why right networks’ acquisition of rootworks may be just what the doctor ordered
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with rick telberg
卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
the accounting world shifted a little with the acquisition by right networks, a cloud-hosting vendor, of rootworks, a technology platform provider to cpa firms.
though conceived before the pandemic, the deal was closed as the first wave of coronavirus was crashing against the shores of the u.s. and it may be a sign of the times under pandemic conditions, as accountants — and, indeed, business in general — race for new technology solutions and business models.
see: right networks acquires rootworks
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in this exclusive interview with 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, right networks ceo joel hughes and rootworks founder darren root, explain the reasons for the deal, and their forecast for the future under covid. warning: their forecast for the future under covid is not pretty.
but the combination of the two companies may augur hold clues to the future of the profession.
transcript
here’s the full transcript, only lightly edited:
[00:00:00] rick telberg: this is rick telberg for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 with joel hughes, ceo of right networks, and darren root, founder of rootworks. now, gm and vice president of market strategy at right networks since the two companies merged. joel, how did this merger come about? when did you guys start talking?
[00:00:29] joel hughes: this merger discussion started over two years ago. i joined right networks about four years ago as ceo and met darren on the road. we hit it off a little bit. i’d say right networks for the last couple years has been looking at acquiring and also growing our own capabilities to better serve firms in particular, beyond our smb customer base. over the last couple of years, darren and i were able to touch base a few times. really, it picked up momentum a few months ago in the fall. we really were able to put a deal together and then complete it despite the covid pandemic, which is not that easy in the first quarter of 2020.
[00:01:09] rick: darren, what convinced you it was finally time to sell?
[00:01:14] darren root: you know, i don’t think it was a convincing of the time was right to sell. the convincing really was, was right networks the right partner? i’ve had a history with right networks that goes back probably 11 years. they were actually rootworks’s first vendor sponsor. we have a deep relationship with right networks that goes way back. for the last few years, rick, i’ve been approached on at least a biweekly basis from different possible suitors that were reaching out to us because we had hit the radar. really, it was more about finding the right partner. i just feel like right now it’s such an interesting time in the profession and i thought rootworks, i think, we need to go faster, bigger and better, and i wanted to find the right partner to do that.
[00:02:03] rick: joel, what makes rootworks the right partner?
[00:02:06] joel: i think for us right networks is a well-established, long-time technology supplier and as we bring more solutions to market and try to complete those solutions even more fully, i think what we’ve been doing is bundling more applications and integrating more things and more complete solutions for firms and our smb clients. we really needed more, i think, strategic direction and better understanding. while we’re building our own product management capabilities organizationally, we’re fundamentally technologists, and i felt like we really could use a core dna boost from a team. having met darren and this broader team at rootworks, really felt like the experience, the expertise, the knowledge, longstanding relationship with the industry, it can really help us drive our solutions set forward to help the digitization that’s happening here. we felt like that was, really, what we were missing. we’re thrilled to have darren leading that team and him helping us now on our market strategy and really impacting where we take our solution set and how we deliver that to firms to make them more successful.
[00:03:14] rick: how does right networks help those 800 firms? what’s in it for them?
[00:03:20] darren: right networks is a foundational company that i think helps rootworks. rootworks has been building technologies that help the front end of accounting firms do business better. right networks has this incredibly solid foundation that spans different vendors. it’s not a single-vendor solution. it spans different vendors. i think adding the two of us together with our front end and our ability to help change behavior in accounting firms with their security, their enterprise nature, all of that stuff. the combination of the two of us, i think, puts us in a really unique spot. a unique place in the industry right now.
[00:04:00] rick: joel, what kind of dna does rootworks bring to right networks?
