At Vensure Employer Solutions, completing an acquisition is only the beginning. The company has acquired roughly 120 businesses in eight years, and each new addition enters an integration process containing some 1,400 steps. For CFO and President Kara Childress, the challenge is not simply bringing more companies into the fold. It is making certain the organization can absorb them without multiplying its own inefficiencies.
That challenge has become familiar territory for Childress, whose career took an unusual turn when she left public accounting to join Vensure as COO. Having previously served as the company’s outside auditor, she knew its finances. Operations offered something different: an opportunity to remove roadblocks and help people perform better.
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As Vensure expanded into global payroll, HR technology, and human capital management services, Childress’s responsibilities broadened to include finance and the presidency. Along the way, she confronted a finance organization whose regional and divisional structure was duplicating work.
The acquisition engine was not slowing down. The finance organization needed to change before further growth made its existing structure untenable.
“We need to think about this differently,” Childress recalls.
The resulting reorganization reduced duplication and positioned finance to support additional acquisitions without continually adding staff. Meanwhile, a dedicated integration accounting team now brings acquired businesses into a common reporting framework beginning in their first month.
Today, Vensure is also expanding its AI capabilities while Childress concentrates on client retention, organic growth, and sales investment.
For a company accustomed to acquiring businesses, the next test is making its growing organization work better.
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CFOTL: Tell us about Vensure. How do you describe this company today and the opportunity that lies ahead?
Childress: We are the largest privately held organization in HR technology, HR and payroll services, what we’d call human capital management services. We’re a global company. We’re in 77 countries directly, but we service 180-plus countries. We have expanded tremendously, not just in the U.S. COVID taught a lot of us that you can be global because we all went remote. My career has grown as Vensure has grown as well.
CFOTL: Vensure has completed more than 100 acquisitions. How has M&A shaped the business?
Childress: We’ve done about 120 acquisitions in about eight years, eight and a half years. We’re averaging now about 18 acquisitions a year. We’ve built this amazing engine to acquire businesses, roll up our industry, if you will. We have a 1,400-step process for every single acquisition we do. That is our integration process. Integration and synergizing is the key.
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CFOTL: How do you make certain you have visibility into those businesses as you integrate them?
Childress: First and foremost, from a finance standpoint, we integrate into one accounting system. You don’t have a choice. We also load all the pro forma from the prior history as if we’ve always owned them so that I can see truly how the acquisition is performing. Reporting for us and integrating into one accounting finance reporting solution is at the top of my priority list. I have a completely separate integration accounting team.
CFOTL: Which operating signals give you the earliest read on how the company’s performing?
Childress: We’ve got several different KPIs we look at on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. One of the things we measure weekly is how our clients are hiring and firing. If we see a trend that the clients are hiring more employees, we know that the economy itself is picking up. It’s those types of KPIs that tell us how our business is doing, but also how our economy is doing.
CFOTL: Where are customers seeing meaningful value from AI already?
Childress: We rolled out our Prism AI tools at our user conference this year in June. It’s in their reporting, so clients can ask it to build a report. We’ve got chatbots that will answer questions more quickly than having to put in a ticket and wait for a human to respond. We’re in the process of building our own LLM, specific to human capital management, so our clients can quickly get answers.