Ross Grainger remembers an early chapter of his career when finance was only one part of the job.
After stepping outside a traditional finance path to own and operate a Maako auto-body franchise, Grainger tells us he learned what it meant to “act like an owner.” That sometimes meant cleaning toilets, learning to paint cars, welding, doing body work, handling customer service, and making outside sales calls. But the experience also taught him another lesson: even if a leader can do everything, “you shouldn’t do those things forever” if they pull you away from where you can provide the most value.
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That owner’s mindset later followed Grainger back into finance. At a healthcare software company, he tells us he was passed over for a CFO role he wanted. The executive hired instead brought a different perspective—one that showed Grainger how finance could move beyond “the debits and credits” and help shape company direction. Grainger says he ultimately became “extremely happy” they hired someone else because the experience accelerated his development.
Years later, that broader view surfaced again when Grainger helped lead a pricing overhaul at a prior company. According to Grainger, management initially proposed a 7% increase after nearly 10 years without one. Challenged by the board to reconsider “the art of the possible,” the team ultimately achieved a 22% to 23% increase in average ACV.
For Grainger, finance leadership repeatedly returns to the same idea: understand where value is created, and focus your effort there.
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CFOTL: For someone new to Nasuni, what does the platform provide? Who needs it, and where is the opportunity?
Grainger: Nasuni is the leading unstructured data platform for enterprises where file data is mission-critical for people and AI. We help manage, protect, and activate unstructured—so think file data—for large enterprises and the AI that supports them.
And one of the things that really attracted me to Nasuni is, in this age of AI, something that I started to see last year and that has become more apparent this year: having data clean, organized, and permission-aware is very important for the success of any enterprise-level AI implementation, because data really drives the success of your AI tools.
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CFOTL: You’re about eight months into the role. Looking back at Nasuni’s 2024 majority investment, what did that make possible that wasn’t practical before?
Grainger: Vista Equity Partners came in with a majority investment in 2024, and I think it brought the next level of professionalism and growth to Nasuni. Nasuni started in 2009 and had multiple growth journeys along the way, but this really helped professionalize how we thought about the future, both in the products that we brought to market for our customers as well as the professionalism of the accounting and finance organization, and really thinking about what the long-term growth trajectory of a company could be.
CFOTL: Thinking about the revenue model, are customers paying for capacity, expansion, or additional services? Which driver matters most?
Grainger: It is a subscription model, and our core is primarily based on storage—the amount of storage that you need. But we do have additional products as our company has moved from a product to a platform company, with additional products to help those customers get value from their data in using their AI tools.
We’re launching a product, AI Activate, later this year. We’ve previewed it as part of our brand change, but it’s moving from purely storing their data to helping companies get that activation out of it to use it for a future benefit.
CFOTL: Tell us about your lines of sight into the business. What early signals are you looking at? What are the metrics?
Grainger: There are quite a few, both financial metrics and some of the non-financial things. Customer health is important. We have a detailed customer health model just to understand their utilization, how many tickets they’re putting in. But especially as we look at upcoming renewals, we want to make sure the customers are happy with the platform that we’re providing.
To set a good foundation for the renewal, we’re also looking at how much capacity they’re using. Are they over or under what they’ve purchased? And what does that look like as we’re coming into a renewal? As well as, what are those opportunities that they could take advantage of—the additional products and services that we offer on top of the core platform—that we may see other customers in their same industry being able to take advantage of to accelerate their business.
CFOTL: As Nasuni expands beyond storage, how do you decide which new capabilities deserve investment?
Grainger: That is really hard because we’re trying to predict the future, right? So I rely heavily on our product teams to gather information from our prospects and our customers to help put together the ideas on what our customers are truly asking for. And then we have to build the financial models behind that to say, okay, with the things that we know—what our customers are asking for, maybe what other like products are out there, what that demand could be, what we could charge for it—and then really try to build that model of: What is the ROI?
If we’re going to build this, are we potentially going to buy it? We had an acquisition earlier this year because we saw that we needed to provide additional services. But doing that build-buy decision and ensuring that we have the right ROI.
There is no shortage of good ideas and wants from our customers. So weeding down to those that are the most viable, that can provide our ROI and continue to keep our customers happy, is how we’re going to pick which ones we invest in.
CFOTL: During the time you’ve been there, has there been any evidence that has challenged some of management’s original assumptions?
Grainger: There are always areas to challenge management’s assumptions. I haven’t seen yet any of the major assumptions be challenged, but there are always things about uptake on a particular product. How fast will our customers accept it? How much can we change buying decisions and buying behaviors? Are we stuck in, say, the traditional model of when our customers buy, or can we actually influence the timing that our customers can buy?
And that just changes some of our go-to-market strategies, potentially where we invest in events, in sales teams, versus sequencing other things.
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