Jill Klindt recalls that back in 2008, when she joined Workiva, the software start-up was somewhat removed from the career path that she had envisioned for herself.
“It wasn’t that obvious to me at first, and it wasn’t what I was looking for,” explains Klindt, who says that at the time, the Ames, Iowa, company employed six to eight people.
Once on board, Klindt found that her accounting skills and willingness to problem-solve quickly made her a go-to executive along the entrepreneurial byways that ruled Workiva’s early years.
Read More“I was relied on, which felt really good, and people kept bringing me opportunities, so I never felt passed over,” explains Klindt, who notes that even when an outside CFO was recruited to lead Workiva’s 2014 IPO, she never felt displaced.
“I would not have been ready for that role at that point in my career,” comments Klindt, who adds that her predecessor in the CFO office became an outstanding mentor to her, as did other members of Workiva’s C-suite.
Meanwhile, a talent-focused culture that took root during Workiva’s early days has continued to thrive during the company’s post-IPO life, says Klindt, who characterizes the culture as one where employees can ask others for help.
Having stepped into the CFO office earlier this year, Klindt says that talent is now the primary concern when it comes to unlocking future growth at Workiva, where employees now number nearly 2,000.
Says Klindt: “We want to be a much bigger company, and in order to do this, we need to keep hiring.” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about Workiva. What does this company do, and what sets its offerings apart?
Klindt: Our mission is to power transparent reporting for a better world. This sounds really big, and it is. We have global customers, so we’re operating across the globe. Our customers trust our platform to connect their data, their documents, and their teams.
We have a collaborative platform that our customers use to create their reports for different regulatory agencies. Using it to create their internal audit and SOX programs and risk programs. Using it to do different types of management reporting, internal reporting. We have banking regulation reporting. We have different energy regulatory reporting for which customers use our product.
Read MoreEMEA has an ESEF regulatory reporting requirement that our solution is now being used to support. In addition, ESG is one of our newer solution areas where we’re branching out and offering reporting capabilities.
We’re a collaborative platform where you can pull in data from any of the sources and use our document creations, spreadsheets, and presentation creator to link all of your data from one source system into all of these different documents.
As an example, the SEC was our initial market and still is a big part of our base, although we’ve expanded greatly past that. You can create your 10-K, 10-Q filing documents, link them into, say, your board reporting, your internal management reporting. Link them into the script that you’re creating for your earnings release, into your press release, into your investor relations presentation. All of this is using the same information, the same data.
Thus you can have one source of the truth there. Our XBRL tagging, which is a requirement for the SEC documents, is integrated within the document, so you do the tagging alongside your work and you never have to stop and tag it separately.
On top of this, you can collaborate within the platform to work with your coworkers, no matter where they are, which has become very important over the past year and a half, as everybody knows. You can do work at the same time in the same document, communicating with them via commenting and directed comments. If you have something that you want somebody to take a look at, you just tag the paragraph or tag the sentence and comment a directed comment to your coworker.
This has really been well received from the start, but the past year and a half, with us being cloud native and being able to have all of our users across the globe use our product to make remote work easier, has been really gratifying, and we’ve seen a nice uptake in business.
JB
Workiva | www.workiva.com | Ames, Iowa