Building the Perfect Accounting Team: A Conversation With Controller of the Year Ashley Griesshammer

In this episode of Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets, Mike chats with FloQast’s reigning Controller of the Year,  Ashley Griesshammer of e-commerce brand Lovevery about her path from Finance to Accounting, Lovevery’s path to automating as much as possible (and how important automation is for accounting teams in 2023 and beyond), and whether the title “Controller” adequately reflects all the work Controllers really have on their plates.

Transcript

Mike Whitmire:

What's up, everybody? Welcome to Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets. My name is Mike Whitmire, I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of FloQast, also proudly an inactive CPA. So Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets, we like to bring on finance executives, entrepreneurs, investors, really just talk about the finance landscape with the goal of talking about career progression, and how can people move up and ultimately get to that CFO role that a lot of people are looking to have one day, or just move up into whatever executive role makes sense and learn about the industry.

So for today, I'm very excited for our guest. Our team wrote up a little bio, maybe I should read a little bit of this bio here, because it's super impressive as I was going through it. So I'm going to start with some of it, and the beginning is, ‘As FloQast reigning Controller of the Year, Ashley Griesshammer has helped e-commerce company Lovevery's accounting team scale as the company has experienced explosive growth. So I'm going to stop with Controller of the Year Award and helping with explosive growth.’ I think that sums it up very nicely. So Ashley, welcome to the podcast. Really excited to have you here chatting through everything, and we'll love to just kick it off and get to know you a little bit. Where are you located? Friends, family, pets? What you got going on?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Sure. Thank you guys for having me. And again, thank you for this awesome Controller of the Year Award. I can't tell you how many times I've had people mention it to me. It's just been super awesome. So I am based in Boise, Idaho, Lovevery is headquartered in Boise, Idaho, I've been out here for a few years, getting a lot of snow out there today, so we're deep into winter.

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah, we're here in late November. It's that time.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes. I'm originally from Michigan, I went to the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, have an undergrad degree in accounting and finance. I am an active licensed CPA, and [inaudible 00:01:44].

Mike Whitmire:

Nice, congratulations. All right.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Thank you. And also a CMA, and actually started my career kind of differently than a lot of people who may have their CPAs. I have a CPA, I have never worked in public accounting, I did one public accounting internship in audit, really determined that it wasn't for me and I kind of wanted to be the person on the other side of the table that the auditors were asking their questions to.

Mike Whitmire:

How did you get away without having the experience requirements? I thought that was a required part of getting the CMA license?

Ashley Griesshammer:

It is not. The experience requirements are actually pretty broad. I don't want to call them vague, but they're pretty broad, one year of experience working with financial statements, analyzing financial statements, anything like that kind of counts. So even if you want to be a CPA, you don't have to work in public, which I think a lot of kids in school don't really understand.

Mike Whitmire:

Don't tell the audit firms that, yeah.

Ashley Griesshammer:

I know, right?

Mike Whitmire:

Very interesting. Okay.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, it's not a requirement. So when I first left school, I actually worked in a very finance heavy role. I did private placement lending for Prudential Capital Group, which is basically a big insurance company that takes all of your insurance premiums, and then they invest it. So people like me work with that money, and we're giving private loans to companies who maybe didn't want to tap a public debt market, or we're looking for a little bit more non-traditional finance. I spent a lot of time looking at a lot of financial statements. I worked on our international team, looking at companies in Italy, Australia, we started up a LATAM initiative at the time, and it was a real crash course in financial statement analysis, rather than doing debits and credits.

And I think that helped set me up for being able to think about what is the accounting role doing, and what kind of impact can we have in a business, rather than just posting transactions? Because so much of accounting now is not just posting transactions. We've got a lot of softwares that can automate that. So accounts are being asked to analyze. What ratios should they be looking at? What kind of trend analysis can they do? And that kind of finance heavy role really taught me how to do that. So it was a super good foundation before I made that switch into corporate accounting.

Mike Whitmire:

As an auditor, I would say you learn a lot about the financials from the ground up and how you get there, but in your role, it feels like more of a due diligence and you're looking at the finished product, and then understanding that and assessing the finished financial statement product through a different lens.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah. Thinking about, what does it mean? Great, you produced this financial statement, what does it mean? What's it telling us? What is it telling us about the health of this business? That kind of thing.

