When Jaylene Kunze was asked to help rebuild a struggling subsidiary in the United Kingdom, she packed up her family and moved overseas with her nine-month-old daughter. The assignment was one more example of the type of challenge that would come to define her career. Rather than following a traditional finance path, Kunze gravitated toward what she calls “the fixer” role, stepping into situations where businesses needed operational repair, process improvement, or organizational change.
That mindset began to take shape through compliance and Sarbanes-Oxley work. While many viewed the documentation requirements as burdensome, Kunze tells us the process forced her to understand “the intersection of people, process, and systems” behind the numbers. It gave her visibility into how businesses actually operated and prepared her for increasingly complex leadership roles.
Read MoreHer appetite for transformation became especially valuable when Tendril transitioned from venture-capital ownership to private-equity ownership. Kunze tells us the company ultimately combined six businesses into what became Uplight. As CFO, she oversaw diligence and integration while helping absorb five acquisitions within seven months.
The experience delivered lasting lessons. Culture, she tells us, matters more than many leaders expect. Different organizations often make decisions in entirely different ways, creating friction that financial models cannot predict. She also learned the cost of pushing too hard. Her team successfully completed aggressive integrations, but Kunze tells us she underestimated the human toll and would invest more heavily in staffing and support if given the opportunity again.
Today, those lessons continue to shape how she approaches leadership, growth, and change.
Made Possible By
CFOTL: Tell us about LegitScript. What’s this company about?
Kunze: LegitScript is a really cool company. It’s mission-based, and our mission is to make the internet and the payments ecosystem safer. What does that mean? It means we’re looking for the bad actors—people who are selling, transacting, or producing illegal goods and services on the internet.
We focus primarily on high-risk areas such as online pharmacies, telemedicine, firearms, gambling, and adult-related businesses. We work with major platforms like Google, payment providers, banks, credit card companies, and individual businesses to identify bad actors and help remove them from the ecosystem, preventing them from processing payments or advertising online.
Read MoreTo make it more tangible, many people know someone who uses a med spa or takes a GLP-1 weight-loss medication. One of our business lines focuses on certifying those who sell medicine online and ensuring they are legitimate pharmacists, licensed physicians, or sourcing medications from certified pharmacies. Ultimately, it’s about protecting consumers and helping ensure they receive legitimate products and services.
CFOTL: Tell us a little about the company’s capital structure over time. Could you share some of that history?
Kunze: The company was founder-built and founder-owned. The founder eventually sold the business to private equity, and today we’re operating under our second private-equity ownership cycle.
CFOTL: If you had to boil it down, what’s driving growth inside the business today?
Kunze: There are a few drivers. First, AI is making it easier to be a bad actor. You can spin up a website and appear to be selling legitimate products in a matter of minutes. As a result, the need for organizations that can identify bad actors and help remove them from the ecosystem continues to grow.
Another major driver is the continued expansion of telemedicine and telehealth since COVID. A significant portion of healthcare interactions now occur virtually. That creates a need for stronger controls and certification processes to ensure providers are legitimate and consumers are receiving real healthcare services and authentic medications.
CFOTL: We always like to ask about metrics. What are the input metrics you watch most closely?
Kunze: There are several. As a SaaS business, we monitor the standard metrics such as gross retention, net retention, and overall growth. What’s particularly important for us is that we operate three distinct product lines, so I spend a great deal of time evaluating product-line performance.
Product-line reporting is much harder than many people realize. This is probably the fifth company where I’ve worked to build reporting that goes beyond contribution margin and all the way down to understanding what each product line contributes to the bottom line. Each of our product lines is at a different stage of its lifecycle. One is growing very quickly, one is relatively stable, and another is dealing with pricing pressure.
That creates important resource-allocation decisions. We don’t want to starve a fast-growing product line in order to support another area unnecessarily. A significant part of my focus is understanding those tradeoffs, evaluating performance at the product-line level, and making sure we’re investing resources where they’ll create the greatest long-term value.
LegitScript | www.legitscript.com | Portland, OR