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On the hunt for our new CFO

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29 Jun 2022 Written by Simon Dawlat

TL;DR: our executive committee goes supernova with our CMO Sonia joining in Q1, our CTO Hervé in Q2 and our current CFO Nicolas transitioning to a full-time people leadership role (CPeO) this year to accelerate our talent recruitment & development efforts — As a result, we’re on the hunt for a new CFO to help Batch transition from 120 to 500+ people gracefully, prepare our Series C, become M&A ready and expand even further internationally to become the European leader and reach 100M€ in ARR — With Nicolas covering the interim period and our great Head of Finance Clément running the finance team on a day-to-day basis, we’re now looking for an extraordinary & humble individual willing to join a rockstar team and build the next generation of European unicorns with us.

Important: Given the recent period and looming economic slowdown it's worth mentionniong Batch operates a very solid SaaS business with best-in-class gross margins, strong ARR growth, excellent NRR, a "use, rather than a need, for cash" and plenty of money in the bank to invest and accelerate — Said differently, we're not part of the crazily overvalued companies bunch and our economics are super healthy. We could—theoretically—become EBITDA positive anytime we want.

Year 7.

We keep pressing.

As the saying goes, "it never gets easier, the problems are just different".

Last year, we executed our first-ever 20M€ raise, after 6 years of self-financing.

The timing was right, but such profound cultural evolution wasn’t going to come easy.

It did not.

Despite the hardships, Batch has never felt so strong, so aligned.

Every day, I marvel at both the long-tenured Batchers who are proving once again their extreme commitment and adaptability, and the new generation of talented people who have joined us in the recent quarters.

I’m also excited about the relationship we were able to build in such a short time with our new investors Oliver Thomas at Expedition Capital and Clément Combal at Orange Ventures — As we enter a new phase of economic turmoil, they were quick to prove entrepreneur-friendly and supportive shareholders, able to empathize with us and give clear answers in minutes. With them, and Olivier Heckmann as independant board member, our board feels stronger than ever.

This year also sees significant evolutions in our executive ranks, as our current CFO Nicolas will transition to a People leadership role — something he wanted to do for a long time — and I can’t wait to see what will happen next in terms of culture and people efficiency with this ever-empathetic and highly analytical leader at the helm of this critical growth function.

Now with rapid growth ahead, and the need for dedicated leaders for each core function, comes the search for a new CFO: an experienced individual able to guide Batch into our next phase of growth and be a strategic business partner to all members of the C-suite.

In this post, we try to give additional context to this search and detail the skill set of our ideal candidate.

Our last 12 months

But first, let’s pause and reflect.

Our journey since Series B is well-documented in this post but to get a sense of Batch’s recent trajectory and what kind of company you'd be joining, let’s cover what happened since we raised last year.

The team has grown from 50 to 120+ people.

Surely a steep headcount increase, but mostly in line with our strategic plan to enter 2023 with as many ramped-up folks as possible across the board in order to align with major upcoming product releases.

This high intensity hiring period came with the usual growth hurdles but it also gave us the opportunity to measure the strength of our culture with candidates flocking to our ATS despite ruthless competition for talent in the marketplace, employee referral amounting to more than 37% of our S1 hires and almost no regrettable turnover since July 2021.

With solid funding and rapid revenue growth, we plan to hire 30 more people before year’s end.

New world-class C-levels.

People will argue that I’m a little obsessed with this idea but a lot of my focus goes towards assembling the greatest exec team ever, with the core belief that Antoine and I must be made obsolete for Batch to thrive.

Until we get there, I truly believe one of the greatest perks of our future CFO will be to join an extraordinary A-Team of execs.

Entering her third year at Batch, our CRO Clotilde is still one of the most impressive and culturally influential exec I’ve ever worked with. Her team went from 5 to 50 people since she joined us in 2019 with ever-rising performance, and she has grown into a better version of herself every year.

Listen to a recent podcast she recorded with Les Infaillibles here.

Joining in February, it took me almost a year to convince our new CMO Sonia to come build the future of CRM with us. Sonia brings us her extraordinary personality and deep market knowledge from alma maters such as Neolane, Adobe and Contentsquare. She’s a joy to work with, an inspirational leader and one of the most impressive talent magnet I’ve ever met.

Joining mid-year, our new CTO Hervé, brings us decades of engineering and management experience with notable tenures at OCTO (Accenture) and Adevinta’s Leboncoin, along with the precious entrepreneurial spirit for having been co-CEO at Videdressing—Vestiaire Collective's archrival—for over 5 years.

Finally, with Nicolas taking the CPeO role, and my cofounder Antoine refocusing his efforts and impressive capacities towards our product roadmap in the CPO role, my obsession is slowly becoming reality, one exceptional exec at a time.

