How to Prepare Your Business for Long-term Success

Welcome back to CFO Weekly, where we're talking with financial leaders about how to build efficiency in their teams, create time for strategy, and ultimately get results, with your host, Megan Weis. Let's jump right in.

Megan: Today, my guest is Tony Tiscornia. Tony is the CFO of Coupa and oversees the company's finance and investor relations teams. Tony has been with Coupa since 2012 in various progressive leadership positions including having served as Chief Accounting Officer and VP of Finance leading up to his appointment as CFO. During his tenure, Tony has helped oversee the company's IPO in 2016, secondary offering in 2017, 3 convertible debt offerings, more than a dozen acquisitions, and overall rapid business growth and global expansion.

After starting his career in public accounting with KPMG, Tony held various finance positions at the Clorox Company, Chiron Corporation, Robert Half, Blade Network Technologies, and Soraa. At Blade, he also played an integral role in the company's IPO readiness efforts, followed by the eventual sale of the company to IBM. Tony earned a BS in managerial economics from UC Davis and is a California CPA. Tony, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Tony: Thanks, Megan. It's great to be here.

Megan: Today we're going to be learning about you and Coupa Software and getting some tips for becoming more effective and preparing for growth. I'm looking forward to learning from you and let's get started.

Tony: Sounds great.

Megan: First of all, and as always, let's start with you and your story and how it is that you got to where you are today.

Tony: Sure. Back when I was in college at UC Davis near Sacramento here in California, I took an internship with KPMG, which is a public accounting firm that many people are familiar with and I was doing various things, taxes, and audits. I didn't know which direction I was going to go, necessarily leaving college, and this was about halfway through, but I really enjoyed it.

On the audit side, I was able to see a lot of different businesses and how they run and meet people within those businesses. I found it very interesting and informative and so lo and behold, I followed that path. I started my career post-college at KPMG, which is a big four public accounting firm. As I said, there are so many different companies that if you look at their financial statements, you meet with their leaders. It really exposed me to how different companies run operationally, how important it is to have visibility and control in all aspects of your business so that you have the agility you need to optimize the performance of your business, and every company is different.

That was an exciting place for me to start. Subsequent to that, I held various roles at Clorox Company, Chiron, Robert Half, Blade Network Technologies, and Soraa. Then I came to Coupa almost a decade ago. I've been here, as I mentioned, for almost about 10 years supporting the company's growth globally over time. We had an IPO in 2016, I came here in 2012 and we've done more than a dozen acquisitions. We've done three convertible notes, we did a secondary offering.

It's been just an incredible experience over the last decade here at Coupa. All in all, I guess that adds up to across those different companies, more than 20 years of experience in finance and corporate finance.

Megan: I think that public accounting is a great place to start a career, but what made you decide to be an accountant, to begin with?

Tony: I think the fun side of it is there was always something exciting for me about balancing things out. Having things organized, financial statements, balance sheet reconciliations, at the very infancy of it I think that's what drew me to accounting. The second thing about it was, I don't want to say social, but from a professional perspective, I got to meet so many different people at different businesses. I was really soaking it up like a sponge. Learning about how these businesses ran themselves, different personalities, and different styles of leadership. I just felt like it was an incredible way to start a career.

I think as time went on I focused a lot of my career on accounting but going back six, seven years here at Coupa, I really got involved on the investor relation side even before we were public. Really the strategic aspects of running a business, investing in a business, became my primary focus or interest if you will. I began as I said, six, seven years ago training to at some point become a CFO, and the CFO at the time, Todd Ford was very instrumental in helping along with Rob, our CEO, and others, helping me learn, get exposure so that I could aspire to be CFO here at Coupa someday.

Now, I get the benefit of having that accounting background which I think is a really strong foundation for a CFO. Plus all the investor relations and FP&A experience that I've gained over the past decade here at Coupa. It's really all coming together and it's very exciting for me.

Megan: Let's talk about Coupa software. What is it exactly that you do?