[00:04:04] joel: good question. i think that at its core, we feel that, to darren’s point, the sort of front-office solutions that rootworks has been developing along with their content, peer community, and coaching to support that is valuable to all those 5,000 of our existing customers, their firms. we’re growing our firm base at the rate of more than 1,000 firms a year right now. i think that, first, just bringing the rootworks’ offering and capabilities to our existing firm customer base is a big win for them. there’s no question about that. i think it’s likely made them more successful over time. i’d say further really the impact on our roadmap and our strategic roadmap of offerings going forward i think will be positively impacted by darren and the rootworks team because it’s still a lot of work for firms to make technology selections and then do the integration they need to do, create processes around those, and make it all work for them, make themselves more efficient and productive. i think rootworks understands that really well end to end. i think we, in right networks, can build solutions and partner with the biggest vendors in the industry to bring together best-in-class solutions that can really be more productive and efficient for our firm customers. the strategic knowledge that will impact our product roadmap will benefit all of our existing and our future firm customers.
[00:05:30] rick: is the combination of a technology company with a network of practicing cpa firms create a new kind of breed of animal? are you essentially creating a network of firms or a new kind of firm?
[00:05:48] joel: i think we are, and i hope we do. first, i would say that one of the things that really convinced me about rootworks being the fit is that darren works our half of a technology and product company too. they’re not at their core, but certainly, they’ve developed platforms. they’re more than dipping their toes into technology. there’s a lot of commonality and crossover there. the whole front office, back office piece that allows solution set, but then how do you move forward? how do firms move forward to use those solution sets, has been, to me, the critical missing component? i think that that’s what darren and rootworks can really help with. to your point, the network then of firms who are like-minded or heading down the same path together, are learning together and supporting each other through the peer community that exists at rootworks is unique. really, i think that can help not just as we help customers, that our firms, they help each other on the same journey. i think it’ll be very powerful, and i hope to create a different kind of dynamic in the industry, yes.
[00:06:51] rick: it sounds like it could be a powerful competitive dynamic with firms, common and complimentary, competencies right throughout the country using much of the same technology base. sounds like a firm that– well, darren, you tell me. if you put together your 800 firms, how big a business would that be?
[00:07:14] darren: we have some business intelligence around this, rick. we would be the seventh-largest firm in the country with somewhere north of 9,000 employees doing nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue. rick, i wanted to follow up on what joel just said. you, joel and i have been around this industry at least long enough now to know that we’ve been trying to drag along practitioners into what we would all consider the technology of the future, i guess. i mean, you and i have been talking about it forever, rick. firms, by and large, have just been dragging their feet. they sort of looked at the internet and technology, and the tools are sort of nice to have. some people have said, “i think i’ll wait this out.” some people have said, “i think i’ll engage with this a little bit.” other people say, “i like things the way they are.” almost overnight, rick, we’ve gone from what was, you could argue it was a nice to have to it’s now foundational. you can’t do business today if you don’t engage with the tools. overnight, it became a fact. you can’t ignore it right now. i think the timing of joel and i getting together with rootworks and right networks couldn’t be better because what we’re skilled at in rootworks is helping firms make that move, and what right network is incredibly skilled at is being the foundation for lots of different technologies. it’s not just one. they’re not a single vendor hosting only one toolset. they’re a platform that can host lots of different toolsets. you can come into the organization now from lots of different places, whether you are any user, ultratax user, or a cch user, it doesn’t matter. you can come into the organization, and we can help you become that modern firm at this point.
[00:09:07] rick: what we have here is a combination of a technology hosting company, a network of firms with a billion dollars in revenue that would rank it as the seventh-largest in the business, that makes you a force to be reckoned with. what are you guys going to do with all this power?
[00:09:26] darren: [chuckle] i’ll leave that to you, joel.
[00:09:30] joel: [chuckle] okay. i think that we’re certainly going to use our power for good and not evil. right, rick? [laughs] first, we want to help more firms. to darren’s point, even that seventh-largest idea, if we think about now, the firms are on the right networks’ customer base. they aren’t rootworks members. they aren’t part of that community yet, so we’ll add many more to them. move that from hundreds to thousands over the next few years. we want to move as many firms that we can toward this modern firm model that darren and rootworks have developed to make them more successful. whether that takes the form of more mergers and consolidation, there’s no plan for creating a mega-firm of the firms that are our customers. that’s not on the drawing board at this point, but i think helping them and having them help each other to be more successful is absolutely the core of why we’re doing this.
[00:10:25] rick: is the covid economy affecting your firms, darren?
