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Gary Boomershine, Chief Executive Officer
Sales Team Live (STL) is web-based software and services company delivering tools, industry data and training to real estate investors.
I needed a financial model to help me figure out the strategies and deal structures for working with customers. As we entered the marketplace, the feedback kept pointing to alternate approaches for pricing, bundling products and services, structuring referral fees, and working with resellers. I needed to test out the choices on a fast track.
I’ve worked with spreadsheets before, but there’s no way I could have built and maintained a model in Excel® that would give me the answers I needed. The solution was Alight Planning.
To get rolling, the Alight consultant walked me through a series of questions focusing on volumes and sales conversion rates when products and reseller channels are mature — that is, what the business would look like a couple of years out. This is the beginning point for Alight’s process and architecture called stage based planning. Build a model with target assumptions of where you want to go, then fill in the blanks of how to get there.
The initial interview took an hour and a half. The next day I was looking at a draft of a baseline revenue model. By the end of the week, we had a complete model — P&L, balance sheet and cash flow — going out three years. While the Alight consultant built the model, I was involved in the whole process of defining the financial targets, rollup structures and activity drivers. The consultant was amazingly fast in translating my vision into manipulable input assumptions and linked data relationships.
The smoothest part was ‘the handoff.’ With just two hours of online tutoring, I understood the financial model and was manipulating the underlying assumptions myself. An Alight feature that makes this easy is Key Measures — a special pane at the bottom of the screen where I can change the most sensitive input assumptions and see calculated metrics of the business. In spreadsheets you have to jump back and forth between worksheets to change inputs and look at results.
I first chose Alight Planning to build a financial model. But I got a lot more — a planning tool that helps me guide my company through a complicated maze of financial and strategy decisions that are having an immediate top and bottom line impact. That’s invaluable.
Finally, I’m a high tech sales guy as well as an entrepreneur. I’ve been around enterprise and desktop software my whole career. There’s no question that Alight Planning is setting new standards for financial software interfaces and analysis tools. Every company should buy this software.
BizFlex delivers internet-powered business operations software that automates business processes such as order management, estimating and fulfillment, that then flow into accounting software.
We first used Alight Planning to develop a financial plan for raising capital. Using Alight’s analysis tools, we did extensive what-if analysis to fine-tune the modeled relationships and underlying assumptions. We then wrote the business plan based substantially on the insights from the model and the analyses we had done. The financing was successful.
Alight Planning is proving to be an effective tool for managing ongoing operations as well. We’re a rapidly growing company. It’s important to measure actual performance against plan and take corrective action on a timely basis. Alight really helps us do this.
For example, the Sales Department has a pipeline tracking system, which is incorporated into the Alight model file. Using Alight’s actuals integration features, we can monitor pipeline activity levels — e.g. number of leads and demos — versus plan. With Alight’s cross-time period linking and lookback at actuals features, we can also project the financial impact of current activity levels — i.e. we can clearly see how today’s pipeline will affect future software sales, consulting, and customer service. It’s all linked in one comprehensive model that drives to the P&L and balance sheet.
Our CEO expects the management team to understand how the business process works and to participate in focused ways to produce results. As the finance person, it’s especially valuable having a modeling tool that deals with the underlying non-financial drivers of financial performance. I can help the sales manager understand the targets for prospecting activities he needs to hit to meet revenue goals. I can also deliver to the CEO in depth analyses of our real business performance with insights about where operational changes need to be made.
The Alight model was built using our own terminology and reflects the complex relationships between the marketplace and our business operations. As such, it’s a valuable tool for orienting new team members to their role in our processes, how their performance impacts others, and how they each contribute to the bottom line.
I was actively involved in building the actuals model and using Alight’s actuals integration features to get accounting books and plan data lined up. The embedded video training fast-tracked my understanding of model building. The Alight Bootcamp gave me a true in-depth understanding of Alight’s potential, which we’re now applying across the board.
While I know spreadsheets well, I could not have built as comprehensive a planning and reporting model in Excel®. Best of all, Alight saves me a huge amount of time preparing the regular financial reports that go to the management team and Board of Directors.
Sherrie Schmit, Vice President, Business Development
Expressware delivers web application software and services to medium-sized businesses and organizations to enable content owners to publish their own content in real time. We have a complicated business model involving half a dozen different revenue sources each with its own ramping, underlying cost structure and efficiency assumptions.
We first used Excel for the business plan. The roll-ups were somewhat crude. It was also time consuming to make modifications such as changing payment terms to see how they impacted the cash flow. The plan was too simplified and couldn’t really support the multiple scenarios we wanted to analyze. The experience was frustrating.
When we switched to Alight, the model came together quickly. We started with a profile that included the roll-up structures and placeholder line items for a typical software business. Unlike a spreadsheet, roll-ups are embedded in Alight, and they’re accurate. Worksheets and financial statements are already linked together.
