Sal Abdulla on the ERP Gap for Startups

[00:00:00] Sal Abdulla: Talk to as many people as possible because the solution is already out there, in the wild. What I mean by that is it’s been amazing talking to literally hundreds of CFOs, VPs and controllers, across the country and even internationally to see what they’re doing to bridge the functionality gap.

[00:00:18] You’d be surprised at the ingenuity and how they’ve essentially cobbled together solutions.

Sal Abdulla Introduction

[00:00:23] Joe Michalowski: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Role Forward podcast. My name is Joe Michalowski. And this episode is brought to you by Mosaic, a strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done. And today our guest is Sal Abdulla, the founder and CEO of a new FinTech company called Nixsheets,

[00:01:02] that is aiming to simplify the world of accounting for all of you accountants out there. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the work he’s doing. So, Sal, thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:01:11] Sal Abdulla: Thanks for having me, Joe.

[00:01:13] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. So, before we get into main topic, which is a lot of background on some of the complex things that accountants deal with every day, do you mind just giving a bit of a background on yourself, uh, the work you’ve done in your career and kind of how you ended up getting to Nixsheets?

[00:01:26] Sal Abdulla: Sure. Well, I’ll start off by saying, I have a bit of an unorthodox career background for kind of the place that I’m in at my, at this point in my life. I actually started off my career working in politics and so spent two years working on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, doing a few things, including working for the democratic party and had an opportunity in my mid twenties to join a startup overseas.

[00:01:49] So, went over there and it was a brand new venture. They had this very entrepreneurial, free spirited type of guy say, “Hey, you want to be my head of finance?” I was 26 years old, knew nothing about finance and I said, “Sure.” Took the job, it was obviously extremely stressful. It was like learning from a fire hose.

[00:02:06] But did an decent enough job to

[00:02:09] kind of segue into kind of move my career along further into finance and eventually took a deputy CFO position at another startup, which was a cable TV company. And so, spent about the first three years of my career in finance overseas, helping to build companies overseas, came back to the states, did a stint for a year at a nonprofit and then, finally, made my way into SaaS.

[00:02:32] Sal Abdulla: And so, the past four years I was at Quorum as their VP of finance. Quorum is a SaaS company based out of Washington, DC, serving the public affairs space. And basically spent four years there helping the company grow. When I joined, I think, they were around 3,000,000 in ARR. By the time I left, they were over 20 million and for the first 15 million of that, they were completely bootstrapped.

[00:02:53] So, it was a, it was a great learning experience. 

[00:02:56] Joe Michalowski: Wow. Wow, crazy. You know, a lot of people that come on are very much from, like, that VC backed world. Cool to have a you on with the bootstrapped experience from 

[00:03:03] Sal Abdulla: Yeah. 

[00:03:04] Quorum and honestly just the move from politics, always fascinating to hear how people end up in this finance world. So, really like the background of the story.

[00:03:12] Joe Michalowski: But, today, I’m going to be diving more into what you’re doing now with Nixsheets. And so, what I want to ask is like, there, there’s just been like this wave and, you know, Mosaic is part of this, Nixsheets is now part of this. It’s like this wave of finance and accounting tools that are coming to market to really transform

[00:03:29] what has been like a very traditional, like, not a lot has changed in the world of finance and accounting, other than moving from Excel to, like, Google sheets. And so, there’s, like, no shortage of areas where you could have said, “I’m going to take my efforts and I’m going to focus on transforming this specific workflow.”

[00:03:45] So, I’m curious, like why, why take the time to kind off transform that ERP accounting side of things? What attracted you to that as Nixsheets founder?

The Need for ERP and Accounting Transformation

[00:03:55] Sal Abdulla: Yeah.

[00:03:56] It was really a realization that accounting at mid-market companies, in particular, was broken. So, if you think about how, what the accounting tech stack looks like at a small company, it’s pretty easy, you use QuickBooks and if you have any complexity for any particular workflow, you add a point solution and integrates nicely

[00:04:15] Sal Abdulla: into QuickBooks. So, think Gusto or bill.com for AP. At the higher end, you know, Fortune 1000, you can afford to implement an ERP system, but more importantly to have that ERP system customized to your needs. You can afford to spend millions of dollars on an army of consultants to build out an ERP to suit your needs.

