viewers today, I think you're one of the first people I've ever heard doing internal NPS. Curious, like, was that an easy thing to kind of get kicked off and like, How have you made that kind of seamlessly work internally? Or is that something that's been like a multi-year rollout? Like how were you able to kick that off?

No, so I would not say it was seamless, but it's not multi-year. I mean, we literally like, I'd say there was one quarter of kicking and screaming and then we sort of got past it. The kicking and screaming comes from the support functions themselves. It's the leaders. So we actually NPS the function and everybody has an assigned point person to them from those support functions. So for example, if you take legal, right? Like for every 150 people at the company, there's one lawyer at the company who is their lawyer. Now that lawyer may not be able to solve every problem for them, but they have a lawyer and they have that person's name and that cell phone. Same is true for HR, same is true for IT, right? And so, and we actually, when we do the NPS scores, like, what do you think about IT? And what do you think about Bob Smith? Right? And we sort of see, like, when you get the NPS score, like, how, you know, who's assigned to you. And so, yeah, I think that the sort of the initial pushback, let's say, from some of the folks in the support functions, most of which report to me, some of which don't, was, well, you know, like, is this, is it going to be fair and accurate? Is this going to be a popularity contest? Is it, you know, what are you going to do with this information? Right? And I think what makes it successful is to say, look, this is just one data point. It's how we measure ourselves. I know that you get 360 feedback or whatever, you get feedback on the function of the individual. This is just one data point, and you can see trends over time. You can see how the workplace team, when they think about we're in the office, free lunches and other things like that, does it move the needle for employee happiness with workplace or does it not? And you can think about that as if one lever is cost, how much money do you spend? Right? If I took your budget to zero, it's a good way to save money, right? But then like, what is the impact on kind of people's satisfaction, right? And we sort of make those like trade-offs, you know, all the time.

Yeah, that's amazing. Just for any of our viewers today who want to like deploy it, are you mostly sending it out via email? Is there any tools or anything that have been critical to being able to kick this off within a quarter?

Email. We use Airtable because we're matching like people to their support person. Right. And we use, um, like for broader kind of surveys, things, uh, like Culture Amp or other, you know, things to do like more overall employee, like benchmarking, but for to do this, like what we call the neighborhood experience survey, we call it neighborhood coverage, right? That, that's just done over email and like Google Sheets and Airtables.

Super interesting. Well, very helpful. One of the things, Cameron, you and I have always talked about is just you've been covering technology companies for a long time, obviously this time dealing with hardware software in particular, complexities that brings. Curious, like, how have you had to specifically kind of adapt your finance and accounting teams and workflows to accommodate this versus kind of the more traditional software environment you've seen in the past?

I would say, oh, sorry, did my video disappear here? Sorry about that. So I'd say the, you know, the way I've sort of thought about that is you just have to be very systems-focused early, right? I mean, your background also has kind of hardware, software in it, right? So when you think about software-only businesses, there's unique aspects to them that sort of have gotten solved by other vendors, you know, around, monthly billing and quarterly billing and how do you kind of do that at scale and sort of solve those problems. And that's been a real challenge for some folks, especially if there's an intermediary involved, if it's not just a direct sale. On the hardware side, you just have to make sure that you keep a series of systems kind of up to date. So what that means is that you have to invest in those systems early. Like we went to NetSuite as our ERP pretty early. It actually predates me. I was employee 200 of the company. And there's not that many people that have like NetSuite live kind of, you know, in the like the 100 to 150% kind of company size. So, you know, that, that why do you need to do that? We have inventory and you have parts and you need to think about that. The other thing you have to do is you have to then invest in the teams that keep the systems in sync, right? A lot of folks, their Salesforce instance is a kind of a zoo that is not particularly useful and people don't trust the data in it, right? And like, whereas we spend a lot of time and energy keeping Salesforce and NetSuite kind of perfectly synced so that the information that's in NetSuite and the information in Salesforce is trustworthy, you reconcile them all the time, right? So that I can like, Business users can run reports out of Salesforce. Finance teams like live in NetSuite, but so do like orders teams and other operational teams because of the hardware component to it. And then you got to be able to like ensure that those things are reconciled on a very, very detailed, like frequent basis so that you can actually kind of make decisions on that. So, you know, I'd say that's the, you know, the biggest focus area has been on, I'd say, just given the hardware side, if that's the gist of the question, it's really about the systems you invest in you're gonna like invest in a bigger ERP kind of implementation earlier on, and then you're gonna have to have a dedicated kind of engineering team just working on those kind of business systems so that it works for the people who are dealing with like, so it works for salespeople, it works for sort of order administration people, it works for supply chain people, it works for, you know, warehouse or somebody who's like holding the physical goods type people. And so they could all kind of like work together.