[00:10:30] darren: all right. that’s almost the perfect example, rick. let me just back up just a second and give you an example of something that has happened over the last four weeks. rick, i’ve been a practicing cpa for 30 years with an accounting firm that was sitting right there. when things like the cares act would come out in the old days, and i’m thinking back 30 years, 25 years ago, i would be sitting in my four walls wondering how in the heck do i interpret what just happened and having nobody to talk to. i have a few staff people, but most firms have three, four, or five staff people, and there was usually a go-to person that had to figure everything out. four weeks ago, three weeks ago, whenever the cares act passed, we had nearly 4,000 messages inside of our community over the course of seven days, firms helping firms figure this out. if you just think about the power of getting out of your four walls as a small practitioner and having the ability to be a part of a community of practitioners that are doing the same thing, helping each other. that’s been hugely impactful inside of our community over the last four weeks because i would say our community has been busier than they’ve ever been, rick, in the last four weeks trying to help small businesses. not only understand what’s happening but get their ppp loans or their eidl loans. then there’s this, “how do you interpret eight weeks? when does that eight weeks start?” it’s actually been so gratifying to watch firms helping each other.
[00:10:30] rick: whether they like it or not, their clients have dragged them kicking and screaming into advisory work.
[00:10:30] darren: the reason they became advisors during this covid crisis is that every single one of their customers was calling them and saying, “i need help,” and so they were being reactive. the platform that i’ve been working on for the last several years, rick, is a technology platform that allows an accounting firm to go from being reactive, waiting for somebody to ask them something, to gather all the information that just swirls around everywhere. it’s information that allows a firm to go from being reactive to proactive and it’s information and the proactivity that actually allows a firm to become a true advisor. really, what i think has been missing and what joel and i have been really focused on since we’ve gotten together is extending that platform of gathering information so firms can go from being reactive to proactive because that is the key that unlocks the advisory services. let me give you just a brief example. if in our firm i know that i have a partnership, that’s a client, and if i knew the answer to the question, “do they have a buy-sell agreement?” then if i knew the answer to whether they had life insurance or not, i could be an advisor. i could say, “hey, you are a partnership. you don’t have a buy-sell agreement, and you haven’t funded it with life insurance. let me help you do that.” that’s being proactive, but i needed the information to do that. most firms just don’t have that. they don’t have the ability to gather that, organize it, and act on it, and that’s what we’ve developed in rootworks and what we’re going to integrate with right networks in their foundational platform to really change firms’ lives.
[00:10:30] rick: joel, how is the covid trauma changing things?
[00:10:30] joel: the majority of our customers are small businesses, and then a minority are firms. but as you said, we have, like, 5,000 firms with probably 30,000 users. our biggest concern was just what’s the rate of smb failure going to be out of the shoot as it related to covid. we’re thinking, “hey, well, the firms are going to be busy. they’re going to have a lot to do. they’re going to need a lot of support. we’ll get to them in a second, but what about their small business clients?” restaurants and service industries, these things just got summarily shut down.
[00:10:30] joel: what we’ve seen thus far in terms of our business and our customer base is: the customers that we have come and shrunken their number of users and the number of subscriptions, so they’ve been very careful about pairing back on unused seats. we’ve not seen churn above our typical rates surprisingly, so i’d say we’ve been– in late march into early april, we saw acceleration with new customer acquisition. i think some people were in a hurry to go remote. they’re adding mostly quickbooks hosting so they could go remote with their quickbooks. our biggest concern was, is our business literally going to contract or shrink right between churn and between customer shrinking? we still grew the business in april.
[00:10:30] joel: net of all that stuff, we saw a contraction in the customer base, but enough new customers and not unreasonable churn so that we still grew the business and things look better already sort of here in may. our customer base, even on the smb side, skews a little bit medium size versus very small. my guess is that the smaller quickbooks online-only kinds of smbs are more likely in the service economy, more likely sharing or disappearing, but we expect to see very slow small business recovery. i just don’t have a view on what that’s going to take. i’d say not as negatively impactful as we thought thus far, which has been heartening.
