By the time Josh Schwartz arrived at Medidata, the life sciences innovation company had found itself entering unfamiliar waters. Having just gone public, the firm was shifting away from being a fast-growing start-up to welcoming life as a more structured, scalable organization. For Schwartz, who initially led revenue recognition, this was the beginning of both personal and professional evolutions that would mirror the company’s own transformation. “This was at a point in time when we were really starting to bring in specialization, to consider how to scale up our business in a major way, and to think about the future,” he recalls.
Read MoreAs Medidata grew, so did Schwartz’s responsibilities. His stubborn curiosity led him to explore corporate corners beyond those outlined for his initial role, which resulted in his uncovering of inefficiencies and eventually his taking on of more of the finance function. “I just started asking questions and driving people crazy,” he candidly reports, noting that his eagerness to improve processes soon came to expand his role across finance in general. As it would turn out, Schwartz’s career growth trajectory—from a start in accounting to driving innovation as a CFO, beginning in 2022—would parallel the evolution of Medidata’s own financial operations.
The metrics that had once guided Medidata’s growth needed to evolve as well, inasmuch as they had changed once the firm had transformed into a platform-based undertaking. “We formerly were focused on how many products our customers were using,” Schwartz observes. “Now, it was no longer about the products—it was about how much data we would be able to drive through the platform.”
This alignment between Schwartz’s career journey and Medidata’s evolving understanding of the importance of having the right metrics highlights the adaptive approach that both have taken to fuel Medidata’s latest growth chapter. Today, Schwartz leads a finance team that embodies the same forward-thinking approach that he had begun to embrace early in his career, which means that everyone in finance is on board with constantly rethinking metrics in order to drive growth.
“It’s no longer about how many products our customers are using, but instead about how deeply we are integrated into their workflows—about how much of their data and processes we are managing.” –Josh Schwartz, CFO, Medidata
“We used to think about individual products, but now we need to look at our platform holistically, in order to understand how much data we are driving through it.” –Josh Schwartz, CFO, Medidata
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CFOTL: Tell us about Medidata … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Schwartz: As an organization, we’re going through a massive transformation, like many other companies at this point in time. With the advent of AI, there’s been such a shift in the availability of data to drive insights and outcomes. For us as a finance function, this has meant transitioning from being a product company to being a platform offering. We had had the makings of a platform before but not the value multipliers, so this latter is something on which we are now really focused.
Read MoreWe started to realize that in the world of price-to-value, we were stopping too early in the reporting process as an FP&A team. We needed to really just go beyond the typical historical metrics that would drive success. For us, it became all about reflecting on the total situation and trying to understand what really defines value for our customers and how to drive dedication to whatever this is across our entire organization—because finance can’t and shouldn’t own the end-to-end journey of the customer and/or even the R&D mission.
Our really transitional “moment” arrived when we saw the shift in our business mind-set evolving from from talking about products to talking about what we call “experiences.” How do we remain involved more toward the end-game of our partners’ projects? Where—and how—in their drug development operational cycles can we most be of help? These developments meant that as a finance team, we had to completely rethink how we engaged with and worked to solve these problems.
Our financial goals right now start with driving double-digit growth and scaling our margins. But what these metrics have looked like in the past but now will look like in the future will be very different, as we look to leverage our operating capital in new, creative ways.
jb
Medidata | www.medidata.com | New York, NY