Building Relationships in Finance

Megan - 00:00:18: Today, my guest is Luigi Testa. Luigi is the chief financial officer at Link Squares, where he oversees the company's finance and administrative functions. In this role, he's responsible for helping scale the company and driving strategy. Luigi was named among Boston Business Journal's 2023 CFO of the Year honorees for his strong performance and leadership. Prior to joining Link Squares, he held strategic finance and corporate development roles at notable companies that include Building Engines, Rapid7, Nanigans, and Acquia. Luigi holds an MBA from Babson College and an undergraduate degree in finance from Bentley University. Luigi, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly Podcast.

Luigi - 00:01:36: It's a pleasure to be here, Megan. Thanks for having me.

Megan - 00:01:38: Yeah, today we'll be discussing how to make finance part of the business's operating fabric to enable better decision making and drive successful outcomes. And I'm excited to learn about you and your thoughts and experiences with this topic. So let's get started.

Luigi - 00:01:53: Excellent. Looking forward to it.

Megan - 00:01:56: Let's start with you. And can you tell us a little bit about your career path and how it is that you got to where you are today?

Luigi - 00:02:03: So I started, I went to school for finance, as many CFOs do. I did not go. On the accounting path, I've worked in venture a few years out of college, and then I began working for private equity-backed and venture-backed companies since leaving the venture. In my last role, I built and ran a corp dev group for a private equity-backed real estate tech company and got to know the two founders of Link Squares. In the meantime, I did some advisory work for them. I also knew some of the early investors in Link Squares, and it felt like a great fit. I really liked the two founders, Chris and Vishal, and I obviously knew the investors. It was a good kind of next step for me. They were looking for a CFO. The company was doubling and tripling every year. And they really had something special. So I jumped on at the beginning of 2020. And the rest is kind of history. And time has flown by. It's been so much fun.

Megan - 00:02:59: So tell us a little bit about Link Squares and the products they provide.

Luigi - 00:03:03: So Link Squares provides, is a legal tech company, we're an AI company. We provide tools to help legal teams go faster, move the business forward faster. So everything from contract assembly to understanding what's inside your contracts, you gotta imagine a lot of companies are sitting on piles of thousands and thousands of contracts and there's millions. So being able to understand what's inside those contracts quickly is really important. We also have a tool that allows legal teams to manage their workflow, because you can also imagine there's a lot of legal priorities in companies and legal's involved in every major decision. So they need to manage their work effectively. And most recently we've introduced a handful of generative AI tools that are just make the product much more robust. And just for background, we actually started out as an AI company. In 2015. So we were AI before AI was cool. And we're continuing to add on to that robust set of features that help our customers automate a lot of the day-to-day tasks that they do, like reviewing contracts and trying to find certain key terms and phrases in contracts. At the end of the day, what we're doing is we're allowing our customers to be much more strategic versus being tactical and in the weeds on a day-to-day basis.

Megan - 00:04:24: And you mentioned having started with Link Squares in early 2020. Is that like right before? Chaos hit the world or in the middle of it?

Luigi - 00:04:34: No, it was right before chaos hit the world. I'd done a bunch of advisory work before 2020 with them. Signed up to start right at the beginning of the year in January. We're raising our Series A. Got that done. And then we shut the office down because of COVID-19 and we just figured it out. But it was an exciting time for sure.

Megan - 00:04:57: Yeah, the last three years for sure have felt quite chaotic for one reason or another. But in 2023, you were named in the list of honorees in the Boston Business Journal for strong leadership. So talk to us about your brand of leadership and why it is that it's successful.