[00:10:30] joel: on the other side of that is we’re seeing that the firms have a lot to do, a lot of help they can provide their small business customers. to darren’s point, the peer community at rootworks, we’re doing this deal right at the same time, and even from before our closing, we started working together, and that’s where i think the technology platform and relationships that we have at right networks, plugging that into rootworks client intelligence platform, we were able to take a partnership we had with a company called bluevine, it’s one of the fintech companies who were able to get ppp onboard and working probably about a week in. almost missed the first go-round of the ppp fundings that really happened at the big banks, but we’ve now made an– some of these have been rootwork’s firm clients as well as a lot of the smb clients out of right network space. we’ve made now hundreds of ppp loans have been applied for and then delivered and funded through our partnership with bluevine that had been in place just because at right networks, we have partnerships with people in fintech to make loans to our large customer base. these are great examples where we’ve been able to connect large small business clients that we have with firms that are helping them, and in this case, partnerships that can really add value. in this case, we’re able to pull those together, collaborate quickly between what was rootworks and right networks now. together, it’d be even easier. we’re very excited about how we can pull technology and data really out of a very large customer base to inform darren’s client intelligence platform. very excited about that. we’re just starting to work on that between our tech teams. i think that we’ll be able to deliver a realization of delivering data into a decision-making process for firms and allow them to be proactive advisors to darren’s point. we think it’s really been missing. advisory sounds great, but what offer i make to whom – do i really understand my customers enough? how much work is it for me to have that somehow surface and delivered to me?
[00:17:33] rick: joel, with your insight into smbs, what do you think is the outlook?
[00:17:39] joel: i think it’s going to be a very slow recovery… i just see fits and starts. i just don’t think we know what it’s going to take to restart this thing. i don’t think it’s going to be that easy—the factors around what’s happened with unemployment, obviously. the different incentives that exist, whether it’s ppp or unemployment and other things that have been potentially future stimulus bills that are being discussed, that’s just going to make it very choppy on the return to work for so many.
[00:17:39] joel: luckily for us that are supporting financial professionals, accounting professionals, tax professionals, there’s a lot to be figured out and a lot to do. we just really need to focus on supporting our smb clients because they’re just going to need a lot of help. it’s going to be a lot of failures, and then hopefully, those businesses and those entrepreneurs can restart themselves. i think that’s part of the beauty of our economy. many temporary setbacks are going to create a longer and slower return to normalcy than we’d hoped.
[00:18:40] rick: darren, what’s the outlook ahead?
[00:18:43] darren: everybody’s kind of feeling the same thing. this is going to be a bit of a slow recovery. there’s going to be some fits and starts. i think we’re going to get there, but it’s going to be some rough sledding. we’re going to change behaviors and expectations. businesses are going to forever change. we’re going to rely more on the internet. we’re going to ask businesses to be more socially responsible. we’re going to ask for contactless things, whether that’s currency or payments, or whatever it might be, businesses have to. for them to survive and to thrive at this point, they have to reinvent themselves in a new way that becomes acceptable.
[00:19:24] rick: what will a successful or a surviving cpa firm look like on the other end of this?
[00:19:34] darren: everything looks different coming out of this. rick, we’re going to learn to work virtually. we’re going to learn that we’re not punching time flocks. we’re going to learn how to do more with less because we’re going to leverage technology better. i’m trying to figure out what’s not going to change inside an accounting firm coming out of this. the majority of partners that i know in firms, rick, we’re just scared to make any changes. we keep doing what we did yesterday, and there’s no impetus for change, but now that the impetus for change was forced upon us, we see that “hey, we can hop on a zoom call. it works just fine,” or “our employees can work from home, and they still get stuff done.” i think with that knowledge now, everything changes because going back to the old way wasn’t necessarily better. i think there’s a new way. we’re embracing it now, but we have to embrace it more effectively and with intention as we move forward.
[00:19:34] rick: darren, what kind of firms won’t survive?
[00:19:34] darren: i think firms that won’t survive are the firms that rely purely on compliance. there’s money in compliance. don’t get me wrong. i think firms should be doing compliance, but firms that are not proactive, that are not adding value are going to struggle to survive, firms that want to go back to the way that they used to do things. we’re sending people home, rick, arguably for six months. that’s a lifestyle change, right? clearly, for three months. people have changed the way they do business and their expectations. employees are changing their expectations. i just think so much is ready to change and i think it’s a good change. those who can’t adapt to the new reality, i can’t imagine why a customer is going to want to go to them.