Tony: The way I like to explain it so that it's somewhat easy for folks to understand, we look at enterprise software as having four large verticals. One of them is the ERP, which of course we're all very familiar with. The second is CRM, in which Salesforce is clearly the market leader there. It's all about the top line and managing your sales. A third one would be HCM in Human Capital Management where you see Workdays and ADPs and many others, for managing your most important asset, which is your people.

Then the fourth one is what I would call the rest of your P&L. We've already covered off on revenue and on payroll, but what about all of your spending of money for your suppliers? All the things that flow into your operating expenses and your margin expenses that ultimately impact your earnings? That is supplier spending. What we call that is business spend management.

Coupa is an enterprise solution that manages all of your business spendings. Our platform helps companies do that via procurement, strategic sourcing, supply chain design, and planning accounts payable automation, payments, treasury management, supplier risk management, and travel and expense management. It's really a broad spectrum, a true platform to help you manage all of the business spendings that happen in your company. It's really valuable for CFOs, and we have many CFO advocates because we provide a consolidated view of all their business spending. We help CFOs improve financial predictability, profitability, and really their business performance overall.

Megan: Just curious, is it a product that can just basically come off the shelf, or does it need a lot of customization?

Tony: No. We don't customize, we're a SaaS solution where there's one primary line of code for our solution. What we do is configure. Many of us in the financial space have war stories or horror stories, about large, expensive, on-prem ERP implementations. Certainly, a Coupa implementation is nothing like that, but it's definitely not an off-the-shelf, try out a few users, land, and expand.

We come in and when we partner with a new customer typically sometimes in a matter of weeks for a mid-market size customer or maybe six to nine months, in some cases a year for a large enterprise customer. We're able to get that customer up and running, do all the configuration they need, and make all the connections to their ERP and their HCM systems and other systems that are needed. It's an enterprise software solution that requires implementation, but we've been able to mathematically offer a very clear path to ROI break even for customers that invest in Coupa. That's one of our biggest calling cards when we sell Coupa to customers.

Megan: I was going to ask, what differentiates you guys from your competitors?

Tony: I would talk about our vision areas. There are a few different stories out there about where the name came from back in 2006 when the company was founded. Some of them are fun and entertaining, but the way we look at it is, each letter in Coupa stands for one of our key vision areas that differentiates us. The C is comprehensive. I just rattled off a whole list of areas that we cover. When it comes to business spending, Coupa is a truly comprehensive platform and I think you'd find it's the only one at that level on the market.

The O is for open. We have a very open community within Coupa. We have tons of data. There are a lot of joint sourcing events and sharing across Coupa. We connect to other platforms. It's a very open environment.

The U in Coupa is probably one of the most important ones. Many of us have used systems that are very difficult to use, challenging, cumbersome, and really old. There's a lot of manual work that happens. There's a lot of customization and fixing that needs to be done. Coupa's a very user-friendly, user-centric we're built with the user in mind. An Amazon shopping cart looks and feels so that the adoption you get by employees around the company using the system is really high. The key to success with all your business spending is getting all the activity into the system so that you are very important.

P, Coupa's prescriptive, we have nearly $4 trillion of transactions that have occurred in the core of our platform over the years cumulatively. We're able to take that data and present it back to customers in ways that can help them make better decisions. We call that prescriptive, the P for prescriptive. Actionable steps that you can take. For example, for this commodity, this skew, this good, you're spending more per unit than your peers. What should you do? Run a sourcing event, create a catalog, and negotiate with the supplier. We offer prescriptions from our data to our customers to help optimize their business and their spending.

Then A is accelerated, I touched on it a minute ago, and we know how important it is for companies embarking upon a journey of a partnership with Coupa to have a clear, fast return on their investment. Especially, in a market that is very turbulent. Where CFOs are in others within the organization are really trying to prioritize where they want to make investments. Our ability to do a fast implementation and get the customer to achieve a strong return on investment quickly is the accelerated component of Coupa. All those things, I think factor into us being the industry leader.

Megan: Sounds like a wonderful product.

Tony: Definitely.

Megan: You've been there now for 10 years. What are your proudest achievements since joining Coupa?