Luigi - 00:05:15: Sure. So I think the thing that I think about most is as a CFO, a lot of times you can get put into the bean counter category and the business really needs you to focus on the big picture. So if you are just being a bean counter, you're actually not doing what you should be doing, which is partnering with the business and helping create value and think about the business strategically and moving forward. So like, how do you get this done and kind of going into my brain, the leadership? I think about it in sort of three different ways. One way is. Creating leverage, so create a way to elevate yourself as the business grows and making sure you keep pace with the business. That's really easy for a business to outgrow you, especially at ArcLib. We've been doubling and tripling the business every year. So being able to create leverage, and that's really by hiring people that are smarter than you and that are experts in their respective fields of the business. And then also allowing them to scale, allowing them to create their own leverage. So as the business grows, you keep compounding that leverage and you can scale your function. You can scale your entire business with, of course, your great team. The second one is integrity. I think it doesn't really matter what level you're at, but being honest and open and vulnerable in the way you lead is really important. I think about credibility a lot with investors, with my peers, with just about everybody you're going to interact with in the business. So being accountable and being able to have good relationships. It makes things a lot more fun and it also makes things a lot easier. As you're trying to run a business, of course, you're going to fall into times that are going to be challenging. But if you build trust and with your peers, with your partners, it becomes a lot easier to run the business. And I think the last one is, especially if you're a CFO, being able to live outside the spreadsheet and understand the more human aspect of running and managing a business. That's really important. It's so easy to go sit in the corner, do a bunch of stuff in a spreadsheet and think it's going to become reality. But that's exactly not how it goes. It happens. So living outside the spreadsheet and interacting with what drives the business forward and the people that do it and the partners that do it. I think that's really key to being successful and growing and leading a healthy business.

Megan - 00:07:34: And when you started your role as CFO, how did you go about building those relationships and the trust that's needed in that role?

Luigi - 00:07:43: It's really easy. Just get to know people, right? Spend time with them. Understand what makes them happy. Understand. About their family, what they're interested in. Have a little bit of a personal touch with them and don't just go to folks when you need something. Make it a relationship that is ongoing, whether there's a challenge that you're trying to overcome or you're just trying to gather data. Really try to make it more personal than just business.

Megan - 00:08:08: And today we're talking about finance and how you can build finance into the fabric of companies operations. So was this the case when you started your role as CFO at Link Square or is it something that you're still working towards?

Luigi - 00:08:25: I think that it's really important for finance to be built into the fabric value business because after all, finance touches just about every part of the company, whether it's directly or indirectly. They're really the eyes and ears of a business. So you really can't run a successful business without doing this. So when I started at Link Squares, we were a small, strappy startup. Tons of success, like I said, doubling and tripling every year. And sort of taking the next step forward, we really had to make sure that we introduced more rigor and discipline as it relates to finance. Because you think about a startup as it goes through its sort of life cycle and becomes a more mature and a growth stage company where we're at now. The investment in the early days is pretty small. It's a few million dollars. So you're just trying to see if something is going to work. You're throwing spaghetti against a wall. As you mature and the business is healthy and successful, the investment becomes much bigger. So having more eyes to optimize, monitor, improve, tune the business, that's really key. So it's easy to get out of course too, because as the business grows, there's more investment, there's more areas that you're looking at. So having finance sort of help become the eyes and ears, the GPS, the business, this is something that is really key to make sure that you're optimizing your investment and ultimately your investors want to make sure they're going to get ROI on their end for what they're investing in the business. And I think having finance be in the fabric of a business, there's always a little bit of it to what degree it depends on the business, but it's never just done. It's kind of like building software. Microsoft has never done building Microsoft Word and says, okay, now we can just sell it and we don't have to do anything else to it. So it's something that you're consistently evolving and making better. And I view finance as a service provider for the business. So your customers are your marketing group, your sales group, and you want to make sure you keep those folks happy, as well as advising them on how things are going in their respective parts of the business, and how to make decisions.

Megan - 00:10:28: So in your eyes, what are the key components of making that happen, of weaving finance into the business?

Luigi - 00:10:36: Yeah, I think weaving fights in business, the key ways to do that are providing visibility and transparency and making sure folks understand from their point of view how things are going from a financial point of view. And it's about, like I said, providing visibility, forecasting, understanding all the drivers and different sensitivities in a business. And also helping them make decisions. And there's data, giving them all the data to make the decisions, but also understanding all the dynamics that are not necessarily rooted in data. And at the end of the day, being able to come to a decision that you can monitor and, I guess, track to some degree. And not everything you can track with metrics. So it gets a little bit tricky when you're trying to separate art and science.

Megan - 00:11:25: And I'm curious about working for a startup as a CFO. How do you balance? The need for taking risks, because those are so important for a startup, with the need to implement controls.