Everyone at Batch became a shareholder.

In March, we rolled-out our first-ever company-wide stock options plan (called BSPCE in France).

It came at the price of intense internal debate and will likely generate solid amounts of extra paperwork (that we're automating thanks to Equify 🤟) but I believe we stayed true to our cultural principles of creating performance through trust—not pressure, and that this decision will enforce an ever-inclusive environment where everyone has a voice, can contribute and can partake in Batch’s success.

International expansion is well underway.

It feels like we finally nailed the right structure for our expansion pods thanks to the drive and commitment of our Head of DACH Expansion, Anne-Marjolaine.

We now have a dozen people pushing Batch into Germany which is shaping up to become our second biggest market after France with many iconic new logos and an ever-clearer positioning thanks to our 10 strong differentiators and radical data privacy choices.

We aim to become the clear market leader in this region over the next 3 years, and are now readying acceleration in more geographies.

Market recognition.

Earlier this quarter we were pleasantly surprised to make Google’s new SDK Index, featuring 80 of the largest commercial SDKs in the world — we discussed what it means for us and our clients here.

Workplace upgrades.

We also doubled-down on our leases and expanded into the same two buildings we previously occupied in Paris (+200% sqm) and Lyon (+300% sqm) to give our team the great offices they deserve.

While flexible work is now the norm, with Batchers working remotely from dozens of cities in Europe, we believe more than ever in large, welcoming offices to provide opportunities to develop in-person relationships.

Get a glimpse of our new Lyon office here, and Paris office there.

Product updates.

We shipped an insane amount of new features and began the progressive release of our new omni-channel dashboard while upgrading many core 3rd-party connectors.

The team worked like crazy behind the scenes to prepare some of the biggest platform evolutions ever that will soon see the light of day while conducting hundreds of client interviews.

Last but not least: solid culture wins.

Making our culture more visible to outsiders is always a challenge so we were beyond thrilled to be named #1 company in the 2022 HappyIndex®AtWork ranking in the 49-200 people category.

Our ideal CFO?

With this in mind, we attempted to define the rôle with the following wishlist.

The ideal person would:

  1. Be a sparring partner to the CEO (myself). I’m intuitive, strategic, people-oriented, I prefer words to numbers and I’m also a sales guy. I need a highly analytical and strategic person by my side to anticipate all scenarios all the time and put the future in numbers. We’ll work together on the "Batch Strategic Plan" — the ultimate finance-informed map for all our operations. We’ll fundraise and acquire companies together. We’ll make sure our board and investors are more committed than ever to Batch’s destiny and we’ll keep educating the Batch team on what it means to be a shareholder at a high-growth company, since everyone at Batch is a stockholder and we believe in growing people. From an execution standpoint, we’ll create alignment and performance throughout all teams with outstanding command of our numbers and financial transparency.

  2. Be a sparring partner to all other C-levels, including Clotilde (CRO), Antoine (co-founder & CPO), Hervé (CTO), Nicolas (CPeO) and Sonia (CMO), empowering and aligning them with numbers, data and financial models. They run large teams. Those teams run the show. Everyone needs the backup of strong financial leadership to make bold, informed decisions that align with the company’s mission and vision.

  3. Have from-the-inside experience of what it means to scale a sophisticated B2B SaaS platform from 100 to 500 people and ideally more, internationally.

  4. Have first-hand, from-the-inside experience in significant fundraising and M&A processes.

  5. Have in-depth, borderline obsessional knowledge of SaaS business models and the ability to dive deep in both the product and the business to challenge and inform important product, go-to-market and pricing decisions.

  6. Have a strong international experience and be near-bilingual in the English language as we’ll look at both foreign candidates and French candidates having lived 2 to 5 years abroad.

  7. Bring the best out of the Finance team in place with talents such as Clément, Alice and Justine, help people grow into better versions of themselves and recruit as we scale.

  8. Enjoy running smooth and scalable financial operations using an efficient, state-of-the-art Fintech stack with tools such as Chargebee, Salesforce, Chartmogul and Equify. (Accounting is currently handled through an external third party but that may change in he future.)

  9. Be ready to take our regulatory compliance and legal efforts to the next level.

  10. Finally, we’ll look at someone matching our cultural compass of outstanding humility, deep collaborativeness, growth mindset and strong focus.

Package & Misc.

We’ll look at a broad spectrum of people with 10 to 15 years of experience and coming from all backgrounds: finance, venture, private equity, FAANG, start-up or scale-up.

You’ll be based out of Paris, with lots of remote-work flexibility.

You can expect top-of-the market compensation as per Figures.hr, a very competitive stock option pool and a seat at our executive committee.

Please get in touch with us!

Simon Dawlat

CEO @ Batch

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