No, it's super interesting. It checks a lot with what we've seen here on the tab side where a lot of the hardware software or companies that have non-software even services, professional services tied to their business are adapting something like NetSuite far earlier, even in the first $5 to $10 million in revenue, just given the— for growth to kind of the theme earlier, whereas like a lot of pure SaaS companies can get to $50+ million in revenue ahead of thinking about a NetSuite or any type of more formal CRM to ERP integration. One thing I know, Cameron, you've built out really well in-house is the accommodating or the accompanying kind of enterprise applications. Does that, have you found that, like, does that sit under finance? Is that a team that you've kind of verticalized under your team? And how do you balance that with other needs that sales and other teams may need cross-functionally.

So are you talking about like the just business systems and enterprise applications generally that sit under many?

Yeah. Yeah.

So look, I think there's like many ways to skin a cat. In our case, the way we've thought about this is there is a rather large engineering team that sits in sales operations that does everything that is like really Salesforce only. And so think about it as like all things Salesforce and facing the sales team, right? And so they'll do Salesforce only and maybe some of the adjunct things that come out of that, like sequencing tools, right? But really anything that's related to that. Then you think about from Salesforce to our ERP, right? That has several users, including the finance organization, so accounting as well as like, you know, AR, as well as then like an order management or sort of fulfillment, if you want to kind of call it that, like a broadly sort of speaking team. And That team is actually the same, it like sits side by side with the engineers who work on like sales operations, so work on Salesforce only, except they're entirely dedicated to business systems, right? And so the way we've actually structured it is they actually, they both those teams report to a kind of like senior engineering leader who does not report to me, right? But a portion of that team, about a third of that team is solely dedicated to the projects that I have in the business systems world. So anything outside of Salesforce, resource only. And all the PMs and analysts that work on that actually directly do report up into the sort of CFO organization. So it was like we PM the stuff, the engineers are not directly reporting into the CFO organization because you want engineers to kind of be with other engineers for sort of best practices and knowledge sharing. But they're like 100% dedicated and allocated to doing business systems engineering work.

Yeah, I like that a lot. I think one of the things we hear from a lot of finance leaders they need the technical work done. Often when it reports directly into them, their ability to guide the engineers, like technically, often can be misaligned, but also just the motivation factor of getting the best talent. However, I think found the best balance because the folks sit under engineering, so they get the right technical guidance and mentorship. But at the same time, they'll have a specific mandate to support finance with specific capacity targets so that it is very clearly mission-aligned so that you're getting what you need to get done towards the broader—

Yeah. Exactly. It's, it's basically like, yeah, there's, there's like pros and cons of putting them all over, but, you know, you want them to have a career path and mentorship. And then the way you prevent it from getting like misallocated is you have fixed resource allocation, right? There are exactly X human beings on that team who are dedicated to supporting finance and broader business systems. And they know that and they're hired into that kind of side and they understand that that's kind of their role. And so then you sort of do that and then you also have to make sure that you have within your world the sort of, you know, different places will call it different things, but the business analyst or PM type skill set kind of directly within our world, right? So we're very, very close to what the accounting users need or the orders users need. We're kind of drawing up like what the requirements are and that's for us has worked very well.

Totally. Kind of switching topics kind of quickly here. One of the things, Cameron, I've been kind of amazed by your team's ability is to just be a really good support function to sales and channel. I'm just curious kind of how have you both balanced like finances needs while still being kind of the team of yes from a commercial ops standpoint? Really enabling kind of the revenue teams to go out and scale the business as quickly as you all have been able to over the last kind of 5 years?