Luigi - 00:11:38: That's a great question. We wouldn't be where we are today if we didn't take risks, right? And as you get more mature, you can take more calculated risks. So as I think about it, I was seeing a little bit earlier in the early days, you're taking a lot of risks because the investment's low. And then once you realize you have something special. You become much more calculated in that risk. And you can also use in leverage history, the data that you've kind of created and built on. To take more risks, what you're doing in a much more calculated way, versus in the early days, you don't really have any data to go off of. So you're operating with more gut. So I think at the end of the day, a business is not going to grow if it doesn't take risks. You're also competing with being able to protect what you have. So if you take too much risk, it could work out really well for you, or you could also sort of blow the whole thing up. So trying to find the right balance of how can I grow incrementally as a business, take little steps once you've kind of reached a good pace of growth, but be able to hedge and not put the business at risk. And I think as you think about introducing new products, is it going to be successful? Is it going to fail? There's a lot of things you can do to make sure you test the market and understand what customers need. Like if you were to invest... $10 billion into XYZ startup and just hire more salespeople. That's probably not going to generate. Of linear growth that you would expect. So that's how I think about sort of a risk scheme where you should invest and when you should do it.

Megan - 00:13:18: As you look back to 2020, starting this role as a CFO, what were some of the first priorities when you started this role? And were there practices that you wanted to implement in previous places of work that you were excited to enact at Link Squares?

Luigi - 00:13:35: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said earlier, I think. Coming to the Link Squares is actually really awesome for me because, like I said, I knew the two founders, Chris and Vishal, got to know them over a handful of years, the earlier investors. So I got to understand all aspects of the business before I jumped in. And they also got to kind of see how I react to certain things. But as far as coming into business and changing things and putting these into place, we have one person on the finance team that did everything from HR to finance to IT. So we needed to build a function from scratch. For me, the things that I focused on were shifting to much more of a metrics-driven business. And this just came with maturity. So like I said in the earlier, just trying things open, you can sell something open. Open as a market there and shifting to a more metrics-driven business. It's making it more about science and less about art and kind of going on gut. And then with that goes providing visibility and accountability into the business, being able to forecast rigor and have discipline, understanding the drivers that make the business sensitive to different kinds of changes. And also in educating the team that you're working with on all those things, because not everybody's spending that much time. In the data to understand what's going on. I'd say the last thing, and this is a really important one, especially if the business is growing fast. And that's being really meticulous about. Creating scalable processes, and also keeping things clean, like really simple, like keep your books clean. It does come in any day to day because it makes it run faster and more efficient. But even more so when you're doing a fundraise, if all your stuff is in perfect order, you have scalable processes, you look like a complete pro when you're going into a fundraise. And this is something that can make it a break. If you're in a fundraise and you're getting asked really basic questions that are a little bit harder for you to answer because you don't have the data there, it's just not a good look. So I think it's not something you wake up one day and say, I'm going to spend a week and I'm going to do this. It's something that you, it's a muscle you're building every day. And part of that building that muscle is investing in systems really early on to help you do that. And I think it's quality over quantity. You don't need to buy 150 tools. You can buy three or four really robust ones and go really deep in those tools.

Megan - 00:16:01: And when you look at a business, which areas within that business do you tend to find the biggest disconnect between that department and the financial side of things? And how do you go about closing the gap?

Luigi - 00:16:15: And it's a good question. I think every business looks beautiful and wonderful on the outside, and there's always gaps you need to close and things that are disconnected. I talked a little about art and science earlier. I think when something is more scientific, where you can say, take sales, for example, if I have X amount of reps that produce Y revenue per year, I can figure out how much revenue I'm going to generate over the course of a year. Obviously, there's outside factors that will influence that and change it. That's more scientific and much more mathematical. But in areas like product and also marketing, it's a little bit harder to connect the dots and figure out where you start generating ROI when you're investing at a certain level. Like in a product, you can say, okay, I'm going to hire 100 engineers and build XYZ products. When is that going to yield a certain amount of revenue? You can certainly kind of model it out and guess, but that's more of the artistic side of things. And then kind of similar with marketing, you're doing activities that are not necessarily always generating revenue, like brand awards and different things. You try to bridge the gap by understanding how am I generating ROI in different investments? And the way that you do that is, and I think our leadership team has been very successful at this, creating annual and quarterly, even monthly goals for each function to align on the investments they're making. I could talk for hours about this, but there's a certain level of buildup to it and making sure you're monitoring, even on a weekly basis, the progress towards those goals and what's the tactical work and outcomes need to happen. This helps you bridge the gap of art and science and make sure that you're delivering the results that you say you're going to deliver. So if you're hiring a certain amount of engineers, are you on time delivering the product? If you're in marketing, are you on time delivering eyeballs on the website page? Like that kind of thing.