[00:04:35] But if you look at how midsize companies are operating, they’ve essentially built, they’ve moved away from All In One Systems, right? They, they’ve built a distributed, essentially a distributed ERP, that they cobbled together using a bunch of different point solutions. And 90% of the work is being, being done in those point solutions. They’re using Bill.com,

[00:04:56] Sal Abdulla: they’re using Devi, they’re using Stripe, they’re using Gusto and to try to go to them and tell them, “Hey, you need to get off all of those different point solutions and move to an ERP that tries to capture all of those workflows in one system.” It’s just not going to happen. And so, we think the cat is out of the bag, in terms of how the world is moving.

[00:05:14] We think the distributed ERP model, the point solutions that are best in breed at what they do is kind of the direction that these teams are heading in and are going to stay in. I would say they’re not heading in that direction, they’re already there. So, what CFOs want, what they’re looking for is they’re looking for a solution that ties it all together because there’s, even though these individual workflows are doing a good job

[00:05:37] at managing kind of what they’re doing, the transactions that they’re handling, the way you kind of piece everything together is still a mess. And it’s, I use Excel spreadsheets as a proxy for how messy it is, right? Like, just go into a finance or accounting org and count

[00:05:53] how many spreadsheets are using. And that gives you an idea of how complex their workflows is. So, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re essentially trying to automate and bridge the gaps left over by the use of all these different systems. 

[00:06:04] Joe Michalowski: I love that. One reason why, you know, I think, Joe, our co-founder, connected us together and, you know, mentioned that we should have this chat is that Mosaic feels very much the same way is like, “This is our value prop, as well.” It’s like, the same idea about all these point solutions is the challenge that you need to overcome,

[00:06:20] it’s like, how do you get all that data together and where we are kind of like the FP&A side. I love that we get, you and I get to talk about more of that, like accounting side and kind of transforming the work that they do. And so, I want to take this idea a step further. And can you get a little more specific about, like, some of the critical accounting workflows that live in these spreadsheets that kind of highlight the limitations of ERP systems that you’re trying to solve for?

[00:06:43] Sal Abdulla: Great, happy to. So, we, we separate our workflows, roughly into two types. We have what we call frontend workflows and backend workflows. So, I’ll start with the backend workflows. Backend workflows is our, it consists of information that’s already made its way into the accounting system.

[00:07:00] So, like an invoice that you sent to a customer that’s going to hit deferred revenue and needs to be amortized over a period of time. Another example would be prepaid expenditures, prepaid software expenditures, fixed assets, all of these, the oldest kind of information is already in the general ledger, but it needs to be further manipulated and you need to kind of maintain detailed schedules for all of these different

[00:07:20] classes of assets and liabilities. And so, the first tool that we’re building is that backend tool, that backend workflow that, you know, integrates into QuickBooks, integrates into NetSuites and takes care of a lot of these things for you. We, we can also, you know, expand it and we’re planning to expand it, to do things like consolidations and cost allocations, reconciliations. Like, I can go on and on. The frontend tool is kind of the tool that bridges the gaps and automation between individual point solutions and the accounting system. So, we mentioned backend sitting on the back of the accounting system, the frontend workflows are kind of “How do I get information from Stripe into QuickBooks?”

[00:07:59] Or “How do I get information from Salesforce into QuickBooks?” Now, these workflows, you know, there’s all kinds of integration partners out there that, you know, work on specific workflows like that, but no one’s looking at it, like a universal level. And so, I think one of the things that I ran into at Quorum was, I used SaaS optics to plug one of those gaps on the revenue side.

[00:08:21] So, it sat nice neatly between Salesforce and QuickBooks. And I was able to move transactions from one system to the next, but then it didn’t solve my problem for commissions. It didn’t solve, like, a million other problems that I had with getting to the kind of actuals that I needed to on a monthly basis.

[00:08:38] And so, what we’re saying is we’re, we’re trying to build a universal sub-ledger that ties around the both, the frontend and the backend of your GL and kind of, kind of handle any workflow. Um, it’s a bit ambitious. 

