Building the Future of Contract Management - Interview with the CEO of Concord Worldwide, Matt Lhoumeau

Episode #136: Matt Lhoumeau, CEO of Concord Worldwide, takes us on his extraordinary journey from founding his first company at 17 to revolutionizing how businesses handle their contracts.

Connect with Matt Lhoumeau and Concord:

1) Matt Lhoumeau: Matt's LinkedIn

2) Website: concord.app

Matt's revelation will surprise you: contract management has fundamentally transformed. While traditionally the exclusive domain of legal departments, today's reality shows operations and finance teams increasingly managing contracts—often with legal completely uninvolved. This shift, accelerated by AI, creates both challenges and opportunities for finance leaders seeking greater efficiency and control.

The numbers tell a shocking story. Matt reveals that 90% of companies still have no contract management system in place, relying instead on fragmented solutions combining e-signatures and generic document storage. Meanwhile, over 90% of contracts are signed without revisions—suggesting the real value is in in streamlined processes and financial oversight.

For finance leaders specifically, Matt offers invaluable wisdom from his entrepreneurial journey. He candidly admits wishing he'd hired a strong CFO earlier, emphasizing that great finance leaders "fight for every dollar" while serving as "guardians of processes"—implementing just enough structure without creating bureaucratic overhead. His perspective on monthly closing processes is particularly enlightening, as Concord evolves toward real-time financial visibility.

Please connect with me on:

1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii

For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy:  financeleaderacademy.com.

Transcript

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Stephen McLain: 0:05

This week, I am sharing an interview with Matt lamou, CEO of Concord worldwide, which is a global contract management system. Matt is a serial entrepreneur who started three companies in his career. Matt also served as a speech writer in the 2007 French presidential campaign for Nicholas Sarkozy. During our discussion, Matt describes the state of contract management with a great vision for the future, along with excellent finance leadership tips for startup companies. Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I'm your host. Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance, in accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. Thank you. This is episode number 136, now let's get right to the discussion with Matt. It's amazing. Please enjoy. I want to welcome Matt Lemo to the finance leader podcast. Matt is the co founder and CEO of Concord, a leading contract management platform used by over 100,000 companies worldwide. He founded his first company at 17 an online gaming community later acquired by orange. Matt is a recognized industry leader, frequently speaking at events like Stanford's Codex and the sea lock conference. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today. We want to hear more about you, so please tell us about yourself.

Matt Lhoumeau: 1:44

Hey, there. Very nice to be here to tell you. What about myself? Well, what should I start with? I am French. I guess everyone would get to my accent very quickly. I've been in the US now for about 10 years. As you mentioned, I actually built my first company as a young teenager. I was 17 when I built. We thought about video games at the time, and, you know, that's kind of where I got the bug of building companies. I ended up after this company, studying a lot of different things. I studied Japanese international affairs, political science, went to a business school. You know, at that time, I was searching myself, visiting between becoming a diplomat, a poet or an entrepreneur. I realized that poet was not a job, and so I should probably find something else, and that diplomacy was great, but I was probably not patient enough to work in administration. Okay, so I settled for entrepreneurship. And so I had the chance to work some with for some amazing people back in France, I spent, I spent a year working for the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, I was part of the 10 people team who wrote all these speeches and policies when he got elected in 2007 working directly with the chief of staff. And then I spent a year working for the CEO and for the founder, the second biggest telecom company in France, and that's actually when I kind of ended up working with contracts. At that time, we just bought a competitor. The competitor was using a lot of money, so I was tasked to renegotiate the contracts we had with some of the vendors. And I quickly realized at that time that everything was done manually. We were back in 2009 at the time, yeah, $6 billion revenue company, and contracts being in paper in cabinet, right? And you know how it is, you end up spending a month just looking for the contracts in the file cabinets of the company, and then you spend another month for us reading them one by one, and then you spend four months sending word documents back and forth to hundreds of people to renegotiate the terms of these contracts, right? And that's basically how I ended up building Concord, with that idea of trying to make sure no one will have to go through what I went through about 15 years ago. Yeah,

Stephen McLain: 3:58

exactly. Hey, please describe more about Concord, your premium service, and how it benefits your customers? Yeah,

