637: Experiencing the Market Economy Spirit | Tom Fencl, CFO, Pricefx

The son of two doctors, Tom Fencl recalls that while growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, to him a free market economy was more “an intellectual curiosity” than a possible career destination.

“When the Berlin Wall came down, I was midway through high school—it was a very formative experience,” remembers Fencl, who says that the historic happening suddenly released “a market economy spirit.”

After studying at Prague’s University of Economics, Fencl says, he was “drawn to the big financial centers” and worked in London for 2 years at Stern Stuart & Co. as a consultant before heading to the University of Michigan for an MBA.

“From a university standpoint, the University of Michigan may not be the most obvious place for a European to go—but they found me more than I found them,” explains Fencl, who notes that years earlier in Prague he had met students from the University of Michigan who were involved in a study of post-communist economies. “They were virtually the first MBA students that I had ever met,” he observes.

From Michigan, he went directly to New York and Wall Street, where roughly 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall Czech-born and -raised Fencl became an investment banker.

“I worked as sort of a traditional investment banker, meaning that I covered everything from capital market transactions to M&As,” says Fencl, who worked for Salomon Smith Barney (later acquired by Citigroup) and Bank of America.

“I left Wall Street just before the 2008 meltdown,” he reports. “That was some lucky timing. I moved back to my home country, the Czech Republic, with my newborn and my wife, and there I joined a private equity boutique,” explains Fencl, who over the next 10 years migrated from what he describes as “transaction-driven” finance roles to more traditional CFO posts.

“I joined Pricefx in Prague—which was its largest office and where a lot of the banking office functions are,” says Fencl, who was named CFO of the company in 2017 and subsequently relocated with his family back to the U.S.—a market that Pricefx now views as a primary source of future growth. –Jack Sweeney

Fencl: To remind your listeners, we're a SaaS company. So that is a subset of the industry where there's one metric above all, which is ARR, annual recurring revenue, and more specifically the growth of ARR. And then you rank companies based on where they are. For the past few years, we've been somewhere around 80% year over year. So that's a pretty decent clip. Now, you ask what did I change since I arrived? I didn't have to introduce that. They were told already by the very first investors, "You need to watch your ARR growth."

The thing that I had to work on doing, and it is obviously a cultural shift, is understanding that particularly when you're using other people's money, where you're not regulated by, do I have the cash or not ... Now, you have a lot of cash, but the right question is how are you deploying it? How efficiently are you using that capital? So, the metric that I had to work and make sure that the organization understand is payback, customer acquisition cost payback. So understanding how the growth ... How much did I have to spend to get that growth? And that of course is something that then leads to further analysis because you break down the metrics into its components. And that's something where you can't just buy the growth, right? You have to have a certain level of patience.

Well, for us, we mentioned before that we just finished fundraising. So we have plenty of cash to give us the, what they say, runway; meaning, we don't have to worry immediately on the short-term of funding the business. But conversely, we need to deploy that capital and, what we say, that's to scale up. And as I was saying before about it's not just growth, but how efficiently it grows. So I guess the biggest priority is make sure that we deployed efficiently, that we do achieve the growth, but we do it in a way that will satisfy sort of the requirements of the return on capital.

And to do that, one of the key areas of our focus today is work with data. There's obviously a lot of data in the business, but not all of it is structured perfectly. And not all of it is organized in the right way. So we're currently spending a lot of effort on making sure that we clean that up and that we, going forward, make the decisions based on data. Data-driven decision-making is a big priority internally.