Ep. 109: Brian Suthoff - Accountants Driving Data

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

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

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (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...