Founder Profile: Brandon Metcalf of Place Technology

Imagine connecting your financial planning and analysis software with your revenue ops software, billing software, accounting software, and your customer relationship management — all inside the operating system that the company uses daily.

Now, imagine that all the “plumbing” for that was pre-built and designed based on workflows to increase operational efficiency, eliminate manual moving of data, and most importantly, provide data when and where it needs to be to make decisions.

At the last company I founded, Talent Rover, I created a series of Excel workbooks that enabled us to forecast the profit and loss and also cash using a direct cash flow method years in the future. These models were accurate but would take more than 150 hours a month to maintain. We had to use them, though, as there was not software available that we could replace it with.

After we sold Talent Rover, I started consulting to figure out what I wanted to do next. The companies I was consulting for were software-as-a-service and service companies. This quickly led to these companies wanting to implement my models. I started looking for software to see if there was something I could implement for these companies instead of the spreadsheets and once again was disappointed with what the options were. So, I started to conceptualize what I would want a software to do, and that led to starting Place at the end of 2018.

I have been leading people and running businesses for the past 20 years. In 2009, I started building a product that eventually became the first company I founded, Talent Rover. Talent Rover was an operating system for staffing and recruiting companies. It was built on the Salesforce Platform, and we had clients ranging from Adecco Group ($26 billion and largest staffing company in the world) to smaller, 25-employee companies. I scaled Talent Rover to having nine offices in eight countries and customers in more than 40 countries. We raised $28 million for that business and sold it to our largest competitor in March 2018.

Most legacy players are focused on enterprise only and have solutions that are difficult and expensive to not only use, but also implement. I see a future where finance and business are integrated in one solution that provides agility, transparency, and collaboration.

My co-founder and CTO, Kabe VanderBaan, was my vice president of technology at Talent Rover, so we’ve been working together for many years. Our current vice president of engineering was our lead architect at Talent Rover, so we also have worked together for a long time now. The rest of the team we’ve hand-selected. For example, our head of sales I recruited personally and has been with us since we started looking at go-to-market.

Our primary competitors for forecasting would be Mosaic.tech, Planful, and Vena. We also have competitors for the revenue operations/subscription management elements of our product. That primary competitor is SaaSOptics.

There are many benefits of building on the Salesforce Platform.  

A few:

• Security, stability, and performance
• Credibility
• Faster build time
• Less technical debt
• $1.4 trillion ecosystem

We are a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model with a minimum of one-year annual contracts. Our product is sold based on a number of licenses.

I’ve raised a significant amount at my last company and have raised $5.5 million for Place outside of crowdfunding. I’ve known many CEOs who’ve raised from crowdfunding who loved it, and I certainly understand why. It’s been a great process so far. I really like being able to support accredited investors but also love being able to give non-accredited investors the opportunity to invest.

We are a proven leadership team, solving a massive problem for SaaS and service companies. Our first one-and-a-half years in the market have been great, and momentum is building.

There are several exit opportunities:

• Competitor acquiring us — this is what happened with Talent Rover
• Partner acquiring us — we are integrating with other products to provide financial visibility
• Private equity acquiring us
• IPO — this is the option that I think is the least likely