Lessons from Craig Wert’s finance career reveal the power of adaptability, problem-solving skills, and the ability to seize opportunities in unexpected places.
Having started his career without a clear road map to the future, Wert later found that his liberal arts background and early experiences in investment banking had laid a good foundation for a career that might have led in any number of directions.
Read MoreWhat began to set Wert apart, however, was his innate ability to troubleshoot. Throughout his career, he was frequently called upon to solve complex problems, whether operational challenges at RCN or financial crises at Vonage. This knack for troubleshooting didn’t just resolve immediate issues, though: It also began to reveal to upper management his maturing strategic acumen and resilience. Every challenge overcome was a stepping-stone that led to increasing trust and the opening of doors to new opportunities.
Today, Wert’s evolution from troubleshooter to CFO of Jobber has proven to be a journey that has endowed him with the ability to anticipate obstacles and swiftly implement effective solutions. As Jobber seeks to expand its market presence and enhance its financial structure, Wert’s troubleshooter mentality suggests that the firm will likely be taking a proactive approach to growth, risk management, and innovation inside the competitive SaaS landscape.
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CFOTL: Tell us about Jobber … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Wert: Jobber is a SaaS-based business. We have a subscription software component, as well as a payments product. We serve home services businesses, primarily in North America, although we also have customers elsewhere. The way in which I think about what we do is just to reference my home in a residential neighborhood in New Jersey. Our target market is all of the pickup trucks and vans that drive through the neighborhood to provide services at people’s homes.
Most of these businesses are very small, with one, two, three, four, or almost certainly fewer than 20 employees. The majority of the firms in this space are mostly small businesses, mostly entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of turnover, a lot of new businesses—and there’s not a lot of software. You might think of us as a very large vertical. We’re almost a super vertical, sort of like a horizontal software business made up of a bunch of verticals.
Read MoreThe key part of our focus on home services is the scheduling component. You have to schedule a crew, as well as schedule the customer if you need access to their home. We are kind of a system-of-record, a workflow management tool for small businesses that have no other software, no other technology. They’re almost always going from pen and paper or nothing at all to one software adoption. So, there’s a lot of opportunity here for us.
Our mission is to help these small businesses grow and be successful. We help them to be better-run, more efficient firms, which in turn allows them to grow and serve their communities better. In some cases, we give them back hours by reducing some of their manual and not really value-add processes through automation. We describe these these categories of functionality as those needed to “get work, do work, get paid.” These are things like quoting work for customers, getting quotes accepted, invoicing, coordinating payments, scheduling the job, and getting together the crew, the customer, the materials, whatever’s involved. We operate across many industries, whether roofing, landscaping, tree work, HVAC, painting, or on and on and on.
We provide a great end-to-end solution. For the market that we serve, it’s really important that we be easy to use and, of course, mobile. Obviously, mobile’s critical because everybody’s on-site. The larger businesses in this space that have more complicated, more enterprise-like home services operations with hundreds of techs and employees will have a different set of needs. The distinction for us is that we’re more focused on firms with 1 to 20 employees.
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“The CFO role at a high-growth company is extraordinarily challenging. This is because you have to wear two hats at once. On the one hand, investing for growth is paramount. But on the other, you are the one responsible for ensuring that returns on investment are achieved and bottom-line results delivered.” –Craig Wert, CFO, Jobber
Jobber | www.getjobber.com | Edmonton, AB