Takeaways:

• Having an understanding of your customer profile is crucial.
• Target the message that you’d like your customers to receiver and how to deliver it.
• Just because you close a sale doesn’t mean it will translate into value.
• If you can’t close deals then you can’t make it to the top line.
• You should question if a new decision will help your existing customers.
• A roadmap allows your team to fully understand any decisions that they wouldn’t normally be a part of.

Quote of the Show:

“What I’ve seen companies struggle the most with is literally figuring out the decoding, the DNA, if you will, of how to get to market. They’ve got a great product. They understand what its value proposition is, but they have this struggle trying to get that word out to their total.” – Anthony Nitsos

Links:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yogicfo
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anthonynitsos

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Sci-Finances – Anthony Nitsos – The Revenue Maze

Welcome to The Revenue Maze sponsored by Lodestar U.R.Y., guiding B2B companies to upward revenue trajectories through part-time leadership traversing the revenue maze. I’m your host, Valerie. We are here to talk to someone who has demystified and traversed the revenue maze in the SaaS space, evolving from years of experience building B2B Saas finance and admin ecosystems for multi-billion dollar companies such as Duo Security, Llamasoft and ten-plus startups. I am sitting at the feet of the master, our guest and Founder-Owner of SaaS Gurus, Anthony Nitsos.

Thank you so much, Valerie, for that warm introduction. If you talk to my household, the word master would not apply to anything. I don’t think they let me cook very much.

You’re a wow in such a fast-paced environment. Ten-plus startups boggle the mind because startups are so difficult. We’re going to get more into that. Before we get deeper, we have to address the show topic, which is what is one strategy people need to utilize, to escape the revenue maze and find that exponential growth that all of us want. We want to be that next whatever. What is that one thing?

In my experience, what I’ve seen companies struggle the most with is figuring out the decoding DNA of how to get to market. They’ve got a great product and understand what its value proposition is but they have this struggle. It’s because trying to get that word out to their target and getting it out to them in a way that their target can receive it, understand it and respond to it is by far the number one difficulty that I’ve seen all these tech startups do. It recurs over and over again. A lot of it comes down to the fact that a lot of the tech startups don’t, from the beginning, think in terms of the go-to-market. A lot of tech startups have great products.

An engineer developed something and somebody comes along and says, “That’s a great idea. I’m sure people will buy it,” but they don’t figure out how to connect the dots between their people and the people who are going to pay them for it. I’ve seen this over and over again. The success stories that I’ve been participating in, Duo Security being one of them, was they had that DNA decoded so they knew what their persona was, what their ideal customer profile was, which personas they wanted to go after and most importantly, what watering holes those personas went to and could go there and hunt for them.

Their marketing wing was beyond belief. At some point, we had 8,000 MQLs coming into the system for Duo Security salespeople to screen through. That takes a machine and it takes somebody who knows how to build the machine and all those key parts. My take on it is if you do nothing else in the beginning, figure those particular things out. What is your persona? What’s your avatar? Are you a caregiver? Are you a sage? What is your company’s avatar? Use that to best effect to figure out who your target is, who is within your organization you need to target and what message they’re going to receive. More importantly, how are you going to deliver that message? If you do all of those other steps and you forget to communicate them, then you’re not going to go very far.

I’m so curious about that because that is ideally one of the most difficult things. What I’ve seen is perception. How do you get it down to that science where it’s communicated properly so that it creates something in somebody’s mind for that need?

If I knew exactly how to do all of that, I wouldn’t be on the finance side of things. I’d be over on the sales and marketing side of things. I’m giving this to you from the perspective of the referee and the business who’s sitting there saying, “How are you all screwing it up?” It’s because of the ones that get it right. As finance people, we’re happy because we take over at a different phase and there are things that we want to do to make sure that the value of the company is appropriate to the sales that they’re making. That’s also something that people don’t think about.