Mike Whitmire:

And then you moved into accounting. I'd love to move into this stretch, but for starters, I will say, are you a Michigan football fan? Is that fair to assume?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Of course I am. [inaudible 00:04:38] back there.

Mike Whitmire:

All right. Well we're coming off of nice Michigan over Ohio State whooping, and FloQast does have a bit of an affiliation with Ohio State. We have an office out in Columbus, and a lot of diehard fans around FloQast, so they were bummed. But hey, I'm from LA so it's fine with me. So congrats on the big win.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Thank you. I'm happy we finally got it. It's been many a years coming. I don't think we won in Columbus since 2000, so very long time.

Mike Whitmire:

Oh wow. I didn't realize it was that big of a deal. And both teams were great this year, so that was a very cool matchup. Well congratulations. All right, back to accounting. Back to the fun stuff. Back to accounting. So how'd you then get the experience with the debits and credits and ultimately get to the Controller of the Year?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, I'll be honest with you, when I got my first corporate accounting job, when I left finance, I took an assistant controller job within a business that was owned by a family private equity office. So this was one of the good things-

Mike Whitmire:

Why did you make that change? It sounds like you enjoyed the diligence, but yeah, why'd you decide to make the change?

Ashley Griesshammer:

I liked the analytical work. I will say, I was taking my CPA exams at the same time that I was working that job. So I knew that I wanted something that gave me a little bit more accounting exposure, than just staying in a true finance role. So it was always in the plan that I was going to get my CPA license, and maybe transfer that into, whether it was corporate finance, corporate accounting, I didn't know at the time, but I knew I wanted something that was more within a company.

A lot of what I was doing in that role, it's transactional in nature. We're analyzing a company to give them a loan, and then after that, we're monitoring them. But it's not like I was in the business providing help, providing advice, I'm not in the day-to-day details. And I wanted to make that move to an actual company, so I could get to know, what is this company doing? I want to learn it inside and out. I want to make value added contributions to improve profits. Improve sales. I wanted to really intimately know a company, rather than work at a transactional role, is really, for me, what I wanted to do.

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah, makes perfect sense.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah. So the first role I had in corporate accounting, I always say the people that hired me must have been crazy, because they hired me as an assistant controller, and I had never made a journal entry in my life. I was like, "I don't know why you want me to do this, but okay."

Mike Whitmire:

All right.

Ashley Griesshammer:

My boss at the time, though, he was like, "I can teach you how to enter a bill into NetSuite. I can teach you how to make a journal entry. This is not that hard to learn." He's like, "I can't teach you how to think, and that's what you know how to do", from that analyst role that I had. So he was super great in giving me a crash course in what you need to do for a month end close, how do we do reconciliations, I mentioned just straight up doing journal entries, I was doing payroll at the time, some sales tax returns, it was a super comprehensive, what does a corporate accounting team do? Which was super great.

Mike Whitmire:

So it sounds like you were doing a lot of the actual doing of work. So were there staff or senior accountants when you started? Or did you just... Tell me more about the team?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, it was a business to business distribution company, so primarily wholesale sales. So we had probably five or six equivalent of staff accountants who were doing both payables, accounts receivables, and then we had a pretty robust credit function we were selling on account to most of our customers.

So I would say that was a very old school, traditional way of operating. They're on the phone with customers, collecting payments over the phone, very different from what I do now in the e-commerce space, but again, was a good foundational, at its core, this is how accounting teams operate. So that's kind of what the team looked like. But yes, I was definitely still doing day-to-day work. Definitely couldn't get away from that.

Mike Whitmire:

And you're reviewing and approving these invoices and stuff?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes.

Mike Whitmire:

Okay.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes, yes. So they ended up sell... The private equity company sold that business to an industry competitor. So I was able to assist with that transaction, which was also really fun to get to pull together due diligence, help the new owners go through that transition, and then I stayed on with that private equity firm just as their director of finance, managing some of their other smaller company holdings that they had. They had three or four more small companies. So I did that for a while, and then that was about the time I was moving out here to Boise from Michigan. So this was also before remote work was a thing. I'm dating myself, so this was before people could do that. So I wanted to move, so I had find a new job.

