How Mfiles CEO Antti Nivala grew Mfiles to $163.6M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording yeah so my my role is the CFO and COO of the business um uh started uh when we were uh really starting to scale the business so I think I was asked to share my lessons learned and and uh it was the challenge was boiling it down to nine so um all right so um yeah what I I'll cover is uh basically um kind of three categories one is in terms of the team and people obviously uh you know the the work is really uh for for a position like like mine it's really about building the team and then enabling them to obviously do do what they do uh so I've got some some thoughts on that um in terms of tooling sharpening the ax lots of lots of Lessons Learned there um and uh in terms of just the intangibles for a company that's growing as fast as we did which I'm sure you know that's of interest to to everybody um clearly lots of kind of leadership uh mistakes and Lessons Learned there so um and I promise none of this is going to be that Earth shattering so it's really just based on kind of practical experience uh and hopefully some of it will be useful uh so maybe tell you a little bit about M Falls we're a uh knowledge work automation company our core platform is a document management platform that automates uh management of information workflows and uh compliance okay uh so uh the the story starts uh way back and and started started in kind of the the the kind of early 2010s if you will in terms of actually become becoming a recurring uh subscription SAS business welcome yeah um and uh so today we're doing uh you know somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 million something like that and so it's been a great great ride and uh definitely lots have Chang uh throughout but especially in the last kind of 3 to four years um and uh and happy to tell you about some very real stories I'm sure every every story every company's a little bit different so happy to tell you about mine and uh to the extent that's interesting to you hopefully all right uh but yeah we're um uh basically kind of at at the stage of um scaling scaling the operations really getting better you know the blocking and tackling is kind of behind us I hope so it's really about optimizing um things like margin and and the metrics um that's that's our stage uh so in terms of the the first category kind of the people and the teams related Lessons Learned so number one for me it's really just making sure you've you fit kind of your your team to the stage right and so I've definitely made a mistake um happy to admit that uh you know early on when I first got to M I say well the first thing I need is a just a killer controller that just done public company stuff I want someone who's just up here and at that page it didn't work out because that's not what we needed we needed someone who's going to be able to roll up their sleeves work with the teams to build some basic things um we don't we didn't need to go from Z to 100 miles an hour right we needed someone to get us from 0 to 20 and so that's that's my Lessons Learned in terms of fitting fitting to to the stage cultural fit we're M Falls is also a Finnish company so we have a unique culture so uh obviously you know all about that but that was very critical for us and and I can admit we've had some misses there uh and then just in terms of speed um the scale and how fast we were growing we just need to move fast and if I made a mistake with with teams which again I have plenty the the worst thing you could do is try to make something work that's not going to work just fail fast move on get better uh won't spend too much time on this I'm sure you've seen probably hundreds of pyramids in your your your career um my this is sort of my thought process when I think about stage uh from a finance and operation standpoint what's the basic stuff early on you're worry about maybe just making sure you can collect cash making sure you can close the books and Report the financial statement and then and then eventually you can work on to things like how do I get my reporting get my budgeting straight and then you can even get into things like okay forecasting and so on and so forth but figure out where you are um when I started M Falls we were probably lower on the pyramid than I'd like to admit so um in terms of the the key sort of things I worked on I thought might this might be interesting to to just again every company's different but for us early on it was really about fundraising can we close a month can we that was actually not easy at first right um are we compliant do we have basic things like sock compliance IO compliance most of our customers were asking for that that was not a given we we invested in it I invested in a controller to really get accounting to the next level um then we went to fpna really getting about budgeting and Analysis uh then we built out the legal function we were using outside Council we invested in internal team then forecasting so kind of gives you maybe a progression um relatively recently hired a ciso um Chief uh information security officer built out a cyber security Team every company at scale is going to need that today obviously um and then we're kind of working on things like optimizing the business now you know pricing deal desk how do we get more out of the deals uh how do we make sure we do good business right so maybe that gives you kind of a sense for the the sorts of um initiatives that that you you might have um hardly scientific but my I'm I'm happy to admit my personal failures so uh these are uh I would say I'll just say this is turnover on my team um throughout the years and if I just did a quick again not scientific my my sense for what didn't work was it a performance skill set issue or was it a lack of culture fit almost always for me it was culture fit things like can't keep up with the pace of business and change um can't collaborate with the teams uh can't sort of keep up with the business initiative changing and and so on and so forth so just just really critical the other thing that I'll highlight is that again not scientific but sort of recently I'm I'm learning myself if things aren't working out make a decision move on fail fast right so that's my kind of wrap up of the the first kind of teams people section is um really fit everything culture as well as what stage you are as a business and then again just moving very fast uh speaking of fast I I'll try to keep keep us moving get us back on pace so the second section is really about tooling and um systems related probably no surprise again I'm I'm like I said uh nothing Earth shattering here uh really designing everything for many years ahead especially when you're a Growth Company like like we are um investing really early on in forecasting that's something that takes practice and it's so important when you get to 100 million let's say and if you haven't already been building your forecasting muscles when you get there you're in trouble right because at that point you need to be really good when you can forecast this quarter next quarter you need to be on right that's uh and and so you need to really start that early uh and then less is more is sort of my way of of trying to rationalize it's way too easy to get into analysis paralysis so just really need to try to avoid that if I go back to our our Revenue growth obviously just conceptual but for us in 2018 is when we did a big system rebuild um went to net suite and brought on some other other Solutions we clearly designed the business though for looking 3 four 5 years ahead we were probably in the 2030 million range when we were doing it and we intentionally all the requirements were based on hey when we are $100 million business this is what we need and obviously that's what we built for and and um that's certainly working out for us and couldn't couldn't you know say that more strongly how important that is uh in terms of forecasting um so again fairly straightforward stuff but to me just critical um number one one is again start early but have a very clear Cadence so what we do with our forecasting and we've been doing this for a long time is on a certain given day of the month you start your collection effort and that's when the business areas know they have to give us their input right engineering knows that's when they need to give us their hours sales knows that's when they need to give us their sales forecast so we know we have very clear dates and Cadence then we collect it we roll it up we have very clear review cycles and those are all calendared just super important to get that going and then the business gets used to it um and then that leads to the second point which is you don't want the forecast to be your forecast it's not my finance forecast right that's got to be the owned by the business so if if you happen to miss the whole business is accountable right um and that's not where we started always I would say so...