Just because you close a sale doesn’t mean it’s going to translate into value for your company for investors to say, “This company is worth this much.” You’ve got to pay attention to what your customers signed, what conditions you’ve given them and what are the terms behind that. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that, on the finance side of things, we want to take care of and make sure is done properly. I can tell you because I see this over and over again, that go-to-market strategy and figuring that out is where most of the failures occur.

I have seen that. We have to think about that a little bit because failures are rampant. 99% percent of small businesses are in the United States and 82% of them fail within the first 1 or 2 years. It’s some ridiculous number. If that is the number one cause, I need to understand it a little bit. I’d be like, “Anthony, how do I fix this and that?” You’re on the finance side but I had some good chief finance officers that tell a story with numbers that is almost akin to music and an orchestra. Tell me a little bit about how you have gone through trying to fix this because that’s a big deal.

It is a big deal and it has a huge financial impact because if you can’t close deals, you can’t get the top line. There’s a cashflow impact. You’re not invoicing customers so you’re not getting invoices to help operate your business. Keep in mind that the world I work in is venture capital-backed. We receive fairly sizable checks from people who are taking a bet on the company’s success. In many cases, the cash from customers isn’t, by any means, the be-all and end-all of whether the company is going to succeed but it does contribute. I’ll use another case in point and hopefully, folks don’t think of me as a noun and a verb in Duo Security. There’s a reason why that particular company exited at $2.35 billion to Cisco. That’s a nice payday for everybody that was involved in it.

The reason was they figured a lot of this stuff out. When it gets down to it, there are people out there that can help you, whoever you are, figure out how to decode that revenue maze or what you called at the top of the hour, the revenue maze. It is a maze but it doesn’t have to be a maze if somebody put it to me as salespeople. As finance people, we listen to salespeople all the time because secretly, a number of us want to be salespeople.

I was thinking that they were roadblocking everything.

No, because in the end, sales gets all the credit for the success. The only time CFOs ever hear about anything is if something goes wrong. We’re the ones where as long as everything is quiet, nobody is paying attention to us and we’re good. When something goes sideways, it’s like, “Let’s blame finance.” How many publicly traded companies have you seen where something goes wrong and they fire the CFO? They don’t fire the CEO. It’s endemic. It takes a certain amount of insanity to want to do what I do, especially in startups.

You’ve got your $1 million, $5 million or whatever it is and you’ve got your money from your investors, now what do you do with it? A lot of times, I’ve seen them dive into, “We’ve got to develop the product.” I have to pause them and say, “That’s great because you get all these things done but how’s that going to translate into sales? Is that going to translate into an upsell? Is that feature that you’re adding going to allow you to go back to your existing customers and upsell them or expand them? Are you in a land and expand mode or are you in a takeover mode when it comes to sales?”

The other pet peeve of mine is that what I see a lot of these companies do is go so hard and fast after the new sales and they forget. That ARR, Annualized Recurring Revenue, is like a bathtub and your faucet bringing the water into the bathtub is your new sales. If you didn’t plug the drain, then you’re letting customers leave on the other end of it. They’re not renewing. Another major sin that I see over and over again is that you don’t think about how you’re going to get to market.

One major mistake for businesses is not thinking about how they’re going to get to market.

It’s like a dog chasing a car. What are you going to do once the dog catches it? Let me take some steps back. SaaS companies are based on multiple of their ARR or the value of their companies. What’s called the pre-money number when an investor comes in and the post-money number depends on the value that everybody agrees on the table and this is what the company’s worth. In the very early stages, that valuation is based almost entirely on the technology and its potential. As you get further invested in later investment stages and rounds, they’re going to be looking more and more at your numbers.

This is where the finance people come into the room and start hemming and hawing. If you have contracts that have money-back guarantees, allow people to cancel after three months or are not true SaaS paid-in-advance locked-in ironclad, then they’re going to discount the value of your ARR stream and give you a lower valuation. Another way that they’re going to look at it is there’s this important metric and this is one where I start people tracking from day one. It’s called Net Dollar Retention. The reason why this is so important is this speaks to the quality of your revenue. This is the drain plug on the bathtub.