Then I went to a children's retail company, and that was really my first foray into e-commerce, which I have loved ever since. The thing that I like about e-commerce is that, so different from kind of more business to business, is that you're dealing with so much data and so many transactions, that oftentimes you don't even need to touch. If your systems are working perfectly, customers can come onto your website, make their purchase, and that will flow all the way through into your ERP system if it works right. That does not [inaudible 00:10:02]. So the concept that you could be doing 10, 20, 30,000 transactions, and you don't need somebody who's touching every single one of these, I'm like, "This is how companies can scale really efficiently." Also, I like to shop, so I like e-commerce companies.

Mike Whitmire:

Personal affiliation. There you go. Hey, you're going to be passionate about something if you love the product in the space, so never hurts.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes. And then really, I joined Lovevery In 2020, right about the time the pandemic was actually starting. Lovevery was really small at the time. They were just this little startup in Boise. We have two co-founders, one who had founded Happy Baby Organics, also here in Boise, and sold that company, and then another who had helped take an energy company public out in the DC area. So two really experienced founders, and I made the leap to that smaller startup really just on faith on them. They were really excited about what they were doing, had grand ideas for the business, I could see their vision, so that's kind of why I wanted to join. At the time, we were a super small team, myself and three other individuals, and we're now a team of about 12. So lots of growth over the past two years. It's been really fun.

Mike Whitmire:

And were you hired directly into the controller role at Lovevery?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes.

Mike Whitmire:

And tell us a little bit more about the business.

Ashley Griesshammer:

So Lovevery is a children's e-commerce subscription business. I kind of tell people it's like BarkBox for babies, but the really cool thing is that it's not just random toys for your kids to play with. It's all research backed, Montessori inspired, so we're sending you a box that's appropriate for your baby's development at whatever age they're at. So there's certain toys that are great for a two-month-old. There's certain toys that are great for a six-month-old. There are certain toys that are great for a one-year-old. And we'll send you those exactly when you need them to really give your baby the best start they have in life. So yeah, it's super cool. I have an almost two-year-old now, so I'm also a customer, which is really nice.

Mike Whitmire:

Awesome. There you go. Hopefully they give some customer perks or something to that effect.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah.

Mike Whitmire:

That's awesome. So I'd love to understand... This is very detailed, but you had mentioned the volume differences, and you had said you were at the wholesale company where it's very manual, versus your next stop at the other e-commerce company. What does that volume discrepancy look like? And I'm trying to think of what if you're trying to do the e-commerce thing manually the same way wholesale's done? Is that even possible? How many humans would that require?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Honestly, I couldn't even put a number on it. Trying to manage e-commerce transaction volume the way you do a typical whole wholesale company is just completely different. But at the same time, they're also different order values. Your e-commerce transactions might be a hundred dollars a piece. Those bigger business to business transactions could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. So you're really comparing apples and oranges. But there's certainly different complexities with the two. Like I mentioned, when you're doing a lot of wholesale sales, you're dealing with customers on credit, you're chasing people for collections sometimes, you know may have that debt that you need to write off. The difference with e-com is you're really collecting that money at your point of sale, so you're not so worried about, "Oh, I'm not actually going to collect on this sale." But you are worried about, "Of these 60,000 transactions, did I capture all of them in my financial statements?" That's a lot harder.

Mike Whitmire:

What's your stack of systems that you use to automate a lot of that work?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, so we recently, just over the past year, we've been using NetSuite since January 2021. One of the big initiatives that I was tasked with when I started at Lovevery was, "Pick us an ERP system that's going to grow with us." We were on QuickBooks at the time, which a lot of small companies start on. It makes sense, easy to use, easy to set up, but there comes a point where that's just not going to work if your company is growing to a certain size. So one of the first things-

Mike Whitmire:

What do you think that break point is? That's an interesting discussion.

Ashley Griesshammer:

I think there are a couple different triggers. So one is if you're trying to go international, QuickBooks does not have multicurrency capabilities. If you are selling your product in US dollars and in euros, you're going to be doing a ton of manual journal entries to deal with that currency. Also, if you're trying to use multiple subsidiaries, they also can't handle that. So you would need a separate QuickBooks account for every subsidiary that you might be using, and those don't consolidate. So those are actually two big things for us, that when we were making that transition to NetSuite, that we were looking for. And surprisingly, there's not a ton of ERP systems that can handle multi-currency and multi-book functionality. There's actually only a handful.