[00:08:49] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I mean, for sure, that, that was one of the questions I want to ask is like, even the name of your company is a bit ambitious. Nixsheets, like the idea, like you’re, you’re not mincing words here. You’re saying like, “Hey, like we want to take these spreadsheets out of your day-to-day life.” And I, I’m curious,

[00:09:04] you know, it’s a really, like, it’s a great name for marketing. I work in marketing, I love it. I’m curious if you are on the side of, like, the spreadsheet debate that is like, “Yeah, we really should, like, eliminate these entirely and, like, let’s get into software.” Or if, like, you think that there’s always going to be a world of spreadsheets, like how, how do you land on that argument of, like, eliminating them versus still dealing with them? 

[00:09:24] Sal Abdulla: Okay.

[00:09:25] So I’ll, I’ll start off by admitting that, I know the statement is a bit hyperbolic. and I, I love spreadsheets, right? I don’t think, I admit that I, I don’t think spreadsheets will be entirely eliminated, but the point that we were trying to make with the name is that spreadsheets are great for analysis, they are great as ad hoc tools.

[00:09:43] But they’re not great as databases and they’re not great as integration tools. And so, if you have a workflow that you repeat month in, month out and you’re storing information, essentially in perpetuity, you should not be relying on Excel or Google sheets to kind of store all that information. And the analogy that I use is a sales team and their CRM.

[00:10:06] And I, I love to use this to explain this to non-accountants. I say, like, imagine a sales team that uses a CRM, uh, for their summary level customer information. And then, uses Excel spreadsheets for all the details. Like, I don’t think anyone would tolerate that situation. It would negate the entire purpose of the CRM, but that’s essentially what accountants are dealing with on a monthly basis.

[00:10:28] Sal Abdulla: We have an accounting system that really is not a complete system of record. It gives you a nice summary-level information. You know, I can put out a P&L, I can put out a balance sheet, but if you were to ask me, “What is deferred revenue consists of?” Or “What are these fixed assets and give me some details?”

[00:10:44] I’m going to go to an Excel spreadsheet to give you that information. And, to me, that’s a, it’s a little ridiculous in 2022 that that’s, that’s still a case. 

[00:10:53] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, here when I talked to Joe and our founders, there, there’s always this idea of, like, every other department got this kind of, like, tech Renaissance of all these different tools that they got, like marketing as HubSpot and sales as Salesforce and accounting and finance got Google Sheets and, like, it’s like, “All right, well, that’s great, but was that really enough?”

[00:11:12] And so, you know, I love the way you explained that. I think it makes a lot of sense and, you know, something I want to understand a little bit more or a little bit better is I guess my assumption is that NetSuite could handle all of these things, like you were talking about needing, like, an army of consultants and, like, all of these people to manage it.

[00:11:28] Like, if you move to NetSuite, like, I think in theory, like, they have the features to accomplish this. Is it that your point solutions are just simply better at it or that, you know, it just doesn’t make sense to invest that much money on, like, like what is the gap look like from, you know, if you try to do all of this in ERP, like NetSuite versus, you know, with all these point solutions?

The Problems with a NetSuite Transition

[00:11:51] Sal Abdulla: Yeah.

[00:11:52] I would start off by saying, like, the, the point solutions are just way better. I don’t think anyone would want to move off of, you know, let’s say, I don’t know, I can’t think off the top of my head, but whatever payroll solution NetSuite might offer or HR management platform, I’m pretty sure, like, you would rather get a best in breed HRAS system.

[00:12:10] So, that’s, that’s one thing. I, I think the, the All In One solution is just, is just completely dead. But then the question is, is like, “What are you paying for with NetSuite’s at the end of the day?” Like, if you’re doing 90% of the work, in these point solutions then really what you’re paying for, for NetSuites is like a couple of extra features.

[00:12:26] Maybe the ability to consolidate a couple of entities and some kind of extra dimensions of reporting. And so, to pay essentially a hundred X, what QuickBooks cost and spend 6 to 12 months of implementation to end up kind of back exactly where you were. To me, it doesn’t make any sense. And I’m not to say this is not knocking on NetSuite’s,

[00:12:45] I think they have a great platform. I like NetSuite’s, I like Intact, like QuickBooks. But, I just really, it comes down to that vision of the world moving into kind of a distributed environment. And I don’t think we’re going to go back to, 

[00:13:00] um, where we were.

