Role of VP of Finance in high growth SaaS

Описание: Enabling revenue visibility across the business

Once there is clear visibility and control of costs and cash, a high growth scaleup needs to ensure the same is in place for revenue.

This means ensuring all growth leaders within a scaleup are looking at, understanding, communicating the same key assumptions underlying customers and people on a weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly basis. A business should be deriving insights from its SaaS metrics and other business intelligence reports regularly.

When a scaleup raises a Series B round, there should be a clear pattern around CAC and CAC payback.

It is the responsibility of a tactical and operational growth leader to create a high performance culture centered on customer and people data used to influence growth experiments and go-to market decisions.

transcription

Now the next two layers of the pyramid is really around providing greater revenue visibility. So this is typically taken on by someone who has a title of VP of finance or also known as financial director in the old world. What she or he will do is be responsible for financial modeling for revenue visibility as well as growth planning. This individual typically is an ex investment banker, or has grown up in a scale of high growth scale up and vironment and ideally has experience with SAS businesses, as well as mergers and acquisitions. He or she also needs to be very strong at communicating and managing multiple stakeholders, including being a trusted business partner to marketing sales, customer success, as well as product share, he needs to be result driven and have this can do attitude to really lead and affect change within an organization. When I say change, it really means transitioning away from instinct to data centric decisions. And by doing that, you have all the four layers of your of your pyramid built out, typically as well. Again, it depends a little bit on the business, the complexity and the size and how many logos you have as well as the billing cycle. But typically you would have a financial controller an operations lead as well as the data and bi lead reporting into this VP of finance individual. This person should be in place following a series around and definitely before you raise a Series B round and having him or her own place will allow you to have recognized clear patterns around your CAC CAC payback, and figure out which channels you're under or over investing in