Mike Whitmire:

It's wild how few options are.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, I'm like, "Your choices are actually really limited." So we went through a true analysis, we went through an RFP process with multiple different vendors, I didn't want to just be like, "Yeah, we're automatically going to pick NetSuite." I had a feeling what was going to happen. But after we went through that process, landed on NetSuite, and used it to, I would say, medium capabilities for about the first year. We had RGL on there, we had our financial transactions in there, but still we're kind of doing a decent amount of manual journal entries. We're trying to true up inventory at month end, at quarter end to our warehouse manually, and those things weren't connected. And then this past year, we undertook a major automation project, which has been super cross-functional, big effort between our accounting team, our operations team, and then our tech and digital team, to really automate pretty much everything we're doing.

So we're now in a true order to cash cycle. So a customer replaces their order on our website, comes into NetSuite, we have a sales order, Mike is getting product A, and then we're also connected to our 3PL, our fulfillment center, so we are getting notification when they ship that product, so that I can recognize revenue.

Being under compliant under 606 is super, super important for us. And on a system like QuickBooks, where we're not getting that live fulfillment information from our 3PL, it's hard to be compliant. You're dealing with the lookups and spreadsheets at quarter end to make sure you're only recognizing what they actually shift, and it's super clunky. So that automation with our fulfillment center has helped our rev rec significantly.

Mike Whitmire:

What's the timeline between an order and a shipment date? It feels like that's probably pretty quick, right?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes.

Mike Whitmire:

Oh no, you send out monthly boxes, so there might be a delay.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Well, there's two things there. So we have the option where customers can prepay, so we're also dealing with a deferred revenue component [inaudible 00:17:09]. A lot of-

Mike Whitmire:

Oh, as soon as there's deferred... Yeah, there you go.

Ashley Griesshammer:

A lot of e-com companies might not deal with that, but you can pay for your whole year of kits at one time. And exactly like you said, all of those kits are not going to ship out at one time. So I have them sitting in a deferred revenue balance, and then when they do ship, they get transitioned to recognized revenue. And we used to do this totally manually in spreadsheets with journal entries, and NetSuite has automated the entire thing for us.

Mike Whitmire:

That's awesome. So then your 3PL is plugged into NetSuite, deferred revenue product, and then one 12th of it gets recognized on each shipment date. So all right. We are in prime accounting operations world right here. This is [inaudible 00:17:49] we're talking about. So for anyone listening who gets confused about what accounting operations means, this is it right here. Connecting one of the most challenging processes. So when thinking about this, the order to cash process, how much time would you say that automating this has saved your team now on a monthly basis?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Oh, two weeks, at least.

Mike Whitmire:

Two weeks?

Ashley Griesshammer:

I would say at least two weeks on a monthly basis. But even more than that, it's the accuracy. I feel very confident that we're not missing transactions, we're not over recognizing in one month versus another month, which again, for us, is really important. We're doing PCAOB level audits, so there's a really, really, really small margin for error. So between the time savings, and then the ability to rely on that data, it's been so worthwhile.

Mike Whitmire:

So it's two weeks on in terms of accelerating your clothes? Or you think it's two weeks of manual hours? So 80 hours a month.

Ashley Griesshammer:

I would say hours. There's still some pieces of our clothes that take a bit of time and our manual in nature, but the individual who was doing a lot of that rev rec is now free to do other tasks, which is great, because we always have more projects coming online.

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah, that's cool. So the real world impact of this now is you have somebody at Lovevery who's not as overworked, they're able to not do that type of grunt journal entry work anymore, and then they get to pick their head up and do some more impactful stuff, and hopefully help drive even more operationally... Yeah, beautiful story. That's a beautiful thing. That's a win-win for everybody.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes.

Mike Whitmire:

So then how... All right. Man, I'm getting real nerdy here, but I do like this stuff. When it's so automated like that, how are you reconciling that account, and how are the auditors looking through to make sure everything's accurate?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, the nice thing is that it's pretty easy to pull a report out of NetSuite that's like, "This is what got recognized in revenue in this month." So they can make their selections from that, and as long as we have a customer number or we have unique subscription identifiers, I'm able to trace that. Here we are in NetSuite, I can find that order in Shopify, I can find that order in our subscription manager, which is a homegrown system that our engineering team has built, and I can find that customer and order in Stripe. So I'm able to match across all of these systems really easily. I would also say for us, in starting off-

Mike Whitmire:

So is that a four-way match? Sorry, because I've heard a three-way match, but that's a four-way match that you just described, right?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah.