Our business model involves multiple payment plans, distribution channels, and licensing structures. Alight makes it easy to evaluate how different scenarios for each affect the bottom line and which assumptions have the greatest impact on financial measures. As well, by assigning different scenarios to time periods, we’re able to quickly evaluate the impact of alternate ramping assumptions.
Alight includes a lot of tools for modeling complicated situations. For example, our plan includes customer service, sales, and testing jobs where hiring is driven by volumes and customer activity. The linking was a snap, but more important, I could fine tune the model to show hiring in the month before the programmed requirement to allow for training. The hiring model is interactive. If I increase or decrease volumes or push in or push out activity milestones, the hiring plan and related resources automatically adjust.
Alight is an invaluable tool for analyzing strategies and managing our business. We can now evaluate different product and service offerings and understand their impacts before making them available to our customers. It plugged the biggest hole in our business planning: “what is the bottom line if we make this change?"
ForceLogix is a web-based ASP that tracks data sources — e.g. sales and corporate financial data, customer relationship and satisfaction data, and compensation data — for managing sales performance ratings and other sales activities.
The annuity elements of our business model make the financial plan especially complex. Our customers start by having us build a prototype application tailored to their data sources and sales management issues, which is a source of revenue. During the process a percentage do not move forward but the majority become a real sale with continuing subscriptions, design fees and installation support. After a year, we have some attrition, but most renew with continuing growth in the installed user base and subscription fees.
We started with Excel templates, but the annuity issues were to difficult to model — at least for us sales guys who are the founders. We needed an intuitive tool with specialized interfaces for sorting out the cross time period data relationships — for accumulating the installed bases, for defining and manipulating attrition rates, and for calculating the interrelationship of revenue sources. Alight did all of this for us.
Size of customers adds another layer of complexity. Large customers have different budgets and attrition rates from small ones. In addition, resellers have a different pricing model and product mix. A zoo in our early Excel models! All straight forward in Alight.
We’re a startup. We can’t afford a high priced finance staff. But we still need to fully understand and massage the numbers for our own peace of mind. We need to know that the financials work in our business model. We have to feel confident meeting with potential investors. After two hours of training on the finished model, I was working on my own, changing assumptions in the Key Measures interface and analyzing impacts on the P&L and cash flow.
Alight’s architectures for creating and managing scenarios are huge. Unlike the spreadsheets where we couldn’t find our inputs or tie out the details, with Alight we continuously create, change and analyze scenarios. I can play with pricing, product mix or headcount assumptions and be confident that the changes correctly ripple through the model and financial statements.
Our first investor presentation was an audience of angels and CEOs from top flight companies. We finished with Alight live through a PC viewer. Two dynamics emerged. First, I was confident with the numbers and presentation. Because I’d worked hands-on with the model, I knew the answer to every financial question. I felt good. Second, my potential investors had a higher level of confidence. The fact that we’d built a plan bottoms-up, that we could articulate headcount details, that we could talk about number of customers and installed bases — this gave us credibility with our audience that we’d really dug into the numbers and knew the business.
Alight was exactly what we needed to round out our business and nail down the numbers. We use Alight daily to run new scenarios, analyze business opportunities, and make investor presentations. Alight has given us the confidence and financial street smarts to talk toe to toe with the most savvy investor.
To get rolling, the Alight consultant walked me through a series of questions focusing on volumes and sales conversion rates when products and reseller channels are mature — that is, what the business would look like a couple of years out. This is the beginning point for Alight’s process and architecture called stage based planning. Build a model with target assumptions of where you want to go, then fill in the blanks of how to get there.
For example, the Sales Department has a pipeline tracking system, which is incorporated into the Alight model file. Using Alight’s actuals integration features, we can monitor pipeline activity levels — e.g. number of leads and demos — versus plan. With Alight’s cross-time period linking and lookback at actuals features, we can also project the financial impact of current activity levels — i.e. we can clearly see how today’s pipeline will affect future software sales, consulting, and customer service. It’s all linked in one comprehensive model that drives to the P&L and balance sheet.
Our business model involves multiple payment plans, distribution channels, and licensing structures. Alight makes it easy to evaluate how different scenarios for each affect the bottom line and which assumptions have the greatest impact on financial measures. As well, by assigning different scenarios to time periods, we’re able to quickly evaluate the impact of alternate ramping assumptions. 
We started with Excel templates, but the annuity issues were to difficult to model — at least for us sales guys who are the founders. We needed an intuitive tool with specialized interfaces for sorting out the cross time period data relationships — for accumulating the installed bases, for defining and manipulating attrition rates, and for calculating the interrelationship of revenue sources. Alight did all of this for us.