Well, there's a couple of things I think we've done well. You know, many things we've done incorrectly, but there's certainly things that we've done well. I think one of them is that concept of the fixed resource allocation of the engineers, the kind, the group that's sort of working with Salesforce and the salespeople. Sitting right next to the group that's working like Salesforce to the, to NetSuite and to everything else, right? And so you first and foremost have to have a group of people who are actually dedicated to supporting a rapidly growing kind of sales organization and revenue, you know, function, right? And we're B2B sort of hardware software. So, you know, we've got a large number of sellers around the world. We've got support infrastructure kind of around them. And so making sure that, you know, I'm a, you know, salesperson in Kansas and I need a different or a manager and I need dashboards customized for me in a certain way to help me like manage my team that can't like end up in a queue with like a 3/4 like development process, right? Like you have to have dedicated kind of talent to sort of go support that. And so I think that's the first thing, which is just making sure that you actually have dedicated folks who are like supporting the frontline revenue generation, whatever that is. Yeah. And then dedicated folks doing the backend setup that we talked about, right, that operationally works. I think the second thing is, you know, it's really just about setting the right culture. You know, you got to have the right people who are commercially motivated, who are very focused on kind of the outcomes that are required, kind of ownership mindset that starts at the top of the house that, you know, I'm fortunate to have a great set of leaders who work for me and leaders who work for them. And so Um, you know, that, that has allowed us, I think, to, um, to sort of scale that. So I, like I said, I think, I think it's culture, and I think it's just like directly aligning. The more you can align people to groups of users, like engineers who are supporting salespeople, engineers who are supporting, you know, finance and orders, right? The more you can do that, the better it is to do that. What's the trade-off? The trade-off is efficiency, right? Fixed resource allocation becomes inefficient. It would be much, you know, you would have like sort of 1.5 people's worth of work. And so it's like better to just be like, well, I have one person, I'll have him or her stretch really thin, but we'll just go get two people, right? And we'll have like one doing Group A and one doing Group B. And that's inefficient, you know, kind of for the time period. But again, it's like sort of what you're solving for. If I was solving for like EBITDA maximization, that's not what I would do. But if I'm solving for like maximizing, you know, a double-digit, you know, mid-double-digit growing like tech company, then, you know, you want to really like make sure that you set yourself up to like static resource allocate as much as you can.

Totally. One of the things you mentioned on the second part of that is just hiring the right people and having the right talent. Curious, is there any specific skills kind of in this growth mindset that you hire for and kind of how do you keep that team kind of current with that mentality?

Uh, you know, it's, um, there's a couple things I do. I think that is like kind of the, the, you know, classic like what keeps you up at night kind of question, um, because the sort of maintaining the talent density that we have here is— I think that does keep me up at night. Um, I'd say, you know, the things that we, you know, I look for personally is I look for people who sweat the details, um, first and foremost, right? So You know what I mean? It sounds a little generic, but you know, the people who sweat the details, when you ask them about something they worked on 4 years ago, can get into like the details and the nuances and what happened and what were the pros and the cons and like how they thought about this and how they thought about that. And they actually had like numbers and details and nuance, right? And I look for people like that, right? Who's sort of like, you know, when I talk about something they did 4 years ago, they're like in it, right? And then 4 years ago, it could have been like a college, you know, paper. Yeah, right. And in which case they're in it. They're like, yeah, tell me about that like thesis you referenced from here. And they're like, details about the thesis they wrote freshman year. And that I kind of like look for a lot because I think people who do that, like they remember details, they remember nuances, they're going to tend to get into the details working here. You know, I think that comes part and parcel with those folks who like drive to completion, right? So you look for people who don't just pass things on or play a role, but sort of like own the outcome. And then, you know, I'm also just a big fan of looking for a track record of success. There are lots of ways to do this. I mean, part of it was sort of my former years, I was a management consultant and they hire from certain schools and they put you through these case interviews and kind of all this stuff, right? And, um, but I think the goal is you're just trying to find as many markers of success, of winning, so to speak, at whatever you were doing, whether that was high school, college, whatever it is, club activities, something, right? And so, so looking for that, um, in people, right? Because people who are like, you know, have a track record of being successful at whatever they were doing, care about their problems, like they have the owner-like care, and then they're in the details, like those people are going to win more often than they're going to lose. They're going to get the right outcome more often than they're going to lose. And so you just reinforce that in the hiring process. You reinforce that in the principles that I talk about. I think it's very important to just, as you think about that reinforcement in the hiring process, The best technique I've learned to reinforce that in the hiring process is to like find a candidate who everybody thinks is pretty good and can totally do the job, but like nobody's pounding the table for, and then just reject that candidate.

