SaaStr 170: Intacct's Rob Reid on Scaling Intacct's Team & Culture To An $850m Exit, Why You Must Attack The Process Not The People & Why The Old School CEO Approach Is Upside Down and Backward

Rob Reid is the Executive Vice President & Managing Director @ Sage Intacct, the undisputed global leader serving finance teams of any size. With over 10,000 employees and and over 3m customers, their financial solutions generate over $2Bn in revenue. As for Rob, prior to Sage Intacct, Rob led Intacct over an incredible 8 year journey culminating in their, reported $850m exit to Sage in 2017. Before that he was CEO and President of LucidEra, a market leader for on-demand business intelligence. Prior to LucidEra Rob was group Vice President of industry leading Siebel CRM for Oracle, managing the SMB sector. Fun fact, over his phenomenal 30 year career, Rob has been involved with 8 startups, 7 of which have had successful exits.  

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How Rob made his way into the world of SaaS over 30 years ago from wanting to be in advertising and hating computer science?
• As a multi-time CEO, how has Rob seen his role and understanding of what it takes to be a great CEO changed over the last 30 years? Does Rob agree that “management upscaling is the most important role a CEO can do”? What does Rob mean when he says, “the old school CEO approach is upside down and backward”? How should it be in that case?
• Why does Rob believe that an executive team is like a boat of oarsman? What are the fundamentals to ensuring your executive team are aligned and working in tandem? Why is transparency across the organisation fundamental to both efficiency and culture? How does Rob think about internal promotion vs external hire when it comes to the exec team?
• Why is Rob adamant that “cloud companies like never before have to be customer-centric”? What does this mean for thinking about optimising the structure of your organisation? How does one think about such high levels of customer success and touch points when serving the immense SMB landscape? How is this feasible? What have been Rob’s key learnings?  

60 Second SaaStr?

1. Following many successful outcomes, what is Rob’s biggest splurge to date?
2. Why does Greg Sands call Rob “The Big Fundamental”?
3. What does Rob know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his career?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Rob Reid