If you are able to keep your customers in-house because you’re loving them, nurturing them, giving them lots of support and contacting and keeping them in the loop, you’re doing a good job on that support side of things. When it comes time for renewal, it’s a processing of an order. There’s no discussion needed. That’s the true ideal situation and this is what a number of my successful clients have done well. They’ve focused on that customer journey. Once the customer is in-house, make sure that at renewal time, they are renewing.

During that entire process, as development is pushing out more features, the renewals team is focused on, “I know this customer and they’re going to want that.” Here’s an opportunity to upsell. Keeping the ones that you have and then upselling the ones that remain, that total amount is measurable. We call that net dollar retention. Your valuation companies, when they come in and the VC is looking at it, say they’re looking at you in C/B, round B or maybe a late A stage or an A extension and they’re paying attention to those numbers, they want to know, “Is the growth that you’re showing me of new sales going to stick? More importantly, is it going to grow?”

They’re going to ask you for that ARR growth number. I will bet you they’re going to ask you for that net dollar retention number and it better be at 115% or higher. Below that, they’re going to start discounting your revenue, which means they’re going to start giving you lower valuations so you’re either going to give up more of your company for the investment or get less investment. Neither one of those is something that an owner wants to deal with.

I’ve thought about some of those things because sometimes in my world, it’s like, “Come on in because we are trying to maximize our multiplier and what we’re valued at.” Some of the things that you’re saying from the finance side of it make sense. You have to marry the perception that you originally talked about with the go-to-market. It almost sounds like what you were creating and I believe, in the company that you’re doing, you do this. The whole business case from that product development standpoint, before you’ve even gotten to market for your go-to-market strategy, is pressure testing. Where could it go from here for five years? What are our goals along the way?

You have to answer the question, a public opinion or perception, what challenge is this solving uniquely or differently? Back to your original main statement, how do you convey that properly? If we could have telepathy, we could get that out there. If you’re creating business cases, which you are, wouldn’t that almost be the go-to-market sales message because you’ve already had to try to get investors and everything else? You’re already pitching them on. I’m curious. How would you see that?

There’s a tremendous amount of overlap between the two because the sales pitch that works for the end customer is the same one that’s going to resonate with your investors. Investors are cany. They’ll understand where that disconnect occurs. It comes back to this concept that I was introduced to a long time ago called The Customer Journey. It starts with that ideal company profile and the personas. How do you close them? What’s the playbook to close them? Once you close them, how do you stand them up? What does the delivery profile look like? How do you produce it to make sure that it’s smooth and going forward, they don’t have any issues? On the back end, how do you renew them?

Understand all of those steps pretty well between points A from awareness when they first become aware of you to when they renew. It’s not like I get to sit back and make this up. We got to realize this is sausage in the making. This is something where you try something first, you’re working with your experts in marketing and sales. It could also be that you got great marketing people and your salespeople frankly stink. They couldn’t close a door, let alone a sale. There are so many factors that come into play but if you don’t have a clear roadmap, then the team isn’t going to know how to go and where to go to.

It’s defining that customer journey from initial awareness, how you get their attention to how you renew them. Understand the key steps and the key points that happen. Each company is a little bit different but there are a lot of commonalities. You can go out and Google search customer journey and you’re going to find all sorts of stuff out there. It’s not like this is hidden. There’s a method to doing this and the companies that figure that out are the ones that turn off with unicorn exits.

When you said unicorn exits, it brought to mind that you described Alice In Wonderland and the Cheshire Cat saying, “It doesn’t matter where you want to go if you haven’t worked through that process of where you want to go.” Let’s talk about your new company, SaaS Gurus. It sounds like you’re taking that. You said the commonalities and tried to help other companies understand exactly what you were describing through this. Tell us a little bit more about that.

