New Xero President Fujioka: US Market Will Be "Biggest"

With the recent news of Xero raising more than $110 million came the announcement of the online accounting software provider hiring a new U.S. president, Russell Fujioka.

Russell Fujioka

In taking over the responsibilities of Xero’s previous North America CEO Peter Karpas, who departed the company in September, Fujioka will be implementing a new direction in growing the company’s U.S. share. The U.S. has lagged behind Xero’s success in native New Zealand and Australia—according to the company’s fiscal year 2015 report, Xero had 119,000 paying customers in New Zealand, 158,000 in Australia and 22,000 in North America as of September 2014.

Xero’s stateside business strategy will be crucial as it moves toward an initial public offering that, while on the horizon, the company declines to assign a more specific timeline. 

Instead, Fujioka said, his focus will be on a U.S.-tailored model for growth. Fujioka most recently worked as a consultant for Xero with global venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing with him four years of experience running Dell’s various global marketing operations and its entire go-to market for the business-to-business group that drove $52 billion in revenue. Despite this background and helping Xero hire its new vice president of marketing and VP of sales in his last nine months with the company, Fujioka said his relatively fresh eyes will be an asset to this role.

“I have the opportunity to come in and look at things from a non-historical bent as we go forward,” Fujioka shared. “I’ve had the realization of a couple of things. The business Xero was able to grow, to thrive in New Zealand and Australia, is not a model that is going to work in the U.S. That was primarily through accountants, bookkeepers and CPAs. There is a different way to convert people under the Xero platform.”

To “accelerate adoption,” Xero will directly target small businesses. Because while its many accountant, CPA and bookkeeper customers overseas typically switch their entire customer base to the platform, their U.S. equivalents are less likely to make that recommendation. The nuances of 50 states and the U.S.’s lagging cloud adoption also factor into the market differentiation.

U.S. finance professionals will remain a vital part of the Xero ecosystem, Fujioka explained. The accounting channel, which is “going to be longer tail but still very much a priority,” will continue to be driven by Jamie Sutherland, previously president of Xero U.S. and now general manager of U.S. products and solutions.

“The central mission of the company is to strive to create a platform that helps small businesses thrive,” Fujioka said. “Accountants, CPAs and bookkeepers are a very important part of that. A financial platform like Xero, and particularly Xero, ties into the professional services of a CPA or accountant and the businesses have a higher predisposition to succeed.”

Also giving these businesses a leg up, according to Fujioka, is the foundational community of more than 29 million fellow small businesses.

“Any archetype for the heart of small businesses, the U.S. is the fabric of it,” he said, stressing the company mission “to help small businesses and be material, in the global view, to get the U.S. healthy on Xero and for small businesses.”

The loftiness of that view is not inconsequential for Fujioka, who is drawn to working with visionaries, ranging from Michael Dell’s drive to democratize data to Rod Drury’s “change the world mentality.”

“Any percentage of small businesses you can make better business people and more financially literate, they fundamentally change the economy,” Fujioka elaborated. “What brought me to Xero was the founder, the mission, and the founder built around the mission. I will help drive the parts we need to get him there.”

As for the $110 million that accompanies his entrance, Fujioka said Xero’s fiscal year 2016 plans have not changed with more money in the bank. What the investments do provide is an assuredness to help Xero go to market organically and eye future acquisitions, he explained. And given the source of those funds in Accel Partners, “an incredible partner in the technology community with a lot of connections and experience dealing with high growth companies,” and current shareholder Matrix Capital Management, Fujioka said he is looking forward to working with “smart money” and “smart guys.”

Both those firms, as well as Xero’s board (which recently welcomed former Salesforce CFO Graham Smith), and Fujioka himself have “no lack of experience on filing, accelerating and understanding what it means to bring a company public in the U.S.”

In the meantime, Fujioka is predicting big things.

“The U.S. market will be the biggest market for Xero over time.” 

New Xero President Fujioka: US Market Will Be "Biggest"

Behind the career: Dev Ganesan, Fishbowl's new president and chief executive officer

By Kathy Orton,

Dev Ganesan

Position: President and chief executive, Fishbowl, an Alexandria company that helps restaurants with marketing.

Dev Ganesan began his career working for consulting giants KMPG and Deloitte. After leaving the consulting world, he specialized in helping companies grow. He was chief executive of Trados, Intelliworks and Aptara before joining Fishbowl late last year.

How did you benefit from working at large consulting firms early in your career?

I always recommend to youngsters to work for a large company as soon as they come out of college before they jump into a start-up. I am a strong believer in that you need to go and work with some of the very large companies where you are trained well in systems and processes, and get trained to different ideas. I benefited from that quite a bit.

What do you like about working with companies that are in the process of transforming themselves?

I like the pace. I always call myself a wartime general. I’m not a peacetime general. I like that intensity where you transform parts of the business, put it in that growth stage and eventually create value for stakeholders. I love that piece. It energizes me to run fast. I love fast. That also fits nicely with my personality.

What appealed to you about the CEO position at Fishbowl?

There’s a shift going on from [advertisers] spending on traditional media to spending more on digital. And once it goes into digital, it’s all about getting to know the customers, engaging with the customers.

Ultimately, the restaurants want to drive in more revenue, more guests, and you can do that by engaging with the customers. But you can engage with them only if you know more about them. That’s exactly what we do. Today, we are providing analytics so that restaurants can get to know more about their customers, where you are going, how much you are spending, and then how to make you come in more regularly and spend more money. It’s all about data-driven marketing, and that’s why I found this job to be extremely exciting.

What do you hope to achieve in your new role?

The company has been an e-mail marketing company, but the beauty is they have a very large base of restaurants that trust them. The reason I’m here is to take them to the next step of basically doing a more data-driven marketing with a solid analytical platform.

Before you took the job, you took 18 months off to travel, but you also studied up on analytics. What did you learn?

I discovered that big data analytics is for real. A lot of people are saying it’s all a buzzword. More and more, it’s all about data. If I have a lot of data, I can see some patterns in the data. It’s all about patterns. Then I can start making decisions based on the patterns I am seeing. The larger the data sets, the more confident you will be in the intelligence you are getting from the data.

Can’t data be overwhelming?

I think that’s where a good analytical platform comes into play. You can’t do it manually. You need to give them data so that they can take action. I call it actionable insight. We are the action engine, and that’s where I am so excited about Fishbowl.

Fishbowl has already developed an action engine, which is e-mail and customer engagement. I want to help the chief marketing officers in the restaurant business run good campaigns, measure the efficacy of the campaign and give them more intelligence around the guests.

This is where many restaurants are going wrong, which is they think “I can do a loyalty program and I’m done.” But loyalty programs are easy because that’s an end. Once you’re already loyal, I know you’re coming. But how can I get others who are not loyal members to make them loyal? That’s exactly what we are striving to do.

What’s the most challenging part of growing a company?

The common theme is it’s not technology, it’s about people. If you have the right team and people around you and you get them to share the vision, then you can basically go and execute on anything. Bringing in the right team and making sure they fit well is a challenge. When you look at a successful company, it’s the team that made it.

What is the best advice you’ve received in your career?

The best advice is humility because the moment I walk up to somebody and say, “I’ve done three companies. It’s easy,” you fail. It’s not about you. It’s about trying to find a solution. Things change a lot. I feel like the advice I got early in life about having a good level of humility as a leader is very critical and has gone a long way.

— Interview with Kathy Orton

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Behind the career: Dev Ganesan, Fishbowl"s new president and chief executive officer