SIM Partners, a fast-growing cloud technology firm that creates innovative digital marketing products and services, is an Evanston, Illinois-based start-up funded entirely by its four founding partners. SIM Partners CFO Amy Cooper has been with the firm since May of 2012 after stints at a national accounting firm, in banking, and at GrubHub, the food delivery site. Two of Cooper's specialties are high growth management and business process improvement and she's applying them at SIM Partners. The firm - which is growing 100 percent year-over-year for the past three years - offers a cloud solution for marketing organizations through its Velocity Platform, a software-as-a-service solution that empowers national brands to maximize social, local and mobile marketing at the location level through automation and scalability. In the following interview, Cooper discusses the company's business, her role and how she manages her tremendous volume of duties. |
Q. Please describe your business and its position in the cloud world.
A. We specialize in helping large-scale brands manage their digital presence at a very local marketing level. We provide excellent content control for these clients, as well as technology that gives them much better conversion analytics which helps them drive revenue and customers through their doors. We also measure cross channel attribution, meaning, we track the various points of contact for an individual throughout the conversion funnel and provide that analysis to our clients to help them improve their marketing efforts.
Q. As CFO of SIM Partners, what keeps you up at night?
A. I am very focused on two things: keeping the company growing at a rapid pace and staying ahead of our competitors, many of whom have tremendous funding and cash resources. In addition to venture funded competitors, there is rapid consolidation in our space already. Big players like Oracle and Intuit have already bought cloud startups like ours. I believe that in partnership with my trusted advisors and vendors, we can execute anything well. But when I think about competition and the dynamism of the markets where we operate, many ideas, scenarios and opportunities run through my head on a nightly basis.
Q. A trending theme in the CFO organization nowadays is innovation. What initiatives have you driven that you consider innovative?
A. From my background with a Big 4 firm I feel very comfortable with how retail businesses operate and I understand their marketing needs. I also understand supply chains very well. The rise of online buying has created additional stress on the highly competitive storefront retail sector. One area of opportunity for our clients in the retail vertical is to use our content platform to drive innovation and leverage their brick-and-mortar locations to fight off the Amazon's of the world.
Q. In our CFO Benchmark Survey Report earlier this year, we surveyed CFOs who identified the top risk for their companies as failure to improve operational processes. Have you re-engineered your processes or are you planning to do so?
A. I've been re-engineering business processes throughout my career, beginning by building a system to rationalize steel production across multiple facilities. More recently, I helped hone GrubHub's sales fulfillment process to the point where we could bring a restaurant live on our site in less than 48 hours. Initially when a restaurant signed up for the online service, it took up to two weeks to get the first order sent to them. After we altered the process, we shortened this to less than two days and could drive sales to them from the GrubHub site that night. For the client restaurant, the number of diners and attendant revenue jumped significantly. So in two days, the client went from no or limited internet presence to accommodating as much business as it could handle from online consumers. At SIM Partners, I need to hone processes to the point where I can free up our top leadership to concentrate on growth, strategy and our competition. I've created the right kind of finance organization for SIM Partners; one that meets the needs of all our stakeholders, from the c-suite to our sales organization.
Q. How have you contributed to driving growth at SIM Partners?
A. From my past experience, I've developed a large network of contacts in the Chicago area investment community and beyond, and I leverage that network daily. Through these contacts we've built an advisory board for the company consisting of key business and investment community leaders including venture capitalists, business advisors and marketing experts. I plan to use this group for additional networking but also as a brain trust that can help me and SIM Partners with some of our more complex business problems.
Q. How much use do you make of partnering or outsourcing within your CFO organization?
A. We're big time bootstrappers, meaning that we created this company primarily through sweat equity without the aid of outside capital. Our founders started SIM Partners as a traditional agency, and through bootstrapping we remade ourselves into a technology company. We developed our own, proprietary cloud platform called Velocity. Velocity is a SaaS platform that maximizes brand local, mobile and social marketing at the dealer, agent, franchise and retail level. This platform is the heart of our company. At our core is our creativity in strategic marketing, local, and social brand promotion. Our team knows how to use words, images, multi-media and advertising to attract customers to businesses even though our business model changed dramatically. Our partners also leveraged their local credibility with the business community. Through them, we gain access to CMOs and VPs of sales with a phone call.
Q. What technology do you want for either your team or your company that you don't currently have?
A. I'd like to acquire accounting systems with automated revenue recognition. We're doing that on spreadsheets now and that is labor intensive. I'd also like to have a look at budgeting and forecasting tools. Since we're a startup, these are pretty urgent needs.
Q. What are your company's expansion plans? What role do you play in these?
A. Our people make us unique, and continuing to identify the right talent and skill sets is critical to SIM Partners' ongoing success and growth. Our business model and cloud platform, however, enable us to quickly onboard, scale and meet the needs of even the largest national brands. Our talent ensures ongoing innovation, but we don't need to add staff to add client business to Velocity. We have product expansion plans and as social media and local evolve we will evolve with it. We have a product strategy group that we are currently beefing up. We're implementing new technology with forward looking designs. We've identified some immediate priority growth markets; namely, retail, financial services and real estate where Velocity is perfectly suited and we have only scratched the surface. This will help us build on our existing prowess in hospitality, education and consumer services.
Q. Do you find hiring for your own team to be a challenge? If so, why?
A. It is always difficult to find talent, however, at SIM Partners; this is made easier by having experienced industry leaders at the helm. People with talents and skills that we require know who our partners are, and they are attracted to our business model and platform. We're also located in a flourishing tech community that has grown around Northwestern University in Evanston. This is the familiar model of Silicon Valley and Stanford. We have ready access to the best and brightest business and engineering students. They need internships to complete their educations and develop products of their own as graduation projects.