Megan - 00:18:15: And I'm curious about those goals. Are those top down or are those built from the bottom up?

Luigi - 00:18:20: We go both ways and I'll kind of walk through how we think about strategic planning. At the top. You have an end goal. And for us, it's, you know, we want to be the best legal tech company on the planet. And how do you do that? You obviously need to keep growing. So you need to keep generating ARR. You want to keep your customers happy. So they stick with you. They continue to buy more products. You want to introduce new products, right? There's a handful of sort of like secondary goals below what your sort of mission is. And then underlying that are the buildup to get to those goals. And I'll use the revenue generation as an easy example. I know if I want to generate a hundred million dollars. It's going to require a certain amount of salespeople that have a certain level of productivity, but it's also going to require... A certain amount of demos and touch points. And all that goes into a formula or a recipe that will, at the end of the day, spit out our revenue number. And we're tracking that. So being able to track all those small goals that kind of get to our end state is really key and important. So you start at the top and you say, OK, I want to be the best legal tech company in the world. And you sort of build it down, but you have to build it up from the bottom to make sure that you have the resources to get there.

Megan - 00:19:42: Yeah, thank you for that. And switching gears a bit, can you talk to us about F Suite and how that came to be?

Luigi - 00:19:50: Sure. So F Suite is a great organization. And I got asked a couple of years ago by the founder of F Suite if I would jump on as one of the founding members. For me as a CFO, especially a first time CFO, like You don't know it all. If you ask me in 20 or 30 years, do I know anything about being a CFO? The answer is still going to be. No, I don't think. That trying to solve all your CFO problems or conundrums that you get into is something you should try to do on your own, like staying in your own company bubble. Is not necessarily an efficient way to run the business. And like going outside and talking to other CFOs. For me, it's been really helpful. I talked about leverage earlier. This isn't a great way to leverage. Use other CFOs that have been there and done that and had the same problems and challenges and have them help you solve yours. The whole point of the org is for you to be able to do the same for other people and get different perspectives. There's a ton of diversity. In the F Suite group. And for me, like I see it as a crude platter. The advice everybody gives you, the problems that people are talking about and ways they're growing their business, it's not all going to be perfect for your exact situation, but it's a fruit platter. You take off what you want and you can kind of modify it to how you think you should do it. You have perspective, which is really the important thing. And you're not sitting in a corner trying to figure it out on your own.

Megan - 00:21:15: So for CFOs who are listening who maybe want to participate, is it like an in-person or is it a chat room? How do you become associated with F Suite?

Luigi - 00:21:25: It's all the above. You can go and apply to be a CFO, obviously. So they have events that you can go to. They have a couple of big events a year. One's in New York, one's in San Francisco. And that's like sort of a big meetup. And then over the course of the year, they host a series of dinners where you can network in your city, as well as they have a bunch of online content. And one of the things they introduced in the last year or so is an online portal where people can ask questions and people can post jobs or you have a technical question about revenue recognition. They can get answers on it. So it's a great group because a lot of times before you have a question, you can just even search for one of the things that you're thinking about. And it might even already be answered.

Megan - 00:22:10: And communication is obviously key for any CFO. So what are your thoughts, language, and presentation styles that are best suited to keeping the rest of the organization informed about finance? And not just the rest of the organization, but other stakeholders who have an interest in finance.

Luigi - 00:22:30: Yeah, it's really simple, actually. It's all about the story that you're telling. Like, I think if you start with the numbers, which I think a lot of, you know, finds people just naturally go into the numbers. You'll lose people doing that. So my presentation style is really starting with the story and themes and not just diving in headfirst on numbers. Like I said, you're gonna lose the majority of people if you just start there. You speak their language, you tell the story. And then the numbers are just there to kind of anchor and support what the story is and what the point that you're trying to get across. I go back to the whole bean counter thing that I was talking about earlier. If you just go into a number of people, I'm just going to see was it being counter. And it's going to be hard for you to really provide strategic direction in the business because you're not speaking their language. So being able to speak their language, understand your audience is really, really key. You're the finance expert, you know, all the numbers, but the kind of key theme that you're trying to get across is more important than just the numbers.

Megan - 00:23:29: And let's talk a bit about artificial intelligence. How are you utilizing artificial intelligence and automation to help things become more efficient? In your product at Link Squares, and in your finance department.