What we focus on in SaaS Gurus, in particular, is what we call the finance and stakeholder ecosystem. We find that as all of the tech people and processes, you need to produce the right numbers because you need those as a SaaS business people but also to look up into the sales chain to make sure that what I was talking about is happening. Anybody in the world can spend all the money they want but it takes the right ones to learn how to make it. That’s why you have such an attrition rate, especially with tech startups. Even if you get $1 million in investment for your seed round, if a year later, you’re sitting there with nothing to show for it, you’re not going to get another round.

First of all, as a CEO or a founder of a tech startup, you should have two things at top of your mind at all times, which are sales and cash management. The next two things that you should have at top of mind are cash management and sales. That’s it. The last thing you want to be worried about is wasting your time chasing numbers that should be coming to your fingertips.

A case in point, I had a client who was spending 40% of her time, as a CEO and founder, doing nothing but trying to find the numbers that she could present to her board and investors. We came in and cleaned that up in three months so whenever she wants the numbers, they come to her first of all. Now, she’s spending zero time on that.

The most important part of that is the numbers are correct. Anybody can put numbers out. This is something that I’ve seen over and over again. I walk into a company and they say, “We’ve got our chart of accountants. Our accounting system is all set up.” I go in there and look at it. I see payroll in one line item. I say, “You’re telling me that your salespeople, engineers, back office folks, HR and all your functions are all one cost. You don’t worry about breaking that out.” Suddenly, it starts to dawn on them.

If you want to, say for example, get an R&D tax credit or report your profit and law statement with a gross margin on it, that’s real because investors pay attention to that. You can’t do that. A lot of times, I go in and we do this over and over again. That’s when Gurus starts. We’re doing the same thing. Every time we walk into these companies, it’s the same thing. Fix the back office so that the CEO can focus on the things that they need to fix. In my world, CEO does not stand for Chief Executive Officer.

What is it?

It’s Chief Excrement Officer because they have to deal with all the crap that nobody else can.

You cleaned that up very nicely.

CFO does not stand for Chief Flushing Officer. We are not the ones responsible for flushing all the crap out of the system. We’re there for finance to make sure everything is done right. I can tell you war stories of how many executive teams waste so much time in the back office because it’s like, “We’ll get to that later,” and then later is there. Suddenly, they’ve got an investor who, first of all, is going to run them through rigorous due diligence. I don’t know if you’ve ever participated in a due diligence exercise for a startup but the later-stage rounds are exponential.

With your seed round, It’s like a handshake in your deck and that’s about it. If you get to the A-round, suddenly they’re starting to ask for employee contracts and customer contracts. You get to the ultimate, which we participated in. I’ve had the displeasure of participating in twice due diligence from a publicly traded company to acquire a private company.

You might as well give up as a finance person for the next two months of your life because you’re going to be doing nothing but producing reports for the hordes of attorneys on the other side. It’s a scale. This is another thing. You’re getting into due diligence and suddenly you’ve got a great investor prospect. They want to see your sales numbers, CAC ratios, your NDRs and all these numbers and you’re looking at them going, “Huh?”

In a couple of businesses that I have owned, you’re hitting a nerve at this point. That’s where I come back to the financial aspects of it. It does create a story if you know how to read the story. A lot of them don’t know how to read the story. I’ve run into that because I’m fractional chief revenues of chief sales. When you go into the small companies, I’ve run into that. They tell you one thing and you’re starting to build all of what you’ve been talking about on the sales revenue side and the go-to-market plan for what they’re going to say and all of these things.

About a month or so into it, they finally revealed the real numbers and you’ve wasted two months. They’re looking at you like, “Shouldn’t I have known this?” It’s like, “You give me one set of numbers and then you have the real one somewhere else.” You have to make decisions based on that. You described it. How are things going with your company? What excites you about the future of your company? What’s going on with this?

