The HoC Growth Story

Contract management

This is where we started in 2006

This image illustrates what many CFOs meet every day: An uncontrollable myriad of different contracts.

CFOs typically start to lose control over decentralized contracts when companies reach 50-100 employees and especially if they have several different locations.

How do you keep up with all activities and how do you maintain an overview of all the contracts?
What happens when employees who have signed auto renewing supplier contracts leave?
What commitments are associated with specific locations and departments for the next 6, 12, 18 months?
And what does that cash flow look like?

Get a taste of how we help the CFO

Imagine that you are a CFO in a company with several locations and subsidiaries. It is Friday afternoon. You are getting ready to leave the office and take your family on a long-awaited weekend trip.

Then your phone rings. It is the chairman of your board of directors. The board would like a briefing on the current cost base and an updated forecast. Also, they want an overview of potential short term cost savings associated with potentially closing one of your locations. You need to help them understand how quickly overhead savings can be materialized and how this will affect the current cash flow projections. When? Monday morning.

What about the weekend trip? Do you cancel it and disappoint your family? At House of Control, we take pride in claiming we are the CFO’s best friend. Often, we mean it in the most practical way. Since 2006 we have provided a fast-growing number of CFOs with the means to control the business. Our software is the key to provide the board of directors – and all other stakeholders – with the kind of data mentioned above. The numbers are instantly available, so you can cater to your board’s wants – and your family’s expectations.

We put ourselves in the CFO’s shoes when we develop software. In the case of our industry-leading contract management software Complete Control, we provide very user-friendly solutions that connects the company’s contracts to future cash flows. These data along with the built-in reporting tools are the core reasons why the CFO can join the family’s weekend trip and still have the insights ready on Monday morning.

However, we can do more for the CFO than helping her or him impress on the board of directors. The same software alerts the CFO before important contracts expire. This functionality can have truly strategic importance, as it leaves time to renegotiate agreements critical to the company. Once all your company’s contracts are centrally stored, you also have the means to improve contract management and reduce costs by cancelling deliveries you don’t need any more. And when control improves your company’s risk is reduced. Your colleagues in the finance department will appreciate that the speed of budgeting increases as well as the ease with which they can match invoices to existing contracts. A substantial proportion of our customers also use our software for IFRS 16 lease accounting – the market-leading solution in the Nordics.

How our portfolio works for the CFO

Our SaaS solutions are best-of-breed and take a customer-centric approach: They offer users a sharper focus, are more effective, and have a higher degree of user-friendliness than what is ordinarily offered by ERP, CRM and other enterprise systems. Other “competitors” are spreadsheets or simply paper documents.

User value can be measured in cost savings; less time-consuming financial management processes; risk reductions and less dependency on key personnel; and a higher degree of control and corporate oversight.

Each of these solutions have effective functionalities when it comes to dashboards, analysis, and reporting. Thus, we are helping the CFO not only performing his or her financial and operational challenges in a profoundly better way; we are also helping the CFO communicate better with the board, management, and other parties.

A common denominator for all our solutions is that they work on or alongside any incumbent enterprise systems, and we offer open and simple APIs. Implementation is always easy and fast, with no need for a dedicated project team to get going and reap the benefits. Intuitive interfaces and user-friendliness work to ensure that considerable and measurable ROI is reached soon after adoption.

Innovation at a glance: How we develop our portfolio

How do we design our product portfolio? We are a customer-centric organization. Quite a few of the solutions you see in our current portfolio started with a customer discussion concerning a need or a wish for us to solve a common challenge. Other times, our solutions evolve from research looking further ahead – to needs not yet expressed by our customers.

No matter what the motivation for a new product, we always aim to develop our solutions rapidly, take risks, review our successes and mistakes, continue, or abort our mission. Let us offer a simplified introduction to our product strategy.

When a “CFO need” is defined, we conduct research to identify whether there is a substantial market potential if served. Is it scalable? We also ask ourselves if solving the need will add “stickiness” to our existing products; that is, will users get more and better reasons to remain our customer? Will it improve the CFO ecosystem?

As soon as a need is sufficiently qualified, it is time to start a process that will eventually lead to the launch of a new solution. How should the new solutions be developed? Should we use our in-house team of experts, enter into a partnership, or should we acquire a company that already has best-in-class technology within this area?

Why our Nordic roots matter

Operating in the Nordics is a privilege for a company preparing a European expansion. We believe that our home markets in Norway, Sweden and Denmark are ideal laboratories for SaaS solutions.

To begin with, the Nordic countries have several characteristics that set them apart from many other parts of the world. Among these, the region has some of the world’s highest cost of employment along with a unique degree of economic equality. This makes efficiency and effectiveness paramount: Keep the use of man hours at a minimum and trust highly educated people to do the work right.

From this point of departure, private and public organizations have sped up and strengthened digitization and the focus on core activities. One consequence is a relatively high degree of outsourcing and use of subcontractors. In addition, Nordic employees are independent women and men, who often sign contracts and purchase things without asking their superior.

All this can easily lead to higher degrees of business risk due to dependency on key personnel – and costs you don’t really need. Our technology is designed to save time while maintaining control, reducing risks, and keeping costs down. Our 2,000 plus customers are both embracing our solutions and challenging us to improve and expand.

A growth equation

We have more than tripled our ARR over the last four years. New sales have been driven both by an increasing number of contracts and increased average deal size associated with a stronger offering.

We have also consistently grown the ARR on the existing customer base. Customer success teams have focused on up-selling, and we have seen positive effects of behavioral pricing models that allow for flexible pricing depending on the customers usage patterns.

Our growth has accelerated with the acquisitions we carried out: DinERP, Effectplan, Business Analyze, Egreement. Keyforce. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has hence passed 200 million, effectively doubled since the start of 2020.

Norway still accounts for the bulk of our business (67%), but Sweden (18%) and Denmark (10%) are growing fast. We have also begun to establish ourselves outside the Nordic region, and we are assessing M&A opportunities to accelerate growth in all markets.

Continued growth is built on four key pillars, outlined in the below illustration:

Large untapped potential in the Nordic market
Strong potential in cross-sales to the customer bases we have acquired, and a large up-selling potential in the existing customer base with the products and solutions we have acquired
Continue to support our organic growth with more acquisitions going forward, and…
Several attractive European market opportunities outside of our core markets in Norway, Sweden and Denmark

We see continued growth opportunities and have significantly expanded our market opportunity with acquisitions.Thus, we have bold ambitions for the next four years, and we reiterate our target to reach 500 million in ARR by the end of 2025.

We are confident that our continuously growing and improving product portfolio and stronger development, sales and customer success teams will enable us to reach these targets.

Our growth investments are currently holding back our margins, but we remain confident that the margins will increase with our scale over time - towards our 40% long-term target.

Our growth journey

Where it all started, where we're heading, what we do for our target customer (the CFO) - and how it benefits investors