Mike Whitmire:

Your homegrown system, Shopify, Stripe, and then NetSuite.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes, and I guess shipment confirmation from our 3PL, but that gets populated in Shopify as well, so you can see it there.

Mike Whitmire:

Okay. Man, that's wild. All right, so you have a lot of sources of truth there.

Ashley Griesshammer:

We have a lot of data sources. Our IT team put together a map of where data is going from different systems and into one system, and it looks even more complicated than the New York City subway map. I'm not kidding you.

Mike Whitmire:

That's wild. And I think this is a very cool part of the accounting operations, is that move into more deep understanding of IT and how everything works over there. Because you just have to have that knowledge. It's non-negotiable if you want to be good at operations at this point.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah. And where I was going with that was we're starting our interim procedures for our year end audit, and using this more automated system in NetSuite, our audit team is going to be able to rely a bit more on our controls. We're working through ITGC controls at the moment. We're certainly not in a super sophisticated place, but it's so clear to me, again, in these high transaction volume businesses where there's a lot of data flowing from a lot of systems, it's so important to have very strong ITGC controls, because your audit team is going to rely on those so much more than substantive testing. I don't want them pulling a thousand different e-com orders. That's a pain. I don't want to pull all of that out of Shopify.

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah.

Ashley Griesshammer:

[inaudible 00:21:51] All these invoices. [inaudible 00:21:53]

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah, they don't want to pay the hours for them to audit that.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Well, they don't want to look at that either. So the more reliance we can get on systems, the more reliance we can get on controls, the more efficient their audit's going to be, and the more efficient our team's going to be.

Mike Whitmire:

I should know this, but Lovevery is private, correct?

Ashley Griesshammer:

We are, yes. At the moment.

Mike Whitmire:

At the moment, okay. So you're not just doing controls just for the fun, you're doing it for prep for potential future growth and all?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes, not for funsies. It's definitely public knowledge Lovevery has aspirations to IPO the next time we have maybe a solid market available for that. So we've spent a lot of time laying the foundation. That's not a process that you can just decide you're going to do and make it happen in a couple months, at least from the controls perspective on your accounting team. We hired an internal audit manager last year who came from public accounting. She did this for companies. A company would go public, they'd bring her team in and be like, "We've got 12 months to be SOX compliant. Go." And they would charge them an arm and a leg to do that.

Mike Whitmire:

When SPACs were being used last year all over the place, people would go public in six weeks. Business was booming for those folks back then.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yes. So I don't want us to be in that situation. I am not the type of person... I never pulled an all nighter in college, and I'm not about to do it now. So I want us to prepare, be ready, the day that happens, I want nothing to change for my team. My team would know what they're doing, they know how to perform their controls, they know what we're going to need to do for reporting, and we're just ready to go.

Mike Whitmire:

Very smart. My company didn't operate that way. We learned the hard way, and then here's FloQast as a result of that painful experience. But no, that's really smart to be laying that foundation and could not agree more on the control testing versus substantive side of it. So as you look around your team and your company, what are you thinking next about improving or just making better?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, I think for us it's just continuing to find automation where we can. And a lot of that comes from cross-functional partnership. I mentioned that we have kind of a homegrown subscription manager, we have a pretty big tech and digital team that does a lot of custom software engineering, a lot of stuff for us. And we're working with them right now on a list of projects that we can partner on in 2023 to just bring more automation to what we're doing. More connections to... We sell on Amazon, let's get a connection to that so that we're not uploading Amazon sales into ERP. Just different things like that, or making sure we're getting error notifications if a connection fails. We use Avalara for our sales tax software. Sometimes, unbeknownst to us, it accidentally turns off. Let's get that notification set up right away, so that we're not then at the end of the month trying to reclassify amounts that got posted to revenue, and should have been in sales tax. So just little things to keep cleaning up is really going to be our focus.