There are two sides to the same coin. What’s going on with our company is that we have so much interest that we’re looking at having to expand. As you pointed out, there’s a real need for this. I’m a Star Trek freak. I’m a big science fiction guy so I think in terms of science fiction movies. Do you remember the movie called Armageddon? There are plenty of movies where you’ve got asteroids headed towards the Earth and we’re all gone. Would you rather find that asteroid when it’s in the orbit of Pluto when you have lots of time to figure out what to do with it?

When it’s crossing the orbit of the moon and it’s down your throats, you’re like, “Let’s all bend over and kiss our backsides goodbye.” What you want to avoid is what I call these extinction-level events. They happen in companies because they don’t pay attention to the back office. One of them could be what you said. Suddenly, they’re in the last throws of closing around and then the investors find out that the numbers that you’ve been giving them aren’t real. The real numbers are here. They walk away from the table and you’re out of cash because you were banking that you were going to get this round landed to keep your company going. If you don’t think that happens, I can tell you it happens.

Extinction-level events happen when companies don’t pay attention to the back office.

Would you rather fix all that annoying back office stuff now or wait until later when it could cost you a round and lots of money to clean it up? Let’s say you’re a well-established company. I’ve had this happen too. I walk into companies that are fairly well-established and their back offices are a mess. The reason is that they’ve grown like, “We need an accounting system. That’s great. We need a startup and an expense.” They’ve got all this tech and they don’t talk to each other. They’re not integrated. There’s a lot of wasted time checking and backchecking.

The poor finance people are treated like dirt because they can’t put the right numbers out. They can’t put the right numbers out because they don’t have the tools to do it. It’s one of those areas where you either get this idea from us or you’re like, “I’m not going to worry about that anyway. I don’t care what he says.” That’s fine. You’ll probably be looking me up in a couple of three years.

One question that I typically ask people too is, “How much money did you lose over those three years?” A lot of times, people misunderstand the price of something versus the value of that price gets. They’ll go, “That’s too much.” It’s like, “We’re in budgeting anonymous. We’re all in mortgages.”

You hit on another one right there, budgets. One of the first things that your investors are going to ask for is your performance. If you give them something that you downloaded from the web like, “This is great. My buddy Jill had this one and you got it from her,” and it doesn’t fit into the entire back office picture that you have, you might as well be speaking Greek to them because you’re going to be giving them something that, A) They’re not going to understand or, B) They’re not going to believe. You don’t want to be in a position where you’re walking into a meeting with investors and you don’t look 100% confident behind not only what you’re doing but what you know.

A big part of what you know is what your numbers are. If you don’t know them and you think you know them, that’s not a good position. I have another war story here, which is I came into a company. It’s a typical startup and they’re trying to do things on their own. One of the things they were doing was tracking their ARR on a spreadsheet. I can tell you that tracking ARR on a spreadsheet takes a CPA to do. It’s like, “I’m Anthony and I’m a recovering CPA.” The last thing I like to do is track ARR on a spreadsheet because it’s nothing more than a pure pain in the backside.

As a business, a big part of what you know is what your numbers are. If you don’t know them and you just “think” you know them, that’s not a good position.

The CEO is tracking ARR on a spreadsheet and he said, “Our ARR is at $500,000.” I’m looking at the spreadsheet and I’m like, “We’re going to put SaaSOptics in.” SaaSOptics is by far the leader in the industry for tracking ARR and metrics. I’m a very big proponent of them because I’ve been working with them for a couple of years. They had put SaaSOptics in but nobody could get it to work. I come in, call my buddy at SaaSOptics and say, “Clayton, we got to get this guy stood up.” They say, “We’re going to put this person out. Let’s get it done.” I got it done and tied everything out. In the end, do you know what their ARR was?

I don’t. What was it?

Two-thirds of what they thought it was. Imagine you are the CEO and you have to go back to your board, many of whom are investors in your company and have put their money in believing in you, to say, “I’m sorry I missed.” It was handled, they went through and they got through it. That is not a position you, as a founder, ever want to be in, which is going in thinking that you have one number and it turns out it’s something different. A miss of 1/3 is pretty big when it’s coming to your top line.