[00:13:01] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, no doubt, agree, wholeheartedly. It’s everything that I’ve spoken to with people on this podcast, on webinars that we’ve done for articles. It really does, especially in the kind of target market that we live in, that issue is just exacerbated by, you know, the realities of being, like, a high growth company with venture backed funding.

[00:13:19] Like, you’re just moving too fast, we have to deal with all these things. And so, I want to dig a little bit deeper into the kind of like chasm between, you know, the QuickBooks world of maybe earlier stage, less mature, and then the NetSuite world. So, what do you think are the inflection points where companies are like, “Okay, it’s time to get off of QuickBooks and move in NetSuite.”

[00:13:39] ‘Cause that’s what, it seems like the normal kind of progression, the thing that you’re fighting against. And have you found that companies are just doing it too soon? Like, are they jumping into NetSuite because they feel like they have to and they just shouldn’t?

[00:13:51] Sal Abdulla: I do. So, there was a white paper that I read recently and you can see a pretty significant drop off in QuickBooks usage at ,I believe, 10 millions. So, 10 million ARR and I’m, I’m biased here towards SaaS, is usually when people start looking for a more robust accounting solution. If we were going to talk about it in terms of head count, it would be about 75 to a hundred employees.

[00:14:12] And at that point there’s usually enough complexity in the organization where you do need to move into something more robust. Information is just

[00:14:19] living across too many systems. Need, need to kind of consolidate it to be able to get a, a decent financial picture. But again, in talking now, I think I’ve talked to maybe hundreds of CFOs and controllers over the past few months and kind of, and, and talk to people who were on QuickBooks, people who migrated from QuickBooks to NetSuites to kind of get a perspective of how they’ve dealt with the migration and what it’s looked like after the migration.

[00:14:44] You find that they, they are shocked to find that, you know, they still need to do 90% of their work in their, in their point solutions and that the promise that NetSuites is somehow going to tie it all together and give you a coherent picture, just never materializes. And it’s I think why, you know, just kind of giving props to Mosaic, why tools, such as the Mosaic, are becoming

[00:15:06] so popular. These, these solutions were never meant to be,and I’m, when I’m saying solutions I’m talking about the old school jails, were never meant to be the kind of integration tool that ties everything together. And so, the, I view kind of the success of Mosaic and other FP&A solutions, these next gen FP&A solutions, as kind of a proxy statement for the fact that we’re onto something because the fact that you need a tool like Mosaic is an indication that the tech stack itself has fragmented. 

[00:15:34] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, no doubt. Like I said, right off the start, just love this idea of kind of, like, you know, I, I understand your mission entirely because I have to sit here and when I, when I write blog posts, when I write eBooks, when I do a podcast, like this is the message that we are trying to get out into the world.

[00:15:47] So, you know, among all the guests that we’ve had, like, your message is probably the one that hits closest to home, for me. Because it’s, it’s the other side of the coin for us. And so, I want to, I want to fully understand kind of, like, what the vision is for Nixsheets, because the way I’ve understood it for Mosaic is that there is this gap between when we’re on QuickBooks and when we’re on NetSuite and like how long can we push that reality?

[00:16:13] But for us, it’s always been a conversation of like, how, how far out can we say, like, “We’ll, we’ll stay on QuickBooks and we’ll stay, like, in our pre-NetSuite world, like, as long as possible.” Is the vision of Nixsheets to say, like, “This is a more lightweight, more flexible ERP replacement.” Or are you also kind of bridging the gap,

[00:16:32] so you’re like a much bigger company that than, again, needs NetSuite? Like, what would be the inflection point where you say like, “Okay, you know, we’ve bridged the gap and now we need another more complex or more, like, enterprise level solution.”

[00:16:46] Sal Abdulla: Okay, I’m going to try to, I’m not sure if I completely understood the question, but I’m going to try to answer it. I want to clarify one thing. I do believe that we will, the tool, the way we’re architecting it, the way we’re envisioning it is going to ride off of GLs, meaning we’re a tool that is designed to envelop a GL and allow you to do way more in terms of automation.

