Spending your way to success and ‘growth at all costs’ are no longer accepted ways to run a business. Cost scrutiny and profitability are the new mottos.

And SaaS and cloud spend is no different. High costs can no longer be dismissed as “just what they are.”

But cutting tech stack costs cannot come at the expense of curtailing a business’ ability to grow. It’s a delicate balance - and one that can have severe consequences if not maintained. 

To help finance and procurement leaders solve this challenge, we held a webinar with top CFOs from Paddle, Ebuyer, Carestone and EmergeOne on how they balance efficiency with growth. 

The panel shared their advice for taking a more strategic approach to SaaS management, including:

• A CFO should trust the decisions of their department when it comes to tools, but question business cases - making sure they’ve considered both the short and long term context. 
• Growth at all costs is no longer possible. The name of the game is efficiency growth, which relies heavily on cost effectiveness and ROI.
• Adopting AI should revolve around whether you have the quality of data to power it.
• Multi-year contracts may seem attractive because of discount opportunities, but could lock you into tech that you don’t need in the long run.
• Regular analysis of tech stacks helps identify the need for more capable solutions and reduces SaaS bloat.

Our panelists:

• Philip Watson, CFO at Paddle: Previously part of the finance leadership at ZoomInfo, and now CFO at Paddle, which has an average growth rate of 175% over the past four years.
• Alison Rose, CFO at Ebuyer: CFO of the recently-acquired and fast-growing $175m+ Ebuyer and former finance leader at SharkNinja, one of the fastest-growing consumer brands.
• Aarish Shah, Founder of EmergeOne fractional CFO consultancy: A two-decade CFO, host of Nothing Ventured podcast and an Evening Standard finance columnist who has achieved $500m in exits with various funds.
• Hermann Deres, CFO at Carestone: Former Investment Banker and CFO of Carestone, Germany’s leading senior living real estate developer & distributor.

If you want to read our thoughts on this webinar, check out our article.