The Accounting Podcast

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Ben Richmond: [00:00:00] So fiercely true partnership for me. We actually we firmly believe in the accountant bookkeeper community. We don't want to compete with it. You're the magic around the technology where it happens. And so we were founded that way and we still operate that way in the markets where we have dominance. And so it's core to our strategy here.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:19] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast was recorded in person at Xerocon in New Orleans in August of 2022. To learn more about Xerocon visit Xerocon That's Xerocon.com. And now on to the episode. Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Cloud Accounting podcast. We are in New Orleans. Hey, David.

David Leary: [00:00:49] Hey, we're Xerocon in New Orleans and we brought our fever favorites. Xerocon person or zero person. Ben, you are now, this is the third appearance on The Cloud Accounting Podcast for you. This is Ben Richmond. He's the country manager for manager for the US, so people should recognize his voice by now. It's three or four episodes. I think he's been on three.

Ben Richmond: [00:01:07] Yeah, it's a it's a phenom. It would be about three. Hopefully. My accent's getting slower and easier to understand as we do. But always love, love having a chat. I think we could talk for hours, so.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:16] Yeah.

Ben Richmond: [00:01:16] Welcome back.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:16] Having me. Ben Richmond.

David Leary: [00:01:18] It was, what, 1000 plus days I heard since the last Xerocon It was. And then it's almost over a year since we had you on, because I think we chatted at the accounting salon.

Ben Richmond: [00:01:27] In New Orleans.

David Leary: [00:01:28] In New Orleans, and that was just at the tail end of COVID there before AMI crime I think. Search.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:34] I forget.

David Leary: [00:01:35] Yes, it's very great. Great. Two years.

Ben Richmond: [00:01:37] Yeah. That was the first time I think we'd gone out on site was zero to a conference, the accounting salon at New Orleans. And what a way to get back into it. Straight into New Orleans. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:01:48] So what else has been going on for you, then, during this this two years of no Xerocons?

Ben Richmond: [00:01:54] Yeah. No Xerocons. Well, still lots. I mean we, we did the lots of good virtual stuff. We tried to make that different. I think everyone had a good shot at that, but we're all over that now. So it's good to be back in person family wise. Well, I'm a dad now, so.

David Leary: [00:02:06] Great.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:06] Congratulations.

Ben Richmond: [00:02:07] So thank you. And this is the first first actual work session since I've had the baby. So I'm actually getting more sleep in New Orleans than at home at the moment, which is not something you usually say. So yeah, it's been a big, big few years, work wise, personal wise, as you probably seen today, like working really hard on the foundations of the product. We've talked about bank feeds, we've talked about the extension of sales tax, the acquisition of locate with inventory. So there's lots of good US product coming, supporting our partners through that time. Man, I can't say how much we appreciate Accountants and bookkeepers and what they've done for small business through the crazy three years, the never ending tax seasons and all the fun. I'm trying to get hold of the ears on the phone and things like that. So it's been pretty crazy for everyone. I think we've all got through and it's so cool to see everyone is having fun together out there.

David Leary: [00:02:54] My takeaway so far, I told the Blake earlier before we were plugging all the wires in here is I feel like as an observer, I came obviously from the green world. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, Wow. Zero's making it very clear that the Americas is a priority.

Ben Richmond: [00:03:07] Absolutely. Yeah. Northern hemisphere, big priority. You know, we've always had bold, global, global ambitions. You've seen us grow in the southern hemisphere, you've seen our growth in the UK. But you know, North America is our big focus and it's exciting market. It's still, still early. So and we know we've come a long way and we know we've got lots more to do as well. So we wanted to make sure that we're super clear.

David Leary: [00:03:27] And you're doing that through the building, partnering and acquiring, I think you said on the stage. Can you kind of give examples of those three that you've done that are specific to North America?

Ben Richmond: [00:03:35] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first one was always the hub dog. We did that well before the pandemic, which is a really good acquisition for North America, given how good the product was. And no one in North America and the last two major acquisitions have been North American focused. And there's, you know, that sort of there's no accident that that shows our priority here. So both tax cycle, which is really helping us sort of think about revolutionizing those write up workflows to India techs up in Canada and then locate the awesome locate product and locate team that we acquired out of California. And we talked about today how we're going to be taking locate, taking that awesome code and those awesome people who have a passion for inventory and building that into zero so that zero has good inventory for good space businesses, then we want to really start to, you know, be super competitive in the e-commerce space. And the really interesting thing with locators, it's a really advanced product. So over time we can take more of the other features from locate and which gives us the opportunity to think about solving those. For me, those more those businesses with more complex needs that often have to go on to the big solutions when they could probably not make that jump. So sort of other phases of locate I see is get good inventory into zero for good space businesses really want an e-commerce and then building out the products that works for those more complex needs inventory businesses. So I'm super pumped and we've got more to go. So we're still, you know, we're out there looking in all the different places of how we expand the platform for what our customers need.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:58] What's the timeline look like on that? Like when are we going to have the inventory.

