When to introduce SaaS Spend Management - with Cledara co-founder and COO, Brad Van Leeuwen

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we're joined by Brad Van Leeuwen, the co-founder and chief operating officer at Cloudera. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Brad. First, the evolution of spend management, both overall and in the SaaS industry. Second, the top ideas for implementing a spend management program in 2023, a CFO perspective. And third, best practices for controlling SaaS spend and fast growing companies. Brad, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Brad Van Leeuwen** (1:15)
Thank you for having me. So I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. In high school back in Perth, Western Australia, I started a gaming events business, a pre-broadband e-sports. Then we ended up quite accidentally building the second biggest company in the category at the time, which was a lot of fun, but then decided to get into investing, which wasn't quite as much fun, and then back into building stuff again. So always looking for problems. Last company before Cloudera I was at, we were growing super fast, and at some point, I just saw a problem as we went from 500 to 400 people. Could not help myself but want to solve because it was a problem that every company was going to face.

**Ray Rike** (1:57)
The problem was just uncontrolled expenses as you grew that fast, right Brad?

**Brad Van Leeuwen** (2:01)
You got it. When we were five people, I was like my Amex was on the table, and if someone needed to buy something, we had a really complicated process. You walked over to my table, you picked up my Amex, you bought something, and you brought the card back. Which worked great, but we were still doing that when we were 400 people, and we just could not find a better system, or a system that would help us do that with control and visibility, and so had to go build it, that had to exist.

**Ray Rike** (2:29)
Well, let's start with a foundational question to ground both myself and our audience with how do you define spend management as we enter here in 2023?

**Brad Van Leeuwen** (2:41)
It's a great question because in 2023, it's really more relevant than ever. What spend management is, you can think about all sorts of products in the space, but what it fundamentally is, is how companies allocate their capital. How they put the money they have in their bank account from investors or revenue from customers to good use for the maximum business impact and the processes they have around that to ensure that happens.

**Ray Rike** (3:09)
In today's environment, and most of our listeners are B2B SaaS founders, CFOs, and good market executives, operating margins and operating profit has never been more important. But as I thought about this conversation, Brad, I'm a little bit older. Spend management has been around for quite a while. Corporate procurement cards, Concur started as a spend management company 20 plus years ago. Why is it so hot right now? Is it just because of the macroeconomic uncertainty? Or is there a bigger trend at play here?

**Brad Van Leeuwen** (3:42)
Yeah. What's happened, like a lot of categories of software, it's just become way more accessible. It was great if you were really big and you could use Concur. Back then, your employees didn't have a great expectation for the software that they could use to do their job, and Concur did something business has cared about, and if you're a big enough company, you could buy it. What's happening now is across all categories of software, companies of all sizes want access. They need these tools to compete in the new global market that we're in. Concur did a great job for big companies, but every company needs to manage the way they allocate their money. That's been one thing. The second thing is that there's been a big change. Since Cloud really happened and took off, we've moved from a world where the IT person guarding the server room door could pick the software that people used, and people just got used to having really bad software. Today, anyone can pick the software they want to do their job, and they expect really good quality software. Otherwise, frankly, people leave their job and they move somewhere else. The bar has gone higher, and team members, employees have way more say in the software being used. That's created a big opportunity in the market across all categories, but including spend management for better, more modern software to enter the space.