Tony: As a fun story, when I came to Coupa, we were on QuickBooks, and we decided to move over to NetSuite. I became the first financial professional to use Coupa and NetSuite together, and that allowed me to be the Guinea pig for all the different integrations we wanted to build.

I really was able to learn the product, and that was maybe nine years ago, eight years ago when we completed that. That was a really great experience. Then I would say we had aspirations of becoming a public company. The first thing you have to do is take all your private company bookkeeping that you've done and get that into a public company shape.

You can report your financial statements, and you can pass audits. Financial statement audits. Probably back in 2014, when we got our first audit opinion completed, I have to say that was a pretty exciting and proud moment. The amount of work, across the team here and with third-party consultants and with my colleagues that went into reaching that milestone, was just herculean, when I look back on it, I think, Wow, how did we do that? Once you get the first one under your belt you've got a good starting point and we just built from there.

Megan: What keeps you there?

Tony: What keeps me here at Coupa? Many things, first and foremost, I'd say the culture that we have here, it's a very respectful culture and very authentic culture. There's not a lot of bureaucracy here at Coupa. My door is wide open and I interact every day with people all across different levels in departments, and in the organization. That really goes for the management team here at Coupa.

Our core values are ensuring customer success, focusing on results, and striving for excellence. We focus on results. We live those core values. A lot of companies I think have core values written down because they have to in today's day and age, but they don't actually integrate them into their daily activities. I can say here at Coupa that one of my main focal points on a daily basis here is to make sure that we're living those as a steward of the culture here. Make sure we are living those core values in all our meetings, and all our interactions, even as we've grown from when I started a hundred people to now over 3,000 colleagues here at Coupa. Culture is really important.

Then I think you layer into that what I would call opportunity. We're the clear leader in the space for business spend management, and we're very focused on keeping that lead and retaining that lead. Then on top of that, we have a huge total addressable market. Most recently we shared a 90-plus billion dollar total addressable market, and we're really in our infancy as far as addressing that. I think the opportunity itself layered on top of the amazing chemistry and culture that we have keeps me very, very excited every day.

Megan: Let's talk about Coupa's IPO in 2016. Can you talk us through when, what went into the decision behind the timing, first of all, and how did you get ready for that?

Tony: Great question. Timing-wise I think that you have to be a certain size. We were nearing $200 million in revenue, which was still fairly young for our company to go public. For us, we're in large enterprise software, we often sell deals to customers that are well into the seven figures from an annual contract value perspective.

When you're interacting with Fortune 100, or Fortune 1000, companies, the pedigree or the comfort that comes with signing up with a supplier that's public that reports their financial statements publicly, that reports earnings, I think really benefits you in having the decision go toward Coupa. Versus some of the other really large organizations that they've worked with in the past, which have good technology, but in our space a bit older technology. That was a big factor for us, was the strength that it would bring to top-line sales being a public company.

What went into an IPO? Everyone talks about what led up to going public. It's an incredibly, meaningful workload. That goes all the way to taking your private company financial statements and making them public. More importantly than that, you have to have the operational discipline to run your business, and meet your results from a top-line perspective, from a cost perspective, and a forecast perspective to close the books quickly, to not have any hiccups.

When you're a public company, you've gotta be dialed in. The timing has to be on point. Really for a year plus, and really intensively for three to four quarters before going public, we strove to operate as a public company would. I think, when you dive into that readiness process, you realize how many-- I don't want to say holes, but how, how much you need to grow in various aspects of your business. A lot of the back office financial infrastructure that's needed you see, you can poke holes in and say Hey, we really need better data here. We need to be closer to being faster.

That requires investment and really a lot of focus from the team. leading up to the IPO it was a ton of work. It was a very exciting milestone. I would say that what a lot of companies or what a lot of individuals that haven't been through it before don't realize is that the first year or two, both actually the first couple of years after becoming public are probably equally as challenging. You're suddenly a public company. You have a stock program that is now actually being executed where you have employees exercising options and selling RSU. You're doing the actual earnings calls and reports.