[00:19:34] rick: joel, from your point of view, what’s the small business technology stack going to look like at the other end of this?
[00:19:34] joel: there are really two pieces of that. i think in a lot of times we thought just about this technology stack being for the people doing the work in the firm or people doing the work, let’s say, at the small business. right out, we have three packages for our quickbooks hosting. that’s our legacy product. throw basic quickbooks hosted with a few things. we have a package that includes bill.com, expensify, avalara, a pdf reader. we’ve taken the top five applications that are modern saas applications that we see the majority of our customers using and said, “let’s just put that all together, make sure that’s fully integrated and sharing data and so forth.” what we see happening, generally, is an anchor legacy application, like a tax application, maybe an accounting application with some modern saas applications integrated being the generic stack. i think that’s been happening. that’s happening as well in all saas land, right? for the smaller businesses, much of the quickbook is online, but still with bill.com and expensify and so forth. we spent a lot of time on that. i think what we see happening more in the future is a verticalization of those kinds of bundles too. in the construction vertical, there are two or three applications that really matter that are very typically used by the majority of people. we’re looking at vertical-specific bundled applications that we think make a lot of sense for that sort of tech stack for the users. i think that becomes under the control of the smb is probably going to be using those applications. as a technology supplier, we’re just making sure that those can all work in an environment and be remotely accessed securely, which is critical with their data protected. that’s what we’re seeing, and i think we’ll see more of, “now, how do i interface that to my client?” if it’s a services business, a lot more of the wow, i’ve got to get docusign, document management back and forth. maybe a secure channel that’s mobile versus just e-mail. those kinds of things are raising what’s necessary and pushing the functionality forward not just, “hey, i’m doing the work, what applications do i need?” then, in addition to that, “how do i then communicate with that client and do that efficiently?” to darren’s point, maybe take payments. it’s from proposal through payments, and there are a number of technologies and companies working in that area. we’re working with some of them today, and we’ll see some of them being more important in the future as well.
[00:19:34] rick: joel, what is the role of fintech going to play in the future of right networks and rootworks?
[00:19:34] joel: there’s the ppp loan situation; that’s a little bit of it. but what i think it’s going to be more and more important: i would say look at what intuit did buying credit karma. you look at an accounting company, as far as i can tell that strategy is, fundamentally, that they just want to be a broker between a large customer base and the intelligence about their financial situation and financial products and services. that’s a matchmaking two-sided network model that i think is going to be maybe the future even of intuit. that’s interesting. i’d say fintech broadly, so certainly loan products and related financial services that could be matched to the needs of small businesses well needs to be an important part of our future. we’ve done some work there and some partnering. i’d say we have a lot more work to do, which i’m excited to dig into, and i think with the addition of rootworks, that will help us. how can we not just do the tech piece, but introduce that concept to make the why and the how understood to firms, and then let them be the advisors for those services. in general, our philosophy in right networks is to try to leverage and support firms to help small business clients versus us as right networks working directly with a huge small business customer base. we have those customers, many of them are connected to cpa firms. first, we start there but support the firms in being advisors to their clients, improving with products and their efficacy. i think fintech is going to be very important for us going forward as a new revenue stream beyond the streams that we have today.
[00:25:38] rick: it seems that fintech was able to do instantly and automatically what many banks were unable to do.
[00:25:46] joel: the other thing that was critical about that, in my opinion, was what smbs were getting help. we had mass smb shut down, and what happened first, not surprisingly, but a little of the rich get richer. it was, first, small businesses that had existing banking relationships, that had loan products. if you were a bank of america or a citibank customer with a loan already, of course, it was easier for them to approve you for a follow on loan from this bank or the government. i think that’s where a lot of the early dollars went. i really believe we were able to help a lot of, not necessarily fully unbanked smbs, maybe some of them didn’t have a banking relationship, literally, and many who didn’t have a banking relationship that was able to support them given the chaos of ppp. i think that’s really where the beauty of fintech on the loan product side is you can get access to the smbs data in right networks, and you can make a decision about making a loan. people aren’t printing out pdfs, and faxing them in, or scanning them in. you don’t have to check back in if you’ve done it. we’ve been giving receivables lines to smbs. you can just be checking their quickbooks receivables balance over time and allowing them to draw more against the loan. it’s much easier to both understand the client, their creditworthiness, the appropriate loan products, and make the loan, but then also service the loan. the beauty of that is technology is being used by all of these small businesses, and having fintech get access to their records appropriately can really be a win-win for both sides.
