145: At Apttus, Finance Curates Growth’s Ever-Protruding Path, Jeff Van Zanten, CFO

CFOTL: Please tell us about a time in your finance career when you had an Ah-hah moment, a moment of strategic insight that led you to drive change within your organization.

VAN ZANTEN: Yeah. I think when you're starting a career, if you are controlling, you're pretty focused in the accounting side. And then whoever your mentor is, whoever the CFO or VP of finance starts to pull you in to FP&A and initially that's probably budgeting, something like that. But the true power of FP&A was brought home to me when I joined the company 20 years or so ago and the CFO said, "Look, I've got a budget. It's time to finalize it but I'm not quite where I want to be. I need 13 cents per share for this year and I'm at 8, so go off and get me to my goal." And I went off and I'm still pretty new to the company and I'm talking to all the business heads and honestly I was listening to what they needed more than helping drive how to get to the goal. So I went back to him, I said, "Hey, I can't get to 13 but I can get you to 11 cents." He said, "It's not your job to report what the others are asking for, it's your job to challenge them and to give me options how do I get to the goal I want," and that was a key part of my career. It was a challenging point where I really understood that the power of finance is not to act as a historical reporting organization or just listen to what others want. It's to actually drive change. It was to identify all the opportunities in the business to be able to get to whatever the financial and operational and strategic goals of a company are. It was transforming because it gave me the authority to go drive the business instead of sit back and just report what the business had been doing.

CFOTL: Can I ask you the final question then?

VAN ZANTEN: Of course.

CFOTL: What is one thing that is really exciting you about finance and business right now?

VAN ZANTEN: In my industry and in the type of hyper growth companies that I enjoy working on and working in, a company like Apttus that is growing by leads and bounds, solving a very, very big immaterial business problem gives the opportunity to scale an organization in a compressed period of time through hyper growth and it brings out the best in people and identifies in some cases the worst traits. And so in a very, very compressed period of time, you're able to see the result of your decisions adjust very quickly, all with the goal of happy customers, all with the goal of driving more change in other organizations. It's extremely rewarding in truly hyper growth scenarios. Think about the headcount we've gone through. Three years ago we were 35 people, today we're 700. I joined 18 months ago, it's 200 people, today we're 700, where the size of our revenues almost doubling year over year. Our customers, we had 100 top level customers at least a year, large organizations, the impact is huge that we can have in those organizations, and to be able to operate in that in truly real-time and make adjustments along the way, it's utterly challenging, it's personally rewarding, it's rewarding to our investors, it's rewarding to our clients and I love seeing our people here, the ones that is committed to this rocket ship grow in their functions, spend six months in a role and move to another role and then move to another role. The compression of time working for a very successful company is hard but just fun, just a real kick in the pants.