[00:17:05] And so, it, we are agnostic to whether, like, you eventually decide to jump onto a NetSuites or Intact, but we will advocate for the fact that we think you can delay that with our tool, quite a bit. We think you can go easily past 50, 60, $70 million in ARR and still stay on QuickBooks using our tool. Now, that, that’s yet to be seen.

[00:17:27] Sal Abdulla: And that’s kind of what, you know, part of us proving out our product. But talking about the vision.

[00:17:32] Getting kind of to the vision of where we’re going with this, it’s less to do about, like, stretching QuickBooks or whether you need QuickBooks or NetSuite and more to do with how we think accounting is going to be done in the future.

[00:17:44] And so, you mentioned, in an email with me, kind of the analogy that I used of the assembly line and it’s getting to that assembly line analogy, which is, we think accountants in the future are going to be building assembly lines rather than working on assembly lines. Right? We think of the in-house accountant of the future, of the in-house controller, basically, as being somebody who is a combination of an architect, a system admin and an accountant who kind of snaps together,

[00:18:14] oh, this entire ecosystem of finance and operation technology and, uh, allows the, the data to flow. So, I think we’re just perfectly positioned for that in the organizations. 

[00:18:26] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, love that. I appreciate you bearing with my rambling question and trying to talk my way through what I was trying to ask. I think you answered it perfectly. So, thank you, appreciate that. You know, where I’d love to take this is, you know, we, we’ve had two people with about, like more accounting backgrounds on, in the past.

[00:18:42] We had Temi Vasco on, she was the controller at Gem and then, Howard Katzenberg, who’s starting a company called Glean, which is, like, again, like, trying similarly to transform certain aspects of, of the accounting process and to both of them, like, I think the end goal was that, you know, we automate all of this kind of, like, grunt work that finance or that accounting often has to do because they are just stuck in spreadsheets.

[00:19:05] If we automate it that frees up time to work on other things and it makes the accounting function, like, more strategic. So, I’m curious for you, like, what would like us strategic accounting function mean? Like, what does that term mean to you? And maybe what’s the end goal of opening up all this freedom for accounting teams?

[00:19:23] Like, what are they able to do because they have a tool like Nixsheets, keeping them out of the grunt work?

Sal Abdulla on Strategic Accounting

[00:19:30] Sal Abdulla: If you think about who are the consumers of the accounting data within the organization, it’s the people downstream like FP&A teams and executives. Right? So, first and foremost, it’s serving those two constituencies and I’m pretty sure you all love to hear, you know, better data for the FP&A team given you FP&A solution.

[00:19:47] But the idea is, is having more reliable financials that are produced in a timely manner. And I’m pretty sure anybody who’s worked in finances had the experience of waiting 15 to 20 days to be able to kind of understand how they did in the previous month or quarter, which I think, by that time, you’ve lost the ability to make a positive impact on the current period in, in any kind of substantial way.

[00:20:09] Sal Abdulla: So, that’s kind of what I would call the table stakes involved in this. But kind of the grander vision is going again to, like, what happens if you have an accounting team that has enough time to step back and understand the flow of data between the entire organization, right. It’s not uncommon to have IT teams, for example, reporting up to the CFO organization and that’s an acknowledgment

[00:20:34] of the fact that the CFO organization is really positioned to be able to understand how the technology all fits together. And so, going back to my example of the future accountant being essentially a combination of a systems administrator, and then accountants, you kind of need both backgrounds in B2B to be able to, to kind of do this effectively.

[00:20:56] Sal Abdulla: I think we’re positioned to really bring order to the chaos that exists within a lot of these organizations. 

[00:21:05] Joe Michalowski: Love that, love. So, I mean, if you’ve seen it all ever, we, we try to clip these episodes into things we can share online. And, and this idea of like, “What do you do with this extra time?” Or “What do you do with this efficiency?” Always makes for really good clips. So, I love hearing your thoughts on kind of, like, what that vision is for what the accounting, accountant of the future can accomplish for an organization.

[00:21:28] So, all amazing. I want to get a little bit tactical because one of the, one of the pain points that we hear from customers that come in and, again, like, you know, we’re, we’re talking a lot about FP&A, so we’ll, we’ll get a little bit away from the accounting, I guess, to some extent, but it’s that like just the internal tools that you have in something like a NetSuite to do reporting and to do, like, custom financial statements,

[00:21:50] it’s just not good enough. And I, I’ve never been in NetSuite. So, I’m curious, have you ever used, like, the internal tools in something like an ERP? I don’t know if you, NetSuite is the one we’re talking about this whole time, but have you found drawbacks of trying to, like, use those internal dashboards or, like, any kind of custom financial statement or report builder in something like NetSuite?