For those out there that are working toward an IPO, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but it's not over once you do the IPO. I think a lot of the focus goes away from certain consultants and other folks that are permeating around the organization, but it's that first couple of years running as a public company that is an exciting challenge as well.

Megan: I didn't even think of that, but I'm sure that's a huge transition and a lot of learning in the first two years as to how to perform as a public company.

Tony: Exactly. You have many companies based on the market cap, have Sarbanes-Oxley requirements that you didn't have as a private company, and the planning when you think earnings and messaging and financial modeling goes out further right because you're talking long-term with investors. It's a great learning experience. It's something that you really need to prepare for. I recommend that you operate as a public company for about a year if not a little bit longer prior to becoming one, including doing mock earnings calls and things like that because it really helps you get prepared.

Megan: That's great advice. You recently wrote an article for TechCrunch and you posted on LinkedIn that, "Today's uncertain market environment presents major challenges to high-growth businesses, especially those looking to do an IPO but finance teams can be the anchor in the storm." What does this mean to you, first of all, and how can companies make sure that they're not only poised to weather the storm but to be able to grow?

Tony: I think if I were to boil it down to one word, it would be agility. Today as we listen to the news, we have an incredibly dynamic changing environment from a macro perspective. You have war, you have commodity prices that are increasing, inflation, monetary policy, and supply chain issues. The common theme when you listen to CNBC's and read Wall Street Journal and other outlets is that no one really knows exactly what's going to happen. The important thing is that you're able to adapt quickly, and I would use the word agility. You need to have agility in your business to be able to make decisions and operationalize them quickly, moving investments from one place to another.

We're in a time where IPOs have been on pause because of the turbulence in the market, and depressed multiples that are out there relative to a couple of years ago. A lot of our customers are using this time to bolster their back office operations.

They want to have complete visibility and control over all of their investments in their business so that they can make the right decisions, regarding personnel, top-line investments, and also regarding all of their spendings with suppliers, who are the critical suppliers, which ones are at risk of going out of business in a potentially down economy, how can I negotiate better pricing for certain commodities or goods or services, which is part of what our solution can help inform you about.

We've seen CFOs who are on the cusp of doing an IPO but can't do it right now, using this opportunity to get all that back office infrastructure really dialed in, and it goes back to the work that led into the IPO and your previous question, really enhance your ability to operate as a public company. Then as time goes on companies will invest in growth to the degree that the demand allows for it. In other scenarios, they may want to optimize profitability because demand is down for example if we enter into a more severe recession.

I think as we sit here today, no one really knows where we're headed. Optimizing that agility, having the pieces in place so that you can navigate this turbulent environment with whatever it may bring, whichever direction it may go, is really the key.

Megan: It's definitely a turbulent environment. I thought coming out of COVID, we might see some normalcy but it seems like one storm after another.

Tony: I think that looking back in the rear-view mirror, you can see it play out. There were unprecedented levels of participation, liquidity, interest rate, and reductions from, for example, the US Fed and monetary policymakers around the world. Now that's being unwound. That obviously created a high inflationary environment. For growth companies, when the cost of capital increases it creates pressure on equity markets, and really that's been pretty broad.

I'm hopeful right now we're in a period of a bit of a bounce. I know that S&P 500 is up about 15% over the last month and a half but once again, I think it's 50-50 if you talk to truly seasoned economists, let alone-- I'm just one opinion as to whether it's a bear market bounce or this is really a new floor that that is stable that people can work off of.

There's tons of turbulence out there, and I think obviously the war in Ukraine, geopolitical issues with China and the US and Taiwan being a recent example, supply chain issues, costs going up with inflation, and the fed and monetary policymakers trying to mitigate that. There's so much that we yet don't know about how it's going to play out. Is it going to be a soft landing? Is it going to be a recession? We just have to wait and see but one thing I can be sure of is we're going to be ready one way or another.

Megan: Let's talk about disparate systems. Lots of companies operate with systems that don't really talk to each other. Let's talk about the importance of unifying those systems.