I’ve hired sales team members based on one premise and created the comp plan for that premise in the strategy and everything and found out the real numbers. They didn’t even have the numbers to get there so you had to redesign the whole thing. If you calculate hours, you’ve wasted your persona. You’re trying to be professional. You’ve done all of these things and then you’ve got people down the road. It’s all mayhem and you’ve got your first revenue maze block right there because you’re starting all over again. That is so fascinating. Anthony, who are you then? Not just in SaaS Gurus but who are you from little you to the present day? What brought you to this point?

I like to joke about Michael Crichton. I’m sure you’ve heard of him from Jurassic Park.

I’m a sci-fi geek. We’ve established that one.

I like to joke with people that Michael Crichton and I have something very much in common. We’re both medical school dropouts.

What do we call that? Medical MSCs.

He made the better move because he went on to write books that made him a billionaire. Counting all the billions is what I do. Why did I raise that? That training to be a doctor at a top medical school in the United States, in looking at the entire system of the person and the environment they’re in, has informed everything I’ve done since. Corporations are no different from human bodies in many ways. The word corporation means body. The word is embedded. We have an executive committee. That’s the brain. You have intelligence gathering. That’s your eyes. You have departments. Those are your organs.

Corporations are no different from human bodies in many ways. We have an executive committee; that’s the brain. You have intelligence gathering; that’s your eyes. You have departments; those are your organs.

Getting all that to fit together and move smoothly and in harmony is as important in human health as it is in corporate health. I took that attitude with me into the marketplace. My first job was as a logistics and production scheduler and manufacturing expert because I took a lot of those things and helped the company improve its product flows, reduced costs and things like that. From there, I moved into ERP systems, which are massive and hugely integrated. I played to my strengths in terms of, “You’ve got a system that’s going to do engineering, production, delivery, accounting and all this other stuff. How do you get everybody to sit down together and figure out how this is all going to work?”

From there, I moved as a controller to a Japanese manufacturing company. This was the first time that I scaled a company and added a zero to revenue in three years. We took that company from $5 million to $50 million in 3 years. I was in charge of the entire back office and I managed to scale it in such a way that the 3 people I had when we were at $5 million were the same 3 people we had at $50 million. We didn’t need to add a single headcount to the back office. I was allowed to automate and put all of those integrations together from scratch. In other words, we moved into a clean building and was like, “Everything with an electron that doesn’t run a production machine, you’re in charge of it, Anthony.”

Having all that background in training, I became a Six Sigma Black Belt as part of that because the Japanese have a very different view. I learned at the feet of the true masters of efficiency and it’s the Japanese because they were using it to kick the living daylights out of the American automotive industry. Being from Michigan, guess what industry is most prevalent in this state? That formed my background a lot. I realized these accountants are having lots of fun but finance people get to have way more fun. I made the move from accounting to finance. Ever since I’ve been providing these fractional services and these various services to a whole range of companies.

I have been doing this for many years. Software as a Service, SaaS, is a subscription I had for a couple of years. I’ve taken all of that experience and this gets back to your question, which excites me. I said, “You can put together a state-of-the-art back office as long as you have a clear master plan,” which we do because we’ve learned how to put it together, “That way, you are not bothered and distracted, devalued or otherwise set up for an extinction-level event for anything that could happen in the back office.” What excites me is the role of AI. When we think about machine learning and machine intelligence or call it what you want, electrons do the thinking for us.

Like in what I’m doing compared to even a couple of years ago, the level of automation tools that are at my disposal to make this back office hum are way different. They’re improving all the time. One of the strategies that we have going forward is, as we grow our team, we’re looking at developing some of those tools on our own because this is coming.

