608: Opening the Acquisition Chapter | Jody Cire, CFO, AllCloud
When the Sarbanes–Oxley Act was enacted 18 years ago, it required the Securities and Exchange Commission to create regulations to define how companies should comply with it—a mandate that would end up impacting the careers of finance professionals well into the future.
CFO Jody Cire was one such professional. Back in 2010, Cire found himself in Boulder, Colorado, after having been relocated from a role in Germany as KPMG’s lead audit manager for SAP AG. In light of his recent large enterprise experience, KPMG had been eager to assign Cire stateside in order to scratch the Sarbox itch of some of its largest customers.
Within a year, Cire found himself knee-deep in massive Sarbox compliance projects with a number of prestigious clients.
Still, something was missing.
Says Cire: “It just wasn’t where my personality or my curiosity really thrived. I just didn’t enjoy it and began to express that.”
Meanwhile, his appetite for assignments involving start-ups and high-growth firms had never wavered, allowing him to confidently exit KPMG and step into a corporate role as vice president of finance and accounting for Boulder-based cybersecurity firm LogRhythm.
During most of his career, Cire’s accounting and technical knowledge had made him a standout. At LogRhythm, he would be responsible for helping the company to develop a successful exit strategy, which eventually was implemented in 2018 when it was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
“We were already over $200 million—Thoma Bravo wanted some fresh blood and new management because there had to be some housecleaning and stripping out of costs,” says Cire, who served as LogRhythm’s interim CFO before joining cloud solutions provider AllCloud last year. –Jack Sweeney
Cire: We established a 2020 budget that was approved when we had a board of directors meeting on January 6. We were 6 days into 2020, and we already had an approved budget. I’ve never been able to accomplish a budget approval so fast in my life. Meanwhile, we also had an internal management plan. Unfortunately, in 2020, this doesn’t win you any prizes because within 6 weeks the world had completely changed. Right? So, in March, we suddenly found ourselves in a reforecasting period involving the general management of our regions, as well as the CEO and myself and my FP&A team. Together we had look at what we saw and what amount of cutting we might need to do.
When it comes to our priorities going forward, we get a lot of inbound interest from potential investors. What they like about AllCloud as a company is that we have a senior leadership team that is structured very well. We’ve got people who have built and sold businesses before, so we are viewed as a good platform play for additional acquisitions. But to do this, there has to be a good succession plan. There have to be good people below me. so I have to continued to build my teams and to build systems that allow for easy integration, an easy bolt-on of other companies. This is what we are currently focused on and will continue to be focused on for certainly the rest of 2020 and probably through the first half of 2021.
We’re still, to this day, probably two-thirds–based, 60% to 65%–based, in Israel, with a big presence also in Germany, Romania, Canada, and the United States. We closed a round of funding last December, our first round of preferred stock. We’ve already bought one U.S. company. We will use that series round in December to buy another U.S. company.