 

The Drawbacks of NetSuite Reporting

[00:22:15] Sal Abdulla: I have. I think anyone who’s used a tool like that realizes quickly it’s limitations, at the end of the day. And all these general ledgers were designed as a basic debit and credit ledger. And so, they were designed to ingest accounting data in a very specific format and to present it in a very specific format. And so they’ve built on top of that

[00:22:35] and over time, they’ve been able to add features and to add capabilities, but the limitation is inherent to kind of the overall architecture of these systems. So, you know, you find limitations all the time, like whether it’s a limitation to your business model, like how do I splice in, like, in order for me to understand the unit economics of a SaaS business, it’s completely different than understanding the unit economics of let’s say like a marketplace or e-commerce business.

[00:23:00] Sal Abdulla: And so, you really can’t handle all these different use cases with a system like NetSuite. So, you need to pull operational information in a certain way. You need to show your ARR, you need to do all kinds of things to really understand your business and the tool was never designed for that. So, I think, you definitely need kind of some additional help in, in the form of some BI or FK&A tools to, to kind of get at the data that you need to run your business. 

[00:23:26] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I want, I want to take that just one step further. You mentioned kind of needing to pull it, I assume this is why you end up just pulling all that data out and working in a spreadsheet, anyway, because, you know, you realized “There’s this limitation, I need to pull in other data.” So, you go in your spreadsheet and you kind of integrate it all.

[00:23:40] You mentioned operational data being an example of something that you’re going to have to combine with that, like, accounting data that comes from the ERP. Can you elaborate more? Is there other information or is it really just like, is it a Salesforce and ERP thing? Like, what, what are some of the other data points that you would want to connect with the NetSuite data in a spreadsheet to effectively report on the business?

[00:24:01] Sal Abdulla: Well, I mean, if we, if we want to get hyper-specific and use just like a very simple, very simple example would be, you have a spend information and say like your AP system, you have sales information in your Salesforce, but then you have headcount information in your HRIS. And, and so, if you’re trying to do allocations across departments, for example, oftentimes if it’s not configured properly having to pull head count information out of Gusto and reformat it just

[00:24:27] to kind of do a split, to understand European L a little bit better. And so, that’s just a very simple example of like, you, you really do need information across the entire enterprise. I love Howard, Howard, who was the CEO and founder of Glean, who was on this podcast. I actually talked to him quite often and he kind of used the example of when he was running his organization as a CFO,

[00:24:52] prior to starting Glean, he would have to, he could get all kinds of detailed drill down information on revenue, but the minute he would try to accomplish the same thing for bills, that data simply did not exist. And so, that’s one example, but the same is true across kind of the entire tech stack.

[00:25:11] You’re, you’re having to go into a bunch of different systems pull it all into Excel spreadsheets with, by the time I left Quorum, I think my monthly reporting workbook had, like, 40 tabs of data pulled in from different parts of the organization. So, it’s not fun to update that every single month. 

[00:25:27] Yeah. If I had to do that in my day-to-day job, I’d probably leave and start my own company, as well. 

[00:25:31] Sal Abdulla: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:25:32] I think fingers crossed{…} 

[00:25:32] Sal Abdulla: I literally think I started this company because I hated that monthly report so much. 

[00:25:37] Joe Michalowski: It’s just, just like, “I’m done with this one spreadsheet. I will go start a whole company just to kill that one spreadsheet.” 

[00:25:45] Sal Abdulla: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:25:45] Joe Michalowski: I love that. That’s amazing. I think that’s perfect. Honestly, it’s probably how the best companies ended up starting. I think it’s how the Mosaic founders started. Mosaic was that, they had to go build something.

[00:25:54] They built a one company and they were like, “We had to do this three more times.” Like, “We are done with those. We’ll, we will give somebody a tool to ever have to do this again.” Now you get a great company out of it. So, you know, I think everybody is rooting for Nixsheets because …

[00:26:06] Sal Abdulla: Thank you, appreciate it. 

