Dive Brief:
- VTS Inc., a commercial real estate tenant tracking platform, has hired former Syncsort Inc. CFO Bob Bies to be its CFO as it enters a crucial stage in its growth, the Wall Street Journal reported.
- VTS began its search for a CFO in April after its former CFO left for another company. VTS, which tracks almost 50,000 tenants in commercial buildings, had just crossed the coveted $1 billion valuation threshold, turning it into what analysts call a unicorn, a tech company that has matured to the point where it can contemplate holding an IPO in the near future.
- Attracting top CFO talent to such a company would seem easy, but as another Wall Street Journal piece makes clear, fast-growing tech companies are finding it difficult to land CFOs with the right mix of skill and personality to guide them financially through their next critical growth juncture.
Dive Insight:
The perfect CFO for these types of companies mixes M&A and IPO experience with a willingness to work the hours, learn new technologies, and take the chances that a young, fast-growing company needs.
“The demand cycle [for CFOs] is so high right now,” the Journal quotes Peter Crist, chairman of executive recruitment firm Crist|Kolder Associates, as saying.
Bies said in the Journal piece that VTS is working toward building a platform that will integrate coming acquisitions of products that complement VTS’ tenant and leasing related products, and also that it plans to launch an online leasing platform, called Truva, that will let landlords and tenants work out their leasing arrangements online without having to use a broker, at least in some cases.
There are no immediate plans for the company to go public, but Bies was hired in part because he’s shepherded a company through an IPO before, the Journal said.
IPOs are one of the reasons tech companies are challenged to find the right CFO. Those CFOS that have been through IPOs before are often hesitant to go through the mentally taxing process again, the Journal piece suggests.
Nick Romito, founder and CEO of VTS, says although he has no immediate plans to go public, his company is well-positioned to do so. “We have the growth rate and the customer base to be a great public company,” he said in the Journal piece. And having Bies on board gives him the right CFO for it, too, should they decide to go down that road.