Do I want to be riding the wave or drowned by the wave? I’d rather be the one riding on the wave with the surfboard. Not that I’ve ever surfed. I can’t. The idea spooks me to death. The analogy is good enough. That’s what excites me about the future. The other thing that excites me about the future and this is from the sales side of things, is we can AI in finance. AI on the sales side of things is helping you figure out some of those questions we started the top of the hour with.

Most importantly, where does your target market water? What are the watering holes that everybody in your target market has to go to over and over again or make sure they go to over and over again? There are so many new ways to communicate. You’ve got Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter and all these. Who knows what else is coming? I know Facebook has this whole Metaverse thing that they have. I don’t even know what that means but it sounds cool.

I’ve seen that in science fiction many times but I’m sure that’s not what he’s thinking about. The point is that you have a constant churn of watering holes where your target clients are going to be consuming where you could potentially reach them. To me, that is between what AI can do to help us get better at what we do and the expansion of the entire internet and social media or whatever it is. We’re sitting here as adults.

I have a 5-year-old and a 10-year-old at home. When I was 5 and 10, the phones went around and around and they were wired to the wall. Online gaming was me and my buddy Mike sitting on the phone each with a chess board in front of us at our homes and tying up the phone lines. That was our online gaming. Look at it. I’m not going to say what that time span is because then I’d be lying about my age but let’s say 20, 30 or 10 years from now, what does that look like? It changes all the time. I know a lot of people are like, “That’s crazy. I’m scared.” I’m like, “No. It’s coming.”

I’m a Trek geek. We’ve talked about this before. I blade runner and its wearables. We saw this a long time ago in Star Trek. It was funny because I did a presentation and I called it So Long Palm, which dates me. I went through all the technology back then in a presentation that is in existence, which is food replicators and some of the things. People’s eyes are going up and we already have wearables. Our capacity to be able to do, the machines have surpassed us. I use my calendar to remind me and tell me whom I’m talking with or what at times.

It isn’t a stretch. I don’t want to go down a big science fiction but machine learning and AI are there and people are going to have to realize because they’re going to use that and beat out their competitors with that information. Where’s the watering hole? I love your analogy. Work smarter, not harder with that part of it. Although I’m a workaholic but one of those things. I know that the people here are also interested in outside of work, what do you do for fun?

I call myself a cyclo path because I bicycle like a maniac. I love bicycling, trail riding and road riding. It doesn’t matter. As long as it’s two wheels and I can pedal it, I’m happy. It gives me a lot of time to think. It also blows off a lot of steam. I am a certified yoga instructor. I used to teach until COVID came along. Unfortunately, it destroyed our studio because nobody was coming in person anymore. The online is not the same. The other thing is science fiction is crazy. I lost track of how many science fiction books and movies I’ve read. I love that. I’ve always loved it. Also, I love learning, believe it or not, foreign languages.

How many do you speak?

I’m learning my sixth one. It’s Greek.

You talked about Greek. My best friend growing up in high school is Greek.

I’m half Greek. I call myself Anthony, the half-Greek. My father was an immigrant, he was from an old country. I’m looking at finally being able to take my family back there because they’re young kids. In our family, we use a lot of Greek names. Our cats are Zeus and Hermes. We’re very much into that culture. I also find that it’s such a fascinating door to open in terms of culture because the culture of a language is so readily embedded in its language. You can read and understand a lot about a culture. Most of the time, I spend working on client stuff or expanding the business. It’s a seven-day-a-week job but I don’t look upon it as a job.

It’s fun. I’m going in there solving problems. It’s easy for me to demonstrate where the problem lies and how to fix it. I get a lot of satisfaction out of clients that are like, “I didn’t realize it could be so easy.” I was like, “It took 20 or 30 years to learn all this.” It’s not like it’s that easy but it’s easy once it’s in place and put together. That gives me a lot of satisfaction. It’s what gets me up in the morning. I was like, “What problem do I get to solve knowing that I can solve it.”