Tony: We talk often with our customers about silos and how they're currently operating, the procurement team, the finance team, the accounting team, and the supply chain team are in a silo. that really leaves a lot of efficiencies, and productivity that's getting wasted that doesn't need to be wasted. We're in a period of time where optimizing your operating margins, your gross margins, your free cash flow margins, and your profitability is a really keen focus for investors, for companies to perform well in capital markets.

One simple example I can give you is procurement teams and the rest of the organization. A lot of the companies we work with have these incredible sourcing and procurement leaders and teams that go out and negotiate incredible rates for their supplier contracts, for anything from computer equipment all the way to materials or raw minerals, things like that. What happens is those contracts often go into a closet or sit in someone's email inbox, or they go to a shared server somewhere, and the rest of the organization doesn't know they exist. They can't access that pricing. They don't know about it. They don't know how to execute that pricing, or they don't even know it's there.

One of the unsiloing processes we have at Coupa is when we negotiate a contract or a customer of ours uses Coupa to negotiate great pricing for our contract, they can put that pricing into the system. Coupa is one cloud instance platform that sits on top of-- We typically see many, many different ERP instances within an enterprise company, and all the employees who need that laptop or that screen, or who need that machine for their lab, when they go type it into Coupa, they can see the pricing that has been negotiated there and they can take advantage of it. That benefits a company's bottom line.

That's just one small example. We see Coupa deployed companies, procurement, supply chain, accounts payable, finance, all the way to the closing of the books FP&A, all working really with very symbiotic information, and data, all working as one to optimize the output for the company. When you have a lot of older on-prem systems or manual processes, emails, the way things used to be done, a lot of that gets lost and there's a lot of productivity that is not taken advantage of and inefficiency and really cost that gets burned.

Megan: Let's talk about what an effective finance team looks like.

Tony: I think in today's day and age, an effective finance team is spending most of their time on work, analytical work, or operational work that can really optimize the results of the business. There are so many systems now, you could go all the way to the extreme of even RPA in some cases but certainly like a Coupa, a Salesforce, many others, Workday, so many systems now that can help automate so much of the process.

For example, with Coupa, instead of a supplier emailing a purchase order to someone on the team, and then having that person type it into an ERP system, that person's whole job becomes data entry. If the supplier enters the purchase requisition through the system, it's already pre-populated and it can just be approved or rejected, or questions can be asked. That really frees up bandwidth for the team to work on other things that are more important to the business.

In finance, I can think of analysis and financial analysis. I can think of sales-related analysis, so many different aspects where you would rather have your folks working on more value add areas than working on old cumbersome data entry-type things. It's amazing. We still see so much paper, manual processes, a lot of really cumbersome work that should be done automatically now in a digital way.

I think one of the keys is to optimize for digitization and to allow your team none of us have unlimited resources to use your resources toward optimizing the business. There are many other things as well. I think making sure to have clear objectives and focusing on those results every quarter. We've done mergers and acquisitions, having the team be ready for those having playbooks for those, I could think of a hundred things that a best-in-class organization would do but with digitization, you can really focus on speed, accuracy, and really execution. Right. I think that's a key focal point for CFOs now.

Megan: You mentioned this before but to be effective things have to be running through the system. As companies implement new tools, what's your advice for getting people to adopt those tools?

Tony: The first thing I'd say is to select a tool or a solution that is user friendly. We like to pride you and Coupa that it's very user-centric the way it was built because whenever something is hard, cumbersome, painful, or slow, your employees have to get their job done. They're going to try to find a way to get it done, even if it means going around the system. That's number one. The second thing I'd say is enforcement is a draconian word to use for it, but if all levels of the organization all the way up to the CEO, or in Coupa's case we have an upside-down org chart.

We like to say that we support those individuals on our teams all the way down to the CEO. You know enforcement through the example I think is key. If everyone in the company including the leadership team is using the solution there really aren't any excuses for others in the organization to not be using it.

Megan: That's great advice. As you look at your own team, what's one of the biggest challenges that you guys are facing this quarter, or let's say the rest of 2022?