Matt Lhoumeau: 4:05

absolutely. So Concord is so Concord dot app is basically a contract management platform. Really focus on the SMB and min market. So typically, if you have you know, between 100 to 1000 employees, you typically are the right people to use Concorde, our platform is really focused on what I would describe as the CLM Contract Lifecycle Management for the post legal world. What do I mean by this? What's been very interesting about the last few years is we've seen a massive shift in companies, especially in SMB market, about the way they manage their contracts. Back in the days, if I tell you contracts, you immediately think about legal. This is going to be the lawyers of the company managing this, et cetera. What we've seen over the past few years, and it's accelerating right now, significantly, with AI, is that smaller, medium sized companies, lower enterprise companies, actually. Will not manage their contracts through legal teams. Who is managing the contracts today in these companies operations, finance and legal is quite often not even involved anymore whatsoever, and quite often we actually see these companies that don't even have legal teams at all. I was last week with a customer here in Texas. We're based in Austin, Texas. We we have a we have a customer. There's a 300 people company. They've been around for 70 years. Very traditional company in the construction, in construction, and they don't have a legal team anymore. They've outsourced everything. And so what's interesting is we've seen that trend coming for the past few years now, and so we built Concord with that idea that this is not a CLM platform for legal teams. This is a CLM platform for everyone else. Obviously, legal teams also use Concorde, but they're less and less involved with these in these contract management processes, which is a good thing, because, you know, they have other things to do quite often. Legal teams are, you know, very underfunded in a company, they have very low resources, and we ask them too much. And so the idea is, let's take over. Let's take away from them. The Contract Management Administration approving for the 50th time the same contract is probably not someone, something that someone should be spending time on, and let's just make sure they can focus on the real topics when it comes to their skill set, which is the legality of an agreement of things like this,

Stephen McLain: 6:29

right? So, so it sounds like the legal teams aren't really your typical customer using the service, because so, so how does it? How does this service really benefit the CFOs out there? Well,

Matt Lhoumeau: 6:45

it's all comes down to what, what a contract really is about. At the end of the day, if you look at a contract today, about what we seen in numbers on Concord, dot app, what we see is that more than 90% of contracts today are signed without any revisions from your third party. And so it kind of makes sense when you think about it, because what are the three main types of contracts you're going to find right? HR documents, sales and procurement, vendors agreement. That's that's very good. About 80% of the agreements are companies, scientifically. Well, you're not going to negotiate, really, your your offer letter, right? You're going to modify, maybe the, obviously, the amount that on that, based on the, based on the person you hire. But you don't really have that kind of power when you get when you get hired, when it comes to your sales agreement, if you sell something to your customers, I assume you probably have a template, yeah. And so you probably should not have to spend, you know, a lot of money to renegotiate your agreements one by one, and then when it comes to your vendor agreements, well, quite often you don't really have that kind of power to negotiate the terms of services that you're you're working with. If tomorrow I sell you a contract with Salesforce, I don't think I can really modify the contract that I have with them the same way that you don't when you approve the table services on Apple Music. You can't really tell Apple to change that for you. What's interesting is that we've seen, we've seen basically contracts today, most of them are signed without any revisions, really. And so what does that mean? It means that at the end of the day, I think people start to realize that what's in your contract is not as important trying to negotiate things that, in the end, might never happen, given the amount of the contract, is probably not really worth their time at the end of the day, you know, if you sell a service for, let's call it$5,000 and your customer doesn't pay you, what are you going to do? Sue them? Probably not worth the money, right? And so people started to realize that it's probably not as important compared to the past. And they started to realize that what contracts are really about is making sure you're getting them done. It's a it's a business process document, right? When you hire someone, you sell something to a customer, you want to put in place a new system from a vendor. You just want it to be done, and you want to be done, obviously, with some controls about who has approved this, this contract, making sure that what's in the contract is still okay. And that's where, basically, we can help the right? Yeah, the finances are going to be able to do this very quickly. Have all the applause in one place. They can check with AI, the content of the contract, and they can just move forward. So it's just about making these teams risk more efficient and getting things done.

Stephen McLain: 9:24

Yeah, exactly because, because we've all dealt with contracts. Contracts go on for pages and they have all these requirements, requirements that the that the vendor has to do, the one who's buying the service or the supplies have to do. So you have to make sure you're tracking all of the due dates. When is what is due? When? When does it have to pay your net 30, or whatever the terms you have to and so your service comes in and helps you track and manage all those type of requirements that are in the contract that you may very well miss. Does that sound right?

Matt Lhoumeau: 9:54

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's the beauty of I think you know what's happening today, especially when you. Comes to AI. So we use AI on Concord dot app to basically make sure that all your due dates, your life cycle, or your payment terms are actually automatically extracted by the platform, and so you receive automatically your deadlines by email. You can we're building a new type of reporting right now to actually let you as a finance leader, you'll be able, thanks to Concord, to actually get a forecast based on your contracts of your cash flows. You'll be able to tell you exactly month after month, how much money is coming in and out of your contract based on your real contractual commitment. Which is interesting, because, you know, when we work on cash flows, I mean, but do this every day in my own company as a CEO, right? Quite often. How do you really evaluate that? Well, you kind of look at what you did last year and you kind of make a projection for the following year, right? But you don't necessarily have a place to track your real commitments here, and that's something that you can do with Concord. So I think the idea at the end of the day for specifically for a CFO, right? If you're a finance leader, what does that mean for you? You can want to get things done faster with less resources. I think at the end of the day, that's the most important

Unknown: 11:11

thing for us, exactly, exactly that's you hit it right there. It's

Matt Lhoumeau: 11:15

efficiency. It's efficiency and and I think the second thing is really about being able to get a better control of your cost, your commitments, in general, and making sure you're not missing something that I've never, never heard in my life, a CFO telling me that they never lost money because they missed a renewal. It has happened to literally everyone, right? And so that's the type of thing that we just also remove as a rescue.

