What sets John Rettig’s CFO journey apart from most is not just its length—spanning more than two decades—but its unusual symmetry. His CFO career roughly divides into two decade-long tenures: first helping scale a digital advertising firm from $15 million to $250 million in revenue, and now serving as CFO of Bill, where he’s helped lead the company from startup to public market success.
When Rettig joined Bill, the company had just $13 million in revenue and a modest employee base. What drew him in, he tells us, was the combination of people, culture, and a product that placed finance operations at the center of its design. It was the first time in his career that he’d worked this closely with a finance-focused technology platform.
Read MoreAt the time, Rettig anticipated a 10x growth opportunity—similar to his earlier experience. “It turns out, it’s 100x,” he tells us. Today, Bill has 2,500 employees, serves 500,000 customers, and supports a network of 7 million members. The company processes $300 billion in annual payment volume and has grown to $1.5 billion in revenue.
Much of that growth, Rettig explains, has come from addressing the operational challenges of small and midsize businesses. Early efforts to modernize paper-based processes helped shape the company’s current offerings, which span accounts payable, receivable, corporate cards, and cash flow management.
“We become the center of their financial operations,” Rettig says of the platform’s role. His focus remains on scaling Bill’s impact across the “Fortune 5 million.”
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CFOTL: John, let’s talk about Bill. It’s clearly a very different company today from when you first joined. What is Bill all about, and what does the company offer now?
Rettig: Bill is a platform built to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) automate their financial operations—things like accounts payable, accounts receivable, corporate cards, and cash flow management.
When I joined the company about ten years ago, what drew me in was the people, the culture, and—uniquely—the product itself. As a finance person, this was the first time I had the chance to be that close to a product designed specifically for finance professionals. During my early conversations with the team, including our CEO René (Lacerte), I remember looking at the product and thinking, “Wow, I wish I had this in my previous roles.”
Read MoreI knew it was a big market opportunity, and I thought it had 10x growth potential. That’s what I had seen in my previous company, Exponential, where we grew 10x or 12x during my time there. It turns out I was wrong—but in the best way possible. The opportunity was actually closer to 100x.
Today, Bill is a much bigger business. We’ve gone from $13 million in revenue when I joined to $1.5 billion. We now have 2,500 employees and serve 500,000 customers. Our network includes 7 million members that our customers interact with, and we process about $300 billion in payment volume annually.
What makes us unique is that we started by solving the hard problems most small businesses face—namely, legacy, inefficient, paper-based processes. We focused on automating those processes and became experts in workflow, collaboration, and the tools that power back-office finance.
Because our automation capabilities are applied to financial operations, we also get to facilitate payments—which is actually our primary revenue stream. That’s what sets us apart.
And because we’re helping small businesses manage their money, we become mission critical to how they operate. We’re not a product you try for a month and then cancel. We become the center of their financial operations—integral to how they succeed and grow.
We like to say the Fortune 500 have armies of people and endless resources to optimize their financial operations. Our goal is to bring those same capabilities to the “Fortune 5 Million”—the countless small businesses that don’t have those advantages. We don’t just streamline financial operations. We also help these businesses grow, because they gain insights from our platform, and their finance teams are freed from manual work. They get time back to focus on running and improving their businesses.
So, that’s a bit of who we are and what we’re building.
BIll | www.bill.com | San Jose, CA