[00:26:07] Joe Michalowski: …not fun for anyone involved.

[00:26:08] So, I want to, you know, we’re, we’re coming down to, to our time, I have a couple of questions left and, you know, one thing you mentioned when we were kind of just getting set up to start recording this was, you know, really enjoying getting to, get that, like, extroverted side and talk to customers and talk to other people in this industry about their challenges.

[00:26:26] Joe Michalowski: I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about what you’re hearing from those customers, any, like, lessons learned in these first few months of starting Nixsheets that you’ve taken away as, like, somebody who is now talking to prospects more than somebody who is deep in the spreadsheets, not getting to talk to those kinds of people that often.

Lessons Learned and Finance Career Advice from Sal Abdulla

[00:26:43] Sal Abdulla: Yeah. I would say, I will tailor this advice to people who might one day consider to start their own company. I think, talk to as many people as possible because the solution is already out there in the wild. What I mean by that is it’s been amazing talking to literally hundreds of CFOs, VPs and controllers, across the country and even internationally to see what they’re doing to bridge the functionality gap.

[00:27:09] You’d be surprised at the ingenuity and how they’ve essentially cobbled together solutions. You know, I’m pretty sure many of us have met folks who have cobbled together, Airtable, and Google Sheet with Zapier and a few other things to kind of tie everything together and to be able to automate as much work as possible.

[00:27:28] Sal Abdulla: Now, those power users represent a very small subset of overall kind of, in any domain, whether it’s marketing, accounting, finance, those, those really strong power users who come up with these ingenious ways to automate their work, you know, represent a small minority. But if you kind of pay close attention it basically tells you what product to build. And so, often, like what we’re building essentially is a productized version of these cobbled together solutions that I’ve observed people put together. And so, it’s been really remarkable that,

[00:28:02] you know, and, and I say, when I started off, I thought that, you know, in order to be

[00:28:08] a great entrepreneur you need to just come up with ideas like X NIHILO, out of thin air and, and come up with constant ideas. And oftentimes it’s not about coming up with ideas, it’s about paying very close attention to what people are already doing. And, I think, like, I know Joe and spoken to him about how Mosaic has came into being and they essentially productized the solutions that they were already building internally for their teams.

[00:28:32] I think oftentimes the best solutions emerge from, from those types of situations. 

[00:28:37] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I really like what you said about kind of learning from those power users and then having kind of the awareness to know that those are like the 1% kind of people of their job, like, they are, are the people that are the best at what they do. And it’s great if everybody can get there, but the reality is like, it’d be great if the rest of us that, you know, aren’t at that level, maybe could just get a tool to automate everything away.

[00:29:00] Sal Abdulla: Exactly. 

[00:29:01] I think it’s a really cool thought.

[00:29:02] Sal Abdulla: I mean, like I’m pretty, you know, I’m pretty sure if every single person out there could write code, they could automate a lot of their FP&A work. But then, the question you ask yourself is like, “Why not just buy Mosaic instead of learning, you know, spending two, three years learning to code?”

[00:29:17] Right? And so, I think that that’s always going to be the case. People are not going to want to reinvent the wheel every time they, they do a job. 

[00:29:23] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I mean, it’s the same for me. It’s like I could spend the next two or three years learning how to be a tactical kind of FP&A professional or I could talk to all of these wonderful finance people on the podcast and I can share those insights with, with everyone else. And honestly that keeps me out of spreadsheets and I’m okay with that.

[00:29:40] Sal Abdulla: Awesome. 

[00:29:41] So, totally understand where you’re coming from. I want to ask you one last question and something we ask everyone that comes on and, uh, it’s very much related to what we just talked about. So, maybe it’s a similar answer, I don’t know, but very simply zooming out. What is something you know now that maybe you wish you knew at the start of your finance career or even the start of your entrepreneurial career, now?

[00:29:59] This is a tough one. Not because it’s a tough question, but limiting it to one response, one kind of answer. I would say the who of your career matters more than anything else. And what I mean by the who is, like, the, the people that you surround yourself with, the people that you choose to bring on will make or break anything that you do in your life, whether, whether you’re an entrepreneur or whether you’re working in a corporate setting or at a startup, like, the people that you choose to surround yourself with are, have a huge impact on your future and on your direction.

