698: Decomposing Business Metrics | Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

It’s no secret that the herculean effort required to keep corporate board meetings on time frequently involves tracking the arrivals of certain board member attendees.

Of course, the most anticipated arrival inside the boardroom is often not a board member at all, but a new business measure or yardstick commonly referred to as a metric.

And just as board members often hail from faraway places, so too do metrics. Or so explains Ross Tennenbaum, a former investment banker, who in 2020 stepped into the CFO office at Avalara, a developer of tax compliance software.

“I’m obsessed about what I call, for lack of a better name, the macro-to-micro continuum,” explains Tennenbaum, who notes that his new environs have opened his eyes to the life that metrics lead as they swim upstream to the boardroom. “It’s about how you connect that board-level output to the individual all the way down in the organization,” comments Tennenbaum, who believes that too often there’s a sizable disconnect between the aggregated top-level results being discussed at corporate board meetings and the customer account manager who’s been struggling to meet a customer retention quota number.

Says Tennenbaum: “That individual needs to understand how he or she is connected to everything up the chain.”

Among those businesses aspiring to achieve the type of deep workforce connections that Tennenbaum is now seeking, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies are known to have an enviable advantage.

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