Yeah.

Just like be very vocal in not hiring that person. So people kind of understand that they themselves were sort of like mediocre on that person. Fine. They're good. Right. Fine. Uh, and that's kind of what you don't want. And if you, if you set that sort of tone in the hiring, then people then find out like really great people and then, you know, they also set that tone with their teams because nobody wants to then like dilute the talent pool that's around them.

Yeah, no, that's super helpful. And kind of one thing I think we mentioned, forgot to mention the users, like you're in the heart of Silicon Valley, one of the most competitive places to also maintain talent. And one of the things I'm amazed by is how much talent not only you've been able to recruit, but also keep with you throughout your amazing tenure at Furcotta as well. Any other kind of tidbits on how to keep really excellent talent kind of current and motivated to continue to grow within your organization?

Yeah, I mean, you know, like there's the standard stuff, like, you know, making sure you identify the high performers and give them stretch opportunities and make sure they're sort of like thinking about themselves sort of a career path for themselves, not just the kind of role, the work they're doing. None of that I invented or was like particularly novel. I'd say, you know, the one, one of the things that we've done particularly well here, which is maybe a little bit more novel, is just really put an emphasis on that like talent, you know, that talent density. And I actually had an investor talk to me recently, a potential investor sort of reach out and it was under the auspices of He reached out because he ended up talking to a former employee who worked with us, and that former employee said, you know, Verkada is so focused on like high talent people that they like, or like the best of the best, that they sometimes miss out on some very good people that could add some value, which that former employee was like viewing as a negative. And the investor was like, I want to talk to that company. Like, who is this company that's like so obsessed with like great people that You know, they're willing to miss out on very good. And so, you know, it's sort of like a bit of a reputation. And I think like, of course, there's mistakes and challenges and that we do not get it perfect, you know, at all. Right. But I think the reason I bring that up is maybe it's a little bit different is it's a kind of winning formula. Folks like to be around and stay with interesting motivated, talented people. I think conversely, if you think back over the course of your career, I'm sure you can remember places you've worked where it's like, kind of people were mailing it in and they weren't all that great. And like the company wasn't doing that great. And you're kind of just like floating along and nobody, nobody looks at that company and thinks, man, this is like the place that I really want to be long term, right? I mean, they tolerate it because they're paid well or they don't work that hard. But, you know, you know, it's rare to get like high retention in those situations. And so, you know, I think that the focus on just like building a team of folks that, you know, feel like it is a high-density place, I'm surrounded by, you know, other team members who I sort of feel like are giving it their all and I respect and like, I think that's very important and something that I emphasize a lot.

Small tangent, but I have to ask along this topic is for just building on that theme, are you a believer in in-person remote, like what's the golden strategy? What's the right balance to—

Yeah, so we're a bit unique and probably not replicatable. I mean, we were sort of as the sort of pandemic wore on, we were pretty early to getting everybody back. We believe very much, especially because a lot of our businesses sort of very early in their career are sort of selling salespeople that, you know, you just learn through the apprenticeship model. I also happen to believe that in the finance function. right? So, you know, we were back to 5 days a week, everybody, for quite some time now, 5 days a week in every office. We've been opening offices around the world. So I think since I've been here, we've opened about 14 or 15 offices around the world the last 3 or 4 years. And they're all sort of in person. They're designed for folks to like learn and work. I think that works really, really well. Now, of course, you know, the— there's a lot of stuff you can do kind of remotely. It's not to say that you can't work remotely. Of course you can. I've done remote, you know, cell phone calls for a long time. I just think that at the end of the day, for a company, the general standard of sort of let's be around, let's collaborate, let's move quickly. I mean, what advantage do you have versus large incumbents other than your ability to sort of like make decisions quickly, communicate and sort of, you know, be faster, smarter, better. So I think that, you know, I personally, we as a company are big believers in sort of the value of sort of being together and sort of of, you know, learning and executing that way.