Mike Whitmire:

I think working cross-functionally is something that's new for a lot of accountants, and it's becoming a bigger expectation. So maybe we could just get really tactical about it. Could you give us some advice on who you're meeting with, how frequently you meet with them, how do you run those meetings, how do you make sure people are being held accountable, the train is on the tracks, all that kind of stuff. Just little 101 on working with other departments who might not necessarily have accounting as their number one priority.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, I think exactly what you said. Accountants are no longer just sitting in that back windowless closet room and counting beans all day. That is not what we do. So I think that cross-functional is really, I would say, the last two roles that I've had, has been the most important thing. So for me, I think in an e-commerce environment, it's operations, like I mentioned. 606 is so important, and you can't recognize revenue until something actually ships out. So I need to know what our warehouse is doing. I need to know if they're experiencing delays. I need to know if they're not getting the information from us that they need. And then, like I said, for me, it's tech and digital, just because, again, we've got a lot of data flowing in a lot of places, and I need to understand what's happening in those systems.

It is not acceptable for me to say to an auditor, "Oh, I don't know. This is the information that got piped into our system." That's not an okay answer. I need to understand how these systems are talking to each other. I think that's going to change business by business. If you're a big manufacturer that sells only business to business, you might need to be really in touch with your sales team. If they're out in the field making sales calls on big customers, you might need to know what's the probability that they're going to be able to close this deal? Do we have inventory to cover this deal? And if not, do we have the cash to go buy that inventory? Something like that. It's business dependent. Every business that's doing a different thing is going to have those key departments that need to work together. But in e-commerce, I think it's really your operations and then your IT and tech teams.

Mike Whitmire:

And you were working with... On the... So operations is a little broad, so that includes warehouse at Lovevery, and so...

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah. So we don't own our warehouses, we use a third party fulfillment center. So our operations team is really managing that 3PL relationship. They're managing procurement, so writing a PO to our manufacturing partner, and they're managing shipping. They're getting the products on a boat and then getting them delivered to our warehouse, as well as to our end customers. But our warehouse is really handling that.

But accounting and finance needs to be lockstep with them, not just for rev rec, but they're writing POs, which is cash out the door. So I need to know when they're going to be buying something, so I can be like, "Yes, we've got cash for this. Do we need to draw down debt? What is our cash flow going to look like? When is this stuff going to arrive? How long is it going to be on the water? Are we going to have the capacity? Are we over inventoried? What are our turns looking like? Are we going to be able to sell through this and regenerate that cash that we have to put down in the first place?" So you have to be so close to these different departments. You can't just be creating a cash flow statement with no input from the team that's writing all the purchase orders. That's insane to me. Nobody can forecast like that.

Mike Whitmire:

No, it's wild. So working with the operations team, that's how you got insight into how everything related to your most impactful account works, which is your inventory side and your sales and all that. And they understand the processes there and the business impact of how it works. So presumably you sat down with them, met to understand everything, and then as you were going through your transformation project, the automation project over the course of the year, did you have a monthly cadence with them? Were you meeting every other week? How did those meetings go? Just super tactical for the audience here.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, so I would say we were meeting multiple times a week. So we did use an outside consultant to help lead this project. We used Deloitte as a firm to help us with our ERP implementation. They've got a great NetSuite function that's been super awesome to work with. But I mean it's us, it's me, our, at the time, director of ops, our VP of ops sitting in a room saying, "Here's what this needs to look like. Here's what a transaction needs to flow like. Here's what happens after the customer places an order. Here's how the goods move." And then I'm like, "Great, if that's how the goods are moving, this is what I need it to look like in an accounting system."

Mean we were honestly in, at least every other day, meetings together. The leaders on that project, I would say myself as the accounting stakeholder, our VP of ops, as the ops stakeholder, we're meeting in what I'm going to call steering committee meetings at least once a week, to make sure that the project is on track, here's what our next milestone is, here's how far away we are from our go live dates.

So we had those, and then those intraweek meetings would maybe include, for me, my assistant controller sat in on a lot of those meetings, and provided some insights. We had our [inaudible 00:30:25] analysts in a number of meetings as well, designing how we wanted the purchase order flow to look. So there's just tons... It's not just your leaders that can work cross functionally, it's every level in your organization that needs to work together. And it's definitely the leader's responsibility to be communicating that to the people on your team. We have to be responsible for providing context. Here's the problem, here's what we're trying to solve and here's why we're doing it. And a lot of those individuals on our teams, the analysts, the staff accountants, they're in the weeds day to day, so they've got a lot of insight that they can share cross functionally too.

