Made Possible By
When Matt Fahy identifies the opportunities that have punctuated his finance career, he credits subscription revenue models as having played a recurring role along the trajectory that has led to multiple CFO tours of duty. For Fahy, it all began with a move to New York City, where he was soon serving one of the media world’s most coveted clients: the Newhouse family (owners of a string of newspapers and Condé Nast publishing).
“Being a private, family-owned business, their concerns were really about safeguarding their assets and monitoring their taxes,” explains Fahy, whose lines of sight into the house of Newhouse were bestowed upon him by his employer, Paul Scherer & Company, a boutique New York CPA firm. Fahy would continue to serve media clients when, in the mid-1990s, he jumped to KPMG’s Information, Communications, and Entertainment (ICE) practice, where he acquired an entrepreneurial itch and soon entered the world of dotcom start-ups. He would serve as CFO for Public Access Technologies and QualityClick.com, Inc., before logging a lengthy CFO tenure at AgilQuest, a workplace management SaaS software company.
It was at AgilQuest that Fahy would fine-tune his approach to customer-centric finance by standardizing the collaborative cross-functional practices that today underpin the customer-serving platform that many call “customer success.” ¤
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Guest: Matt Fahy, CFO
Company: FinFit
Headquarters: Virginia Beach, VA
Connect: www.finfit.com
CFOTL: What are your priorities as a finance leader over the next 12 months?
Fahy: Over the next 12 months, I would say the number-one priority is going to be working with the management team and accelerating the growth that we’re already seeing.
We’re growing 50% to 100% per year, and we want to increase that growth. So helping with those unit economics and working with the marketing and sales team, making sure that the sales and marketing engine is really fine-tuned. And making sure we’re all on the same page with those unit economics, so when we go and if we raise additional capital and put that into our sales and marketing engine that we’re going to get the outcome and the growth that we’re expecting. To make sure that the firm is growing, but it’s growing through a capital-efficient process. So that’s probably number one.
And working with operations and streamlining the operations, because again, with fast growth, you have to constantly be looking at your business processes and scaling those for the next level of growth. The other thing I really like about FinFit is their very strong focus on automation. Every time a process starts to get too manual and bogs down a resource, the answer isn’t to get another resource. It’s how do we automate this? And really helping the team go through that evaluation process of what internal business processes are the most important business processes to automate and accelerating that scalability of our business to achieve the very big growth prospects that we have in front of us.