Couldn't agree more. Thanks for sharing that. One, just moving back to you kind of as a finance CFO, is there any complexities you find that CFOs neglect when they're building a finance team? Just kind of building on that topic for you specifically that you've found.

I mean, you know, it's sort of hard for me to comment on other CFOs and sort of what they do other than the ones that sort worked with, I would say, you know, again, I'm personally like very focused on sweating the details. So for me on the expense side, that means, you know, I'm in the weeds on small dollar amounts down to $25K, really any over $25K at our company, you know, myself or the CEO approves it even at our size and scale, even if it's in your budget. Right. You know, I still approve the POs through our PO approval system. You know, I'm involved in compensation decisions, really any compensation decision for any employee that's outside of kind of our bands, which are pretty narrowly defined. And then, you know, I'd say the other thing that I tend to see ignored, and again, this is maybe a stage of company, but I would say is that you have to think about the cost to your employee base's productivity and satisfaction of the financial operations decisions that you make, right? And so that's why we do the, the NPS scores as an example. When we roll out a new PO request process or a T&E, you know, system, right? You know, we're very like shortly after that we're NPSing, you know, the function and the impact of that. And we'll do deep dive questions around those things. And we really don't understand like, is this a place where people feel like like it's a great place to work and I can get stuff done, or is this a place where it feels like when I want to come in and get something done, I need to get my laptop fixed, it's like going to the DMV and I gotta wait in line, I gotta take a ticket, and then I'm gonna call center, and then I'm gonna wait 4 hours, and you know, then they're going to escalate me to level 2 because level 1 couldn't solve it. You know, like that, that's just frustrating and, and it makes people unproductive and it makes them kind of, um, demotivated, right? And so I think that, you know, uh, I guess where I've seen especially large scale is the sort of efficiency motive, the like let's cut costs, consolidate, get more efficient is not balanced with, you know, sort of at what impact to the productivity or the top line or the employee retention or the employee motivation, right? And so that's why I think, you know, sort of most CFOs are very good at cutting costs, budgeting, planning, accounting, right? But maybe less like good at thinking about like what the implication of that is on like the the productivity and happiness of the workforce.

Super, super interesting. I'm just on the topic of agility, just coming back to what you just mentioned, that ability to be at that level of detail and approval and just kind of, for lack of a better word, in the weeds. How have you found that balance? Like, why is that component so important while still building like an agile function? Like, How do you reconcile those things and what makes that level of detail orientation so important to you?

You know, I haven't figured out a way to do it differently. Maybe that's the answer. Also, you know, my last business, BlackRock, you know, is founder-led 40+ years in, right? So it's the same president, it's the same CEO. I think if you, you know, I mean, obviously Jeff Bezos moved on, but you look at like Google and, you know, how long Apple was run by the same person. And you look at a lot of great businesses or Elon's businesses, there are a lot of businesses that are run by founder CEOs where they're in the details. And there's a reason why that works, which is that you can make decisions quickly, you can balance very challenging— there's not a clear answer to most problems. Otherwise, like AI would've just— there's no more management jobs. It'll just be done by AI bots. But the, you know, so ultimately I think that, you know, getting involved in the details and being able to make those nuanced trade-offs is what generally speaking, like, has correlated with a lot of successful companies and certainly what I've kind of discovered. Now, the nimbleness and the agility to that is you've got to think about like what are the systems that you put in place around that. So for example, I said that I go down to $25,000. I don't go down to $1, right? There's obviously like approval limits below $25,000 because like the cost benefit of me being involved in that doesn't make sense, right? Um, there are certain places where, uh, I approve like compensation outside of a banned range, right? And if you are outside of the banned range, it goes to myself, the CEO, or one of the other co-founders, right? And, but then within the banned range, like much broader set of people can be like agile there. And sometimes I'll give them budgets of money where they can allocate money outside of band and that. So, you know, like you have to think about the systems where like if a problem is going to come up 100 times, it's not scalable for me to like weigh in. But at the same time, you know, there's enough like unique problems where the benefit of a senior level leader being in the details to understand the nuance of that decision is I think what enables a business to make like smart decisions quickly.