[00:27:17] rick: darren, how is fintech, as broadly defined, going to play a role in accounting firms going forward?
[00:27:27] darren: rick, you and i have been around the profession long enough to remember when there wesall kinds of tax software out there. everything was decentralized. everyone was creating a software application, and the next thing you know, 10, 15 years later, those things started rolling up into these things called suites, and now we’re in the next iteration. the next iteration is connected platforms, is connected pieces. fintech being a huge component of that. it’s about money, information, knowledge, whatever you want, all that stuff being connected and flowing seamlessly. i think the accountant has to be the quarterback of that. they have to be the master of that. it’s not going to be one company who builds everything. an accounting firm is going to have to be masterful enough to pick the right toolsets to pull together lots of information because we’re not we’re not talking about just three, four, or five apps. we’re talking about 15, 20. lots of different things. some of those things have to be client-facing like websites, and some of them are payments, some of them are scheduling, and some of them are video conferencing. all this stuff has to come together and feel extremely seamless to the end-user customer and usable to the firm. i think that’s really going to be one of the roles. a key role of an accounting firm going forward is the ability to pull together the right toolsets across all this stuff, including fintech, to really service their customers.
[00:29:07] rick: where does it go from here?
[00:29:09] joel: at this point rick, there’s not another specific step. for right networks, we’ve been on a mission the last two to three years, is to definitely get more firm-focused and think a lot about through firms to smbs, and we like that. we like that model from a technology go-to-market standpoint, a support standpoint. we love this industry that we’re in. i think what’s going to happen, that we’re going to be eyes-wide-open on, to darren’s point, is it’s not going to be the same coming out of this. when we come out of this, it’s going to be different. in general, we hope to be one of the people driving that change and supporting that change. what’s most important to us is to think about making firms successful, and then supporting these smbs. as that takes form in technology and then in practice and in a peer community, we’re going to be one of the leaders there. i think we will be blazing a path with our eyes wide open.
[00:30:09] rick: if you guys are right you’re propelling a paradigm shift in the technology, financial, accounting firm space, redefining how technology and accounting firms work together, redefining how accounting firms work with each other and with technology, redefining how financial technologies work together. something very different is going to come out of this. the two of you have done something very dramatic, it’s like an epic change in the way business gets done. congratulations and good luck. is there anything i haven’t asked that i should?
[00:30:51] darren: i think, at least from my perspective, rick, what we’re attempting to do is create a platform that small and medium-size accounting firms can operate on. the thing is they get to bring their own device to that platform if that makes sense. you don’t have to switch tax off to be a part of our platform. you have to come with a concept that you want to be connected, that you want to be cloud-based, that you want to serve customers end-to-end. we’re not going to tell you what device to bring, so to speak, we’re going to help you pull that together because it really is, we call it, the performance platform. it really is a platform of all the different pieces and parts seamlessly integrated. i think that’s really the beauty of what joel and i are attempting to do, with team.
[00:31:44] joel: i would reinforce that by saying our mission here is to build the most complete and comprehensive platform that drive success for firms. that’s not a single vendor platform. by definition, part of what we’re doing is curating and in working with major vendors to deliver solutions that people can come from where they’re at, as darren said, but take advantage of an integrated platform that contains things they’ve worked with in the past. really, now with a business model and a playbook, they can leverage that for much more dramatically. then with the support of a community, just to be a more successful, best-in-class platform that will be more integrated and, i think, more powerful than any single stack from an existing vendor.
[00:32:26] rick: well, then, thank you very much, joel hughes, darren root. i appreciate your time today. thank you.