Mike Whitmire:

I think that's very underappreciated. I've noticed, back in my Cornerstone days or my EY days, it seemed like the people who were actually doing the work were oftentimes forgot as part of these types of discussions. And it's like, well the people who are actually doing the crappy work that we're trying to automate, maybe they're the ones that should have a lot of input and say into how this should work because they know all the issues around it.

So I love that you mentioned that. I think it's important that you have stakeholders that it's assigned to, you have a steering committee, and you have people to hold accountable for things getting done on the appropriate schedule. But then it's up to the leader to loop in the people doing the work as appropriate. And also, number one, is how it gets done the best way. And then number two, if people are involved in the process, they're more bought into that change, and it's more likely to be adopted and implemented and be successful after the fact. That's how I approach it, so sounds like similar approach to all of this. Another item I really wanted... I love that you did this, is you opened up an internship program, Lovevery. Could you tell us a little bit more about that and the inspiration behind it?

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a huge, well built out internship program. This started as, "I need some bodies, but I don't get headcounts. So how can I [inaudible 00:32:17] people under the radar?" But I think for us, Boise's got two really big great colleges. Boise State University, University of Idaho. So there's lots of students. Both have business schools, so there is definitely availability there, and for me, I mentioned that I had done an internship in public accounting, I had also done an internship in investment banking, and both of those things really helped me decide what I didn't want to do more than being like, "Yes, this is the golden internship. This is everything I ever want to do with the next 60 years of my career." And I think internships are valuable from that perspective. It's just as much about-

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah, get to know.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah. It's just as much about finding out what you don't want to do as what you do want to do. And I think specifically mid-size companies being in industry, it's not pushed at a lot of colleges. I remember when I was in school, it was really like, "Okay, you can go work for a public accounting firm, you can go work for an investment bank, or you can work for a giant corporation like Kellogg's or P&G." And that's cool, those are really good starts, but there's also a lot of other options out there that aren't as pushed on college campuses. So I think for us it was, let's give some students an opportunity to see what working in a small business is like. I found my niche in that small to medium and growing companies, and I really just stumbled into it. It's not like it was planned out on my part. And I think that opening that opportunity to students to think about is important.

Mike Whitmire:

I think that's really, really smart. And it's weird how... I call it the audit industrial complex. I think they've done a really good job infiltrating colleges, and I get the incentive as a professor, you want to place as many students as possible, and it's way easier to have a relationship with a couple firms who can place all of your students, rather than go around and find a bunch of smaller companies, that onesie-twosie type placement. So I totally get it, but I think it deprives students of that insight into small and mid-size businesses. And for a lot of us, myself included, that's way more exciting and interesting, and you get really good exposure to the whole business and the whole balance sheet and operations and it's a great learning experience, working at a smaller company. I think it's way better.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah, totally agree.

Mike Whitmire:

So I'm glad you're making that opportunity available for at least a couple people. That's awesome. And we're getting towards the end of time here, but I want to wrap it up with, I guess just a bigger discussion is, controllership role has changed a lot over the last five years. I'm curious where you see things continuing to progress, and as you look at your career, what are some things you're focused on to be able to keep up with that trend and where things are going?

Ashley Griesshammer:

I kind of mentioned this earlier, but the controller is not really... For a long time, it's your controller's making sure the numbers are right. They're making sure everything gets into the financial statements, and then saying, "Here you go. I've made this income statement and balance sheet for you." That's not really what we're here for anymore. At least in my view. That's a part of the role, but I also think a lot of it is providing insight to your executive leadership, and then also your cross-functional business partners. So report the numbers, but also interpret the numbers. Take what happened, but also think about why did it happen, and what could this mean for our future. I should not be sending off an income statement to a CFO, and have them come back to me and be like, "Well, gross margin looks low this month." Or, "Why did payables go up so high?" Or, "Why did this account change?"