That, that is super helpful, spot on. And I think speaks really well to the agility theme for today. Cameron, I know we're almost on time. One last question. I know we started by talking about we're in kind of the post-Thanksgiving kind of most important time as you think about 2024 planning. Curiously, I mean, you've now done this many times over, or you've done your 10,000 hours of next year planning. But for just our listeners today, we would love to just get your take on maybe 1 or 2 things you think finance leaders, or for you, you've gotten right that's super important in terms of 2024 planning. And what are some of the common mistakes that you've either made in the past or you see other finance leaders make that you would ask our viewers to avoid?

I mean, I think that, you know, things that let's say we've done well, or I think are important are, you know, number one, when you're making plans, you got to understand how many are you making and what is the purpose of those plans. You know, there's definitely sometimes a lot of energy that's put into the board plan or the external plan, which is basically your sort of semi softball plan, right? And that has a purpose. People don't like to be disappointed, right? But like, if you're making that plan, understand that's what you're making. If you're making the thing that like is the stretch plan or the management plan, understand that that's what they are and what do they mean and try to be like really, really precise on who sees which plan and kind of what are you trying to achieve with each plan, right? What is the goal of that plan, right? And so I think that's one we've gotten increasingly kind of intentional on. I think the other thing where I've just seen planning sort of go wrong, and I think we've, you know, generally speaking, done a good job of this, but, you know, there's always like ways to improve it is I think good plans make a lot of sense sort of tops down. And so, you know, there's a lot of aspects of our business that are basically ratio driven. So if we want to sell X, I need Y number of salespeople for every like, you know, salesperson, I need 0.1 managers, right? So it's a 10 to 1 ratio. I I need, you know, 0.05 like sales ops people. I need, I need this. I need ratios of people to support that. I need engineers for every product, right? I need designers for every PM, for every engineer, right? Like to think about it in kind of these like top-down ratios. Because what that allows you to do is twofold. One is to like, a couple things. Number one is allows you to like quickly sort of scenario plan. Like what if revenue is 30% light? Like what would I do to like headcount, right? But number two, allows you to stay within a realm of what is reasonable. You can reason at the sort of like senior leadership and board level around your plan in a way that sort of like is intuitive, as opposed to like the bottoms-up planning where there's like a lot of sort of wants and desires mixed in with needs. And it's like very hard to tell like what's happening when you bottoms-up plan a lot of departments, and you got to really dig into it, and then you never really know. And then you sometimes end up with this thing where like your sales and marketing costs, your G&A costs are like 4x competitors, you know, like what just happened here? But it all made sense from a bottoms-up perspective. So I, you know, I just think that a good way to think about a business is to have kind of top-down ratios or however you want to sort of think about that, but top-down kind of metrics that help you think about what things should cost and how you should invest. And then the plans become easier to understand and you can also sensitize them a bit better. And that's not to say you shouldn't do the bottoms up, it's just kind of like, sure, but push comes to shove, you kind of want to start with— I remember at BlackRock, we would do a ton of bottoms up planning and then you just get this memo and it was like a form memo. It went on for like 6 pages and then it was clearly like a bunch of boilerplate in there and then they just put a line in there and your budget is it's, you know, X point X million. And it was kind of like, there's no, there's no explanations to why it's X point X, but they basically like took your bottoms up. They're like, thanks, we have a like what it needs to be and like X point X is the answer. Uh, so, you know, there's like many ways to do that, maybe less like, uh, memo-based, but, you know, ultimately like having a view from a top-down perspective of like what each thing or function should cost in ratio to other functions, uh, is going to be like, is a useful thing to have as you like sort of go into planning.

That's— I love that very, I think, actionable answer for a lot of folks who are going through this and trying to remove a lot of the qualitative and emotional parts of planning and provide a more structured way also to just find a way to do that across functions, especially sitting in the finance seat. Cameron, this has been an extremely enlightening conversation, I think, both on the themes of being agile, but also very like well planned out and thought through from a process standpoint. I think there's a lot for, I know myself to think through as I'm going through planning and a bunch of decisions for our growth in the coming quarters and years. And I'm sure for a lot of our users today. So as always, I really appreciate all of the time you've spent with me and I'm more than confident this will be super helpful to our listeners today. Thank you so much.

Great. Yeah, I know. Glad to do it. Always good to spend time with you. And thanks for having me.

Take care. Thank you.