Luigi - 00:23:45: Sure. We love AI. We've been in AI companies since 2015. So AI automation, we absolutely love that. And it certainly helps the business grow faster. And from an investment standpoint, it requires a lot less staff investment if you're doing it the right way. I think if we hadn't invested in AI as a finance team, we'd probably need to have at least double or triple the staff every year. And then from a product standpoint, we actually use Link Squares on the finance team very regularly to make our processes much more efficient. So I have tons of examples, but I think in general, AI for legal teams helps them go really fast and elevates their status because they're no longer sitting with their face in a contract trying to just pull out key terms. For us as a finance team, one of the things we used it for is to run our procurement and bring new vendors on, fire old vendors, get contracts evaluated, sign, just using all of our tools. And for the different groups in the company, we have a process that every group follows when they want to buy a piece of software. And it makes it really easy and streamlined. You're not playing email ping pong and trying to figure out who's going to sign what, when. It's all in our tool called Finalize Transaction for Signing. And you can see who has the pen, sort of what the expectations are, what the next steps are. And then for really big things, AI and automation, I would say one of the things I'm most proud of is we did our CREC fundraise in 2020, $200 million. 70 days because we had all of the AI and automation to answer questions so quick that we weren't spending days or even hours to turn questions around during due diligence. So having our systems in tip-top shape is really important. At the end of the day, nobody wants to spend hours in the bowels of contracts or Excel sheets or playing ping pong. If you have a good process, you can eliminate a lot of that and focus on the things that are actually really important for the business.

Megan - 00:25:48: And you've discussed durable growth and that concept of financial sustainability. So how does AI aid that idea of durability?

Luigi - 00:25:57: Yeah, in some cases it's really the backbone. You're not using people to do things. You're not reading contracts manually. Talk about leverage. AI is that leverage for you to gain an edge and just do things faster. And we've used it in so many parts of our business. Our customers use it. I talk about how the financing uses it, how legal to use it as it relates to our tool. It's cross-functional. So our customers can use our tool in Microsoft Word. They can use it in Salesforce.com if you're a salesperson in Slack, which everybody uses Slack. So we found a lot of use cases for it in reading it with a handful of other tools. It's been really helpful.

Megan - 00:26:38: And talk to us about growth and efficiency and which of those two things is most important to you right now, particularly during these uncertain economic times.

Luigi - 00:26:49: Yeah, at the time, they're definitely different than they were in 2020–2021. It's really interesting. I think in 2020–2021, growth at all costs was very much in fashion. Efficiency was sort of secondary. I think today, those two things are reversed. But I don't think it's about picking one and saying, OK, I'm just going to grow or I'm just going to be efficient. It's finding the recipe and balancing the two of them. Like I said, 2020–2021 growth was sort of the king and efficiency was at a backseat. Now it's. Opposite. I think today You can grow half as much, but you need to be twice as efficient in the business. But it really depends on the stage that you're at in your life cycle and what's right for the business. Ultimately, it's what's going to create the most value for the business in the long term and not just looking at the next year. That's how I think about it.

Megan - 00:27:44: And last question, speaking of uncertainty, but what is it that's keeping you up at night?

Luigi - 00:27:50: My kids keep me up at night because they're all like under-tenanted. I'll keep you up at night. I would say, you know, I don't sit up at night and think about problems. I think about what are my goals and what's standing in the way of solving those problems. So right now it's the economy. I can't control the economy, so I don't think too much about it. I'm just like very aware of what's going on and understanding how it could impact the business. But it's like, what's our ability to scale the business, keep things growing at an efficient pace and kind of tugging on that durable growth theme. So we're always thinking about how we keep our customers happy? How do we invest in the business at the right level and make sure that we monitor it and also have enough resources around the business to support all the initiatives that are going on? It's about adaptability. I would kind of characterize it as that, you know, being able to be adaptable. One is you mature as a business, but two are outside factors that are really out of your control. Kind of, you know, change the client for you.

Megan - 00:28:52: Luigi, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Luigi - 00:28:55: Thank you, Megan. This was a lot of fun. Appreciate it.

Megan - 00:28:58: I've really enjoyed speaking with you and thanks for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge. I wish you and Link Squares all the best.

Luigi - 00:29:08: My pleasure. Thanks again.

Megan - 00:29:10: And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.