David Leary: [00:05:02] Like secretly asking? There's probably a feature he's been watching zero for years that's still not here. Maybe it's secretly asking.

Ben Richmond: [00:05:08] Yeah, if I need to talk to Cookie VP of product and see if you can now and for the US to see if we can get signed up on the on the beta. So the team are working really hard to get it into zero like we wanted to. I think we've learned a lot in the acquisition space and so, you know, riding the cloud clean and to zero, making sure that it scales really well. So that's the first focus and sort of what I would call it, like a locate light sort of for the smaller in the town. And I think I'm not quite sure we're looking we're opening interest for the beta and I think hopefully sometime either later this year or early next year to have that. Going into the product, the further stages, we go fast into e-commerce and then obviously the more advanced features will come over the next sort of couple of years. It is a big piece of work, so it will be really careful not to overcome it because it's building it properly into zero is a big task. So but the locate team that I think you know any Tyrion that they're that great passionate folk that know the space know the US market really well so I've got every confidence they're going as fast as they can so.

David Leary: [00:06:08] So that's acquisitions. I think you also announced like the team are building estates that you have engineers in the States, you've got park managers in the states, you want to talk about the team you're building, even marketing, I guess, like.

Ben Richmond: [00:06:18] Yeah, yeah. And so at some I think big things are the big ones. First out I think is there's been a couple of real votes of action for us. So Chris O'Neill, who's only chief growth officer who's based in San Francisco, got a pretty tenured background in the SAS space with companies like Google and Evernote. Doug, who's out in San Francisco as well, who's our EVP of Engineering. So between those two roles, pretty much most I think every engineer in the company now reports through to North American leadership. So we're starting to see that migration of leadership to where we want to win the most important market at the scale of the North American market. We're building our product teams here. We've obviously established the Toronto Hub as well. So lots of different functions starting to grow here, which as you know, I've been close to the product. Having people that really understand the customer challenge and problem that we're trying to solve just helps us go so much faster and at the same time, we're still leveraging. I mean, I think one of the benefits of being a global company is there are a lot of things that are the same around the world. And so we're still leveraging experiences from other markets where it makes sense, but making sure we've got really good local horsepower and knowledge to solve the, you know, there are many, many unique US challenges to solve. And so having people that have got experience and solving those here in the market is a big focus.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:31] So you mentioned inventory is a big focus. What else is the focus on in terms of product for the US market?

Ben Richmond: [00:07:38] Yeah, great question. So you would have seen the partnership with Everlast. So we really want to put good comprehensive sales texts into zero so that you can calculate and report on sales tax within Xero. So, you know, we spoke about this in the last time we're on the show. There's a lot of innovation in Xero's global platform that if the basics for particular segments of the market, you know, verticals don't work, then they can't get access to that. So we're really focused in the US on, you know, getting those basics rights, making sure high quality bank data is coming into Xero, making sure that we can go after goods based businesses and serve them well with the good sales tax, the boring compliance stuff which, you know, people call it boring, but us accountants will always say it's actually it's the exciting stuff that actually makes life go faster and get you to the cool stuff. Things like improving our 1099 experience and all the things you hit enter and Cookie talk about. So lots of core product needs. But also we're looking at things like you've seen this year with analytics. Plus we're starting to think about what are those insights we can deliver, How do we do more with the ecosystem as well? So how do we use the ecosystem and markets where we want to grow and go together with a lot of our key partners? So keeping that really open partnership approach that we've had.

Ben Richmond: [00:08:45] And the other one is XP. We've now got enough scale in the US and it's kind of funny because if you think about small business insights, they're generally small sample sizes that government or state government departments do. By the time you get the insights published, it's usually the survey takes 12 months and then eight months later we're talking about this is the insights we learned, which is kind of useless. And so we're at a scale now which is exciting. In the US and Canada. We can start to aggregate the data anonymously and surface up key insights, so insights that we can use to help champion bid a small business policy with government insights that we can use to give to our advisors to help them advise and coach small business. And so we're excited to launch that today as well.

David Leary: [00:09:25] You were that you've previously done that in other regions. Yeah, because I think we've talked about these numbers during the pandemic on the podcast before, I think we covered some of these numbers. So now you basically every quarter you're going to do kind of the same thing in the US.