I sing in quite a few languages because I sing opera but I have no idea other than the synopsis of what exactly I’m saying. I always appreciate it when people have that talent and passion for languages. I have a nephew that picks them up like crazy. I had wished the American school systems had required that because I’ve lived internationally and they required different languages. That is way cool. Anthony, I feel like my brain is on overload. I’m going to have to rewatch this over and over again to get all the nuances. If you were to give your younger wiser self advice, what would that one piece of advice be?

Pay attention to the computer revolution. I joined it late. I’m fully embracing it now but there were things that if I had started even ten years earlier than I did would put us way ahead of the curve. The whole idea of automation, machines doing our thinking and stuff for us and a lot of them wrote stuff for us, we don’t realize those of us, especially been around for a while. How much we, A) Take it for granted but, B) How much our personal lives have been revolutionized. Think about what it was like when you were five. What was the state of technology then? Think about where you are now and the massive gulf of change that has occurred. It’s continuing to accelerate and there’s no end in sight.

We’re hitting the top of our time. I want to thank you so much, Anthony, the SaaS Gurus, for coming to my show. To everybody who’s been reading, thank you. We always want to be moving on that upward trajectory, avoiding the roadblocks and uncovering things that companies might not have thought of on this show. If you like this, like it, share it and do all those wonderful things. Anthony, where can they find you?

The easiest way to find me is to go to our website, SasS-Gurus.com and go to the Contact page. Right from there, you can handle it. If you want to email me directly, it’s as easy. It’s Anthony@SaaS-Gurus.com. I don’t make it hard for people to find me. If both of those turn you off, go to LinkedIn. I haunt it all the time. I’m there a lot. I have a live link on it on my browser all the time in case somebody wants to reach out to me. Any one of those three.

There you have it. Thank you again, Anthony. Thanks to everybody joining the show. We’ll see you all next time.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Important Links

• Lodestar U.R.Y. – LinkedIn
• SaaS Gurus
• SaaSOptics
• LinkedIn – Anthony Nitsos
• Contact
• Anthony@SaaS-Gurus.com
• https://Twitter.com/YogiCFO

About Anthony Nitsos

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡:

💠 𝐒𝐚𝐚𝐒 𝐆𝐮𝐫𝐮𝐬 – best-in-class finance and stakeholder “ecosystems” that always produce the right numbers, save cash, protect assets, and free CEOs and Founders to focus on what matters most–growth.

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐖𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐓𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫:

1️⃣ Work quickly to re-engineer your tech pile into a tech stack (weeks not months)
2️⃣ Illuminate your org in ways never seen before (exec team prospers)
3️⃣ Find waste, streamline ops (team happiness improves)
4️⃣ Set up for smooth scaling (plug and play ecosystem)

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐌𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐧𝐞𝐫:

⚡ Permanently, cost-effectively fix all your number problems
⚡ Responsive, accessible, fast, and constantly evolving best-practices
⚡ Focusing on what matters – valuation, cash, and sales

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭:

📢 “We knew SaaS Gurus nailed when our hardest critic on the Board, a former CFO said: “These are finally the numbers I’ve been looking for!” – Kathleen Craig, CEO, Plinqit

📢 “SaaS Gurus made an immediate impact on the finance, HR, and administrative backbone of our organization. They fixed systems none of us could figure out.” – Peter Falzon, CEO, Ripple Science

📢 “One of the most amazing things for me…was the ability to deliver within the first week! The assessment was unbelievably thorough and of significant value in terms of value for money.” – Susan Landis, Executive Director, Assoc. Clinical Research Professionals, Inc.

𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭:

🏆 I bring a unique mix of medical school training, Six Sigma Black Belt process expertise, and the financial skills of a CFO with two unicorn exits and numerous other start-ups.

🏆 I provided the world’s most sought-after resource for B2B SaaS company financial strategy and operations.

𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞:

⭐ Clear KPIs and Metrics
⭐ Effective budgets and projections
⭐ Efficient, integrated systems and processes
⭐ CEOs freed to focus on strategy
⭐ The right numbers on time

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