[00:30:30] And so, as I, I think, when I was at the beginning of my career, I used to believe that somehow if I were to achieve technical mastery that, like, my life would be a crazy success. And so, I would limit myself on the type of, type of dentures that I would do because I felt like I didn’t know. So, I would, I would have a great idea or at least I think it’s a great idea.

[00:30:58] I think people would probably disagree, but I, I would get an idea and say, “Well, you know, I need four to five years of expertise, in this particular domain, to be able to move forward.” But, really, what was actually needed is just the right people next, next to me on the journey. And so, as I’ve kind of grown up realizing like, “Hey, you know, in order to get this venture off the ground

[00:31:21] Sal Abdulla: I need the right co-founder. I need the right first, five, six team members as being more critical than any single idea that I come up with, in terms of a product or a vision.”

[00:31:31] Joe Michalowski: So true. I love that answer. I think anyone who’s listened to multiple episodes of, I sound like a broken record. This is my response almost every time I hear one of these answers to the question. And it’s just that I love this question because I can apply it to my own career. I think the people that come on this podcast in finance have a real knack for looking at their careers and their jobs.

[00:31:54] Like, even in a company at a much higher view than maybe, like, somebody with a stereotypical view of finance and accounting might think. They might think that somebody is gonna, ” What’s one thing you wish you knew?” And it’s like, “I wish I knew how to build a financial model earlier or something.” Like, it’s never anything

[00:32:09] so tactical and I really love that because it applies to so much more than just, you know, the day-to-day work that finance and accounting people do, which is why, you know, someone like Nixsheets, someone like Mosaic and all these other companies are trying to transform this industry because there’s a lot more to offer than just spreadsheet, like compilations and aggregations.

[00:32:29] So, really love that. Appreciate you indulging me in, in my favorite question that we ask.

[00:32:34] Sal Abdulla: Yeah.

[00:32:34] It’s interesting. I think a lot of the folks who start companies

[00:32:39] probably exhibit more introspection than most, only for one reason. And it was not complimenting founders or anything like that. What I mean by that is, usually, the start of, of a company is usually after a period of pain, right? Whether it’s like really being, the feeling of being stuck in your career and trying to figure out why you’re stuck in your career or the feeling of

[00:33:02] the, of a problem that needs to be solved. So, usually a lot of times, like, you know, especially if, if you’ve climbed to a decent place in life, like I was for the first time in my life comfortable, you know, attaining a VP position at a company. And so, taking the jump with a young family is, wasn’t an easy decision, but you find that like it, a lot of the founders and if you talk to them, they’ll tell you the same thing.

[00:33:23] Sal Abdulla: They were, almost felt compelled, forced to do it. And I think that’s where realization comes from. 

[00:33:28] Joe Michalowski: Love it. I think, I think that’s a great place to, to kind of leave us off. It’s why I love ending the podcast on that question, but really great. All the insights on this episode have been fantastic. So, appreciate you taking the time. But want to turn the floor over to you. Ask simply, where should people go to connect with you, to learn more about the work you’re doing at Nixsheets?

[00:33:48] Anything you want to plug, the time is yours, go for it.

[00:33:51] Sal Abdulla: Yeah, thanks. Well, our website is up, it’s pretty sparse and that’s on purpose. It’s the nixsheets.com, N I X S H E E T S.com. And we have a waiting list, so we’re not live yet. But if you’re interested in learning more, interested in automating some of your accounting or just even want to talk about best practices, I’m always happy to share time with fellow financial professionals.

[00:34:16] So, feel free to just submit your email and we’ll reach out to you. 

[00:34:20] Joe Michalowski: Amazing. The URL will be in the show notes and everywhere else that we put this episode. So, you guys will be able to find it, no problem. But, Sal, just wanted to say thank you again for taking the time. Really appreciate getting to learn from you about this problem. And it was just great having you on The Roll Forward.

[00:34:34] I hope we can do it again, sometime. 

[00:34:35] Sal Abdulla: Yeah. Likewise. 

[00:34:36] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon. 

[00:34:37] Sal Abdulla: Thanks Joe.