Ben Richmond: [00:09:36] Yeah, I think it's so New Zealand is an interesting one. So we have such scale in New Zealand and we've had success by running down there for a while to the point that as you know, the Government's making those calls early in the pandemic around do we lock down again, do we need to lock down the city? And then what is the impact on the small business economy? We were actually able to surface that information and start to show them that, you know, when we lock down aggressively for two or three weeks, here's the here's what it does to top on revenue in those in that customer group in that area and his and and also surface up things where, you know, there's a segment of customers here with their revenues down, but they're holding the net profit flat. So what are the common things we're seeing there? I mean, some of the early research when we launched it down there, things like more active use of an advisor. So the common traits that you could see between the ones that were able to hold the net profit flat when those sort of top line decreases happen, use of an advisor and more use of technology. So if they had more apps connected. So yeah, super exciting. So it really early days as we launch it here in the US but it's so cool to be able to bring that to the US market because generally small business insights are a real black hole or the information is too late.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:40] So. We talked about how a lot of the or more of the development is coming to the US, more resources, the leadership in terms of like product here in the US. But a lot of it and especially in the last, you know, during the pandemic is in New Zealand right. Like your core development team and I know New Zealand was locked down for quite some time, probably one of the strictest in the world. Is that why, from my perspective, sitting here, we didn't have much in the way of feature development for several years, it felt like. I mean, like, did that really hurt Xero? Yeah.

Ben Richmond: [00:11:17] Think the lockdowns did. So we were as a company born in the cloud and we've always set up the ability to work remote. You know, our teams were able to really quickly adapt when New Zealand lockdown. Our product teams have always been distributed around the world. You know, we have development in the UK, we have quite a lot of our development in Melbourne, Australia, across the cities and New Zealand was a couple of years ago sort of pre the pandemic. We'd already established the Toronto Hub. So if I was to talk about what was the reason for the delay, probably a couple of things that we've been pretty open about. One is the platform is now 16 years old and we've been scaling really quickly. And you know, is that our last results over 3.3 million subscribers. And so we've been doing a lot of work to modernize the platform, which often users don't see the impact straight away. So how do you, you know, re-engineer re modernize the platform so you can continue to innovate at the scale that we are now? So there's been a lot of work going on in that space. The other thing too is the US is just hard and half, you know, I am impatient and want half the features overnight as well. But as we know, things like sales tax and things like bank feeds have been incredibly complicated. The one I'm really proud of though, and it's an area where we've done a lot of the modernization work and we've seen the sort of mojo of xero's really consistent releases as xero's reporting.

Ben Richmond: [00:12:31] So we've had it we've had that focused on the US for a couple of years now. And so you've probably seen a lot more regular releases coming out in the US for US specific reporting and, you know, great example of we launched the new this new report, There was a couple of things that US partners didn't like about it. They were able to get that feedback and then we were able to roll a fix within a week based on that customer feedback. So that's an example that we've done really well. Our reporting is holding up really well in the US, particularly as we know the US does a lot of things differently. Accrual versus cash is obviously a big one, so users being able to select I want cash by default, but I can also switch accruals. So that's nearer. We have gone fast. So pandemic didn't gave us challenges like every other company did, whether it was the great reshuffle as opposed to the resignation. But yeah, we've always had distributed product teams, but we're starting I think what you're seeing a shift to is specific products for specific that are specific to the region. We want to make sure we're building more of the more of those in regions so that we can go faster.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:28] Makes sense.

David Leary: [00:13:29] So I know you have to go, you have to wrap up, but you're on the main stage and Amanda Gillard asked you what you would tell somebody that's never seen Xero or touch Xero, an account or bookkeeper. And she said, You get one minute to answer it and you went on for like 8 minutes, so I'm going to give you a second chance. I pulled up my stopwatch, so I'm going to ask you this question and we'll hit start on the stopwatch. Why Xero?

Ben Richmond: [00:13:47] Yeah, absolutely. So you've got the stopwatch going. So firstly, true partnership for me, we actually we firmly believe in the accountant bookkeeper community. We don't want to compete with it. You're the magic around the technology where it happens. And so we were founded that way and we still operate that way in the markets where we have dominance. And so it's core to our strategy here to do a small business is what we love. You know, I come from a small business background. I've seen the trust we have and advisors. And when I was an accountant myself, you know, I saw the clients trust in us that we just didn't capitalize on as well as we could. That coupled with a small business family. So Xero is the platform that I do believe will bring a lot of those people that sit around the team, that support a small business and help them get confident to grow and thrive. It's I think it's a partner community like actually, and you can see that the fun, the coopetition that happens in the Xero partner community, this competition, there's so many partners in our space that are new, old, but they're all willing to share that.

David Leary: [00:14:39] I get it. You did it 54 seconds. Yeah.

Ben Richmond: [00:14:43] I might have had to go into that fast talking New Zealand accent for that, though.

David Leary: [00:14:46] Thank you so much for joining us. And I love it because you've been the consistent Xero voice for our podcast listeners.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:52] And if folks want to connect with you online.

Ben Richmond: [00:14:54] Yeah, at Ben Richmond. One is the Twitter handle tried to get someone else got it for me the original or just email me Ben dot Richmond at Zillow.com obviously with an ex.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:05] Great to chat with you Ben Thank you.

David Leary: [00:15:06] Thanks man.