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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

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?
Office with contracts

Our answer to "the contract jungle" was a contract management software. Complete Control provides the CFO with unparalleled control over contracts, assets and other obligations. 

Imagine that you are a CFO in a medium-sized company with several locations and maybe a few 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 cell phone rings. It is the chairman of your board of directors, telling you that 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. 

They have already had some discussions amongst themselves as they are concerned about the current economic climate so they would like to meet Monday morning.

If you have our Complete Control solution you get this report by the touch of a button. If you do not, I think you will have to disappoint your family and cancel the trip.

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.

The CFO's best friend

We brand ourselves as «The CFOs best friend». Our product vision is to provide CFOs with financial control and enable them to optimize business processes. The pyramid illustrates well how we are building a stack of solutions on top of our Complete Control offering and expanding the CFO ecosystem. 

Product Strategy

  • The Control segment is the base. Complete Control with Contract and Subscription management, notifications and alerts as well as our Authority Matrix creates a strong foundation for an expanded offering.
  • The Business Processes segment offer Digital signature, Procurement and Supplier management systems.
  • The Compliance and Forecasting segment includes our IFRS 16 solution, a Fintech outsourcing register and our Budgeting and forecasting solutions.
  • And on top of this pyramid, we have our Insight offering with Business Intelligence and Analytics as well as the recently launched CFO dashboard enabling the CFOs to get the total overview and providing actionable insight for Operations and Strategic processes.
House of Control’s ambition is to provide the control panel that will be the first thing any CFO checks out every morning and the last thing she or he sees at the end of the working day.

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?

Our IFRS 16 compliance solution and the purchasing solution Complete Procure are concrete examples of this methodology. The IFRS 16 solution was developed in-house when CFOs voiced the need for a tool to manage the new lease contract requirements that came into effect in 2019.

The Complete Procure technology was developed on the basis of DinERP IP. Prior to the transaction, we had identified a need among CFOs to manage framework agreements and procurement in better ways. You can read more about this on page 16. Before any acquisition, we conduct thorough Due Diligence processes that include deep dives into the target company’s IP.

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.

Growth Q3 2021

How we do it: our growth machine

Growth Machinery

The Road ahead to 2025

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.

Growth Avenues