Tony: Scale has always been, I've said for many, many years my primary focal point, we're a growth company. We have been ever since I've been here at Coupa, really a hyper-growth company. When I joined a hundred folks to more than 3000 colleagues here at Coupa. We've gone from having a US operation only 10 years ago to having a 25% of our sales be or so give or take in EMEA, we have operations in Asia and broader APAC, Japan, have Latin American operations, and sales. How do we continue to meet the needs of this growing business through scale?

One of the traps you can fall into is just adding people. You may have to add people but to what degree? Is throwing people at the problem the right scalable solution? That's where we often see an opportunity to invest in technology whether our own usage of Coupa or many other areas of technology that can help automate processes so that it's not so labor intensive for folks but really broadly, running a business with a hundred employees versus three plus thousand employees it's a different ballgame. When I started probably 20 million of revenue this year we guided to somewhere in the 800 plus million dollar range for revenue on our recent earnings call.

There are a lot of scales that come into that. At every turn when you think you got it licked, there's another challenge that's right in front of you that you have to focus on. That's one of the biggest things of course in this market environment that we're in as well from an investment perspective that's another area of focus is what we're investing in growth and profitability for our company and growing the business, the market. What are the best places to make those investments? Especially given the backdrop of all the turbulence in the market? That's another focal area.

Megan: As a technology company, what investments are you making in technology?

Tony: I can call out one or two examples. Certainly, within Salesforce, there are a lot of different plug-ins or add-on solutions that we've used to get additional data to help make better decisions to help qualify customers. That's one. There's a solution that we use called which is really helpful for us for forecasting and for managing our deal flow. There are too many to name. There's a solution called Xylo that we recently introduced. I'm just giving you a few examples.

Just probably two or three out of a hundred. Which helps us understand all the different SaaS investments that we've made, all the different solutions that we're using and which ones do we actually use. Which ones do we not need? Many, many different ones. NetSuite is of course our ERP and has been great as far as running our business from an ERP perspective and financial reporting. Anything that can really help us optimize the top line in the bottom line from an operational perspective. Those are areas that we focus on for investment.

Megan: Just curious, do you see a day where you'll outgrow NetSuite, or is that a product that can grow with you unlimited?

Tony: It's possible. I think that we're a software company so we don't have a lot of heavy manufacturing. We don't have any manufacturing. We are also from a volume perspective we tend to do large enterprise deals and large mid-market and corporate-size deals versus a company that may have a million consumer transactions per day or per hour and so I think we can go a long way with NetSuite. I never say never there could get to a point where we outgrow it but I don't see that happening for many, many years.

Megan: The last question is just taking a look at the talent market at the moment. What are you guys doing to attract and retain the best and the brightest?

Tony: It's a great question. I think that first and foremost I talked about Coupa being a clear leader in this space. I pointed out four big verticals and all companies are addressing these areas. CRM, HCM business spend management BSM, and ERP. In our space, we're the clear leader and we continue to build upon that lead. I think that helps us attract talent. When you're coming to a place where you have the best solution in the market, it makes you more confident in selling it.

The second thing is we have a massive total addressable market, and it's still relatively untapped. The word I would summarize those two points is opportunity. There's a lot of opportunity for folks that come to Coupa from a business perspective and we like to say Coupa is a platform for both personal and professional development for our colleagues. A lot of opportunities here. It's a very meritocratic environment, and the business has a lot of opportunities.

I think we have a culture that I mentioned earlier of authenticity and respect. There's not a lot of bureaucracy here at Coupa. I think it's a very modern culture that's an arrow in our quiver as well. We're making investments, we're investing meaningfully in career opportunities and talent development. We recently raised salaries for a broad swath of our employees. A lot of that is due to inflation that employees are seeing, we're really building a destination company where people want to stay, grow and build together. Communicating that message to prospective employees and really helping them understand what we're doing here, I think it really helps us attract top talent.

Megan: Definitely sounds like a great message. Tony, Thank you so much for being my guest today.

Tony: Thank you very much. It was great to be here and have a wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Megan: I really enjoyed speaking with you. It's been fun. I wish you and Coupa software all the best. To our listeners, please tune in next week, and until then take care.

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