Ep. 109: Brian Suthoff - Accountants Driving Data

Contact Brian Suthoff:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/suthoff/


Visit Tally Street: https://tallystreet.com/



Get a Free Retention Report!
https://tallystreet.com/retention/



FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. Once again, this is
your host Adam Larson, and I'm pleased to bring you another
engaging episode of our series as Iintroduced to you episode 109,
and our featured guest, Brian Suthoff. Brian is the CEO and
Co-Founder of Tally Street, a company that helps small to
mid-sized businesses keep and grow customers through actionable
insights automatically generated from various sales data. In his
conversation with Mitch, Brian discusses, how big data translates
to great opportunities and explains why management accountants
are best fit for driving this growth in these businesses. We'll
hear more as we transition over to the rest of the episode
now.

Mitch: (00:52)
So Brian, before we kick things off, why don't you tell me a
little bit about yourself and give us some background on Tally
Street and exactly what you do.

Brian: (01:00)
Yeah, great. Thanks, and thanks for having me. So Tally Street is
focused on helping small and mid-sized businesses who want to
grow and get paid, generate more value from the financial data or
the accounting data that the businesses are already managing. The
inspiration for Tally Street really came from a couple prior
experiences of my own. Most of my background has been in big data
and analytics, but then about four years ago, I started a liquor
distributorship in Boston. Very traditional small business, just
me and a couple other people. And, you know, we were successful
in growing that business across Massachusetts, but very quickly
ran to the point where we had, you know, a couple hundred
customers and couldn't keep them all in our heads, and we're
basically missing having access to the kinds of customer
analytics and insights that I was used to having and more tech
focused businesses. So as we looked at ways to try to solve that
problem, what we found is that accounting and finance teams are
really sitting on a wealth of customer data inside that
accounting system. That's really being untapped in most small and
mid-sized businesses. So that's really, our goal is to help
managerial accountants generate the insights, the customer
insights and information that large businesses have had for a
long time, but to do that at kind of a scale and a cost that's
appropriate for small businesses, so they can make better
decisions and be more profitable and successful.

Mitch: (02:32)
So I know for us, you know, our accounting and finance listeners,
our members, a big focus for us is using this data and making
some kind of actionable insight, you know, something where we can
make more strategic business decisions, but again, we're
targeting accounting and finance professionals. Now you don't
necessarily have that background in accounting. You come from the
big data side of things. So, you know, how have you been able to
kind of adapt with that target audience and then, you know, what
kind of opportunities do you recognize with this diverse
background?
Brian: (03:04)
Yeah, learned a lot over the last couple of years, as I've been
speaking to more accountants and financial professionals and just
catching up always on the industry and changes on the industry,
and one thing I noticed in the recent issue of the Strategic
Finance magazine is they had a great article on data
visualization. And, you know, I think the reason that article is
published is plenty of people have said, you know, everybody's an
analyst these days, right? And roles are changing, and managerial
accounts role is also changing from being mostly a record keeper
or compliance cop to now also providing those insights and
helping the businesses make better decisions. But the problem
that a lot of these businesses have, and what I've seen is that
they don't have the kind of the data lakes, the big data sets,
the pristine sets of data that large enterprises tend to spend a
lot of money managing, but they do have, or the best set of data
they do have is their accounting system. And that's where we
think that managerial accountants can, can really win, right. Is
they're sitting on the best data set, that typically exists in
most small and mid-sized businesses. So it's an area where they
can start to apply those, analytic skills, presentation skills,
using the data they already have, and they're already familiar
with and generate a lot of additional value for the organization.
If you just think about what's in that accounting system, the
sales transactions, payment transactions, it has  what every
customer bought the price they paid when they bought how often
they purchased, how much money they've spent, just a wealth of
information that can be shared across the organization and in a
number of visualizations, but also putting it into other systems
like CRMs that sales and marketing teams use.

Mitch: (04:58)
And then ultimately, what is the opportunity that would come out
of this once they start tapping into this data? What are some of
the examples or some of the outcomes that you've seen
typically?

Brian: (05:09)
Yeah, great question. There are, there are examples across the
entire organization. I tend to think of things, you know, they
start with generating revenue, of course, but move on to managing
costs, forecasting, customer behavior, forecasting, cashflow,
understanding customer profitability, you know, just to take an
example on the revenue side, again, that, you know, the
accounting platform, whatever it is, has records of every sales
transaction, which is connected to a customer and exactly what
they bought and the kind of smart software that exists today, and
what we're building at Tally Street can analyze all that data and
start to group those customers based on, on those patterns, those
buying patterns. So for example, you could look at customers who
they've been around for a long time. They buy quite frequently
and they spend a lot of money. So they have high lifetime value,
which is a key metric that you often hear. Those are kind of your
champions, and then on the other end of the spectrum you might
have the ones who were just never a good fit to start with. maybe
they only bought once. They didn't spend that much. They didn't,
you...