Stephen McLain: 11:43

Yeah, you know what? I wish that I had had this service when I was serving in the in the army. I had, I was an auditor in Iraq for the US Army, and we had to pour over. We not only had to review, do audits of already completed contracts, which was pages and pages of requirements, and you're having to pour over it manually, but also looking at the various communications and documents that were going forth between the very high level commands and agencies that were in Iraq trying to support the trying to support the mission that we had over there. I literally were going over using Control F and trying to look for all various keywords, funding, money, support for maintenance, building things. So like, I really wish that I had had this service when I was serving over there, and then in my also a lot of my follow on assignments because you, because you have to do a lot of that manually. And I wish I would have to be able to use Concord as a as a way to feed through these documents and the control

Matt Lhoumeau: 12:56

f you are actually able to do certain but I didn't even have this 15 years ago, right? So, yeah, it's really but I think, I think what you're describing is what I've seen over and over myself in my previous roles, or when I what I hear from our customers. And it's fascinating. You know, even today, when you look at the penetration rate of contract management system within companies, today, about 90% of companies, nine, zero, 90% of companies have nothing in place. And so what do typically, typically, companies have today in place? They have some kind of an E signature platform. So they will use DocuSign, or something like this, and that's it. They still send the documents through word, through word, or sometimes slightly better, Google Docs, and they will store that somewhere on SharePoint, on or Box or Dropbox. And so this is absolutely not efficient at all. It's also, you know, not very cost efficient either, because you have three or four different subscriptions to do this. And the idea for us was to just bring everything in one single platform so people don't have to switch on and on and so, so, yeah, so it's a it's a common problem. It's happening to more companies and what people think. I'm always surprised sometimes, but to to see some, we have some very, very famous customers. I'm not going to give any names here, but you'll be surprised to see that they have nothing in place before starting with Concord, yeah,

Unknown: 14:20

I think they're listed on your website. Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Stephen McLain: 14:26

So hey, please tell us about, if someone wants to obviously learn more about this service. I think you have a number of free resources on your website. Please tell us about, about those free resources? Yeah,

Matt Lhoumeau: 14:39

absolutely. I mean, you can typically go to Concord that app, so it's c o n, c o r, d, dot app, A, P, P, and basically from there, you'll be able to get in touch with your degree with us. You'll be able to see a full demo of the platform directly on the website. We're very much of a transparent company. Our prices are on the web. Site, you have the ability to talk to someone the same day, and you will get a demo and a quote. We can also give people access to free trials. So we're trying to work the way everyone should be working nowadays. I think the time of having to go through four or five calls with an SDR and a salesperson just to get a demo and a pricing last century. And so we're trying to do a bit different here,

Stephen McLain: 15:28

right? Absolutely. And you have a you guys have a blog, and you've got some guides and some webinars on the website that someone can get continue to get more comfortable with the service, and also build a help and guide while you're using the service, so especially

Matt Lhoumeau: 15:44

for your audience, right? Because, as I mentioned, a lot of our users nowadays are actually people that are like CFOs finance leaders in general, and so we have a lot of content on how efficient contract management can really help their teams and their their goals at the end of the

Stephen McLain: 16:00

day, right? Absolutely. Hey, one of the things I wanted to ask you about today is you have, obviously have taken a few organizations from the startup phase, and I really want to, really want to talk about and ask you a couple of questions around your startup leadership, like describe what it takes to lead a successful startup, you know, from forming a team, communicating a vision, and really trying to lay down what kind of those expectations, it's a totally different environment than from what an organization that's already been been around for a little while,

Matt Lhoumeau: 16:39

and it's the best question, I think you know, so I've been doing this for now, so that's my third company, and so I've done this for one most would say maybe 20 years now. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, what it really takes is intense resilience and commitment. You know, before what's interesting about Concord so we created Concorde about 10 years ago now, and right before Concorde, my co founder and I had a previous company contract management space also in France at the time, and we failed that company. We crashed, you know, we were bootstrapped entirely at that time we released the first platform. Had a few customers, but we started to sell out of churn very quickly. So we felt, and you know, what's interesting about this is that we felt for three or four years or and then after four years, we started to understand why, really we failed. The answer wasn't always that obvious, but that's because we work on that first startup, and that we fell there, that we started to understand what we should be doing. Yeah, we've Concord, and that's why we built Concord, the way it is today, versus what people were doing at that time, you know, 1015, years ago. So what I mean, but what I mean by physics example, is you have to be okay to fail sometime for three or four years in a row, right to be able to get to that light bulb moment when you're going to realize what you really need to solve for and you know that makes sense, because if just having an idea like this was sufficient to build a company and to be successful with it, well, there will be a lot of companies out there, not a very successful people. And, you know, sometimes I think the problem with the way entrepreneurs are successful, entrepreneurs are telling their stories. I kind of tend to forget about this first few years of struggle and go straight to the result. And I think that's, that's a that's not what happened to us. Clearly, we, fell on that first company, and then we were able to