You need to provide that insight. "Hey, gross margin is low this month because we're in peak holiday shipping, and UPS rates went up 10% for the month of December." I need to provide that context so that they... And it doesn't matter what size company you're at. Sometimes your controller is that top finance and accounting person, especially in a smaller company, you should still be providing that insight to your CEO. Maybe they're not as well versed in numbers, and you might need to take a little bit longer to explain it to them, but that's an important insight that they need to understand about how their business is running. Not just giving them a spreadsheet of numbers that they don't really [inaudible 00:36:29].

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah, I think it's the how it's running part where we have a particular insight. Because then... The example you just gave on the gross margin side, well guess what, you also have insight into the warehousing and shipping and what all that looks like. And so you're in a pretty unique position to understand that full landscape and provide that information. The title of controller is really starting to bug me. I don't think it states the gravity of the role, or the importance of the role within a company very well. Here's a question I've been asking people. What role equivalent is a controller? Do you view this as... Is it a director level title? Or is it a VP level equivalent? Where does it stack up? And I have my own thoughts on it, but I'm curious what you think.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Honestly, I think it depends just on your company size. Like I said, sometimes your controller is your top level finance person in a business. There might not be a CFO. That's pretty common in a smaller size business. And I've certainly been in that situation before. Your controller, if you've got director of finance, VP of finance, CFO, tons of people above, they're still providing a lot of important work and a lot of important insight. Our general counsel at Lovevery has a tendency to call me the woman behind the curtain. Because he's like, "You just know everything that's going on." And that's the thing about the controller, is you have to know everything that's going on. Because, I always say this to our other team members, the buck stops with accounting.

Every dollar that is coming in and out of the business is going to show up here. I'm going to see it. That's literally what I'm here for. So yeah, I kind of do need to know everything that's going on. So I think the controller title can be so encompassing of a ton of different things. And in a small business, they might be overseeing HR. They might be overseeing IT. I've done both of those things in previous roles too. I don't do them now because we're a little bit bigger, we have specialized departments for those. But you see so much and wear so many different hats across the controllership role.

Mike Whitmire:

Thanks. Yeah, makes sense. Even at an organization where it's a little bit bigger and you have a controller and a VP of finance, they're very different functions. They both roll up to the CFO, or if there's a CAO, even if you're at that level, it starts to move into that fold. So personally, I would say a controller is more along that VP title. That's how it should be thought of, as a VP level person within a company. So sort of held at that same level of the VP of sales or VP for biz dev or whatever. All that said, the reason I do like the controller title is for all the reasons you just mentioned, is that you have complete control over the business and know everything that's going on, and you can be called the woman behind the curtain with all that, because you have total control of what's going on. So controller, in some regards, is very fitting, but doesn't give the rest of the company a good perception into the level of importance of that position really holds.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Well, I think just accounting generally, when you think about other... I'm going to pick on marketing. And I don't mean to pick on them, but you can have so many different titles in marketing. There's a ton of different things you could be called. I generally think corporate accounting, it's fairly straightforward. You're a staff accountant, you're a senior staff accountant, you're an assistant controller, you're an accounting manager, you're an assistant controller, you're a controller. That's kind of like what it is. So there's not a lot of latitude in titles. So I think for me, and for my team too, we generally try not to get super hung up on that. It's important that we're doing value added work that we're being challenged every day, those kind of things. And like you said, making sure your controller has a seat at the table is important in every business. And Lovevery is super great about that. I think everyone on our leadership team understands that everything's going to eventually fall into accounting's lap. So we need to be part of those conversations.

Mike Whitmire:

And the reality is, you have titles, but generally, accounting's overworked, it's a team sport because you all have one goal, and a lot of people end up wearing multiple hats through all those processes just depending on what's going on. That's just sort of the reality of it.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Yeah.

Mike Whitmire:

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation, Ashley, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I think it'll be really helpful for the audience, and just wanted to say thank you, and once again, congratulations on Controller of the Year Award. I think full on full display with this podcast why you won that award. Very well deserved.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Well, thank you. It was super nice to chat with you today. And yeah, hopefully some of the listeners find value in this, and can take some of these tidbits back to their own teams.

Mike Whitmire:

Yep, for sure. And I doubt anyone from FloQast is going to listen to this, so I'll say go Michigan, congratulations on the win at the end of it.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Thank you.

Mike Whitmire:

All right, bye Ashley. Have a great rest of your day.

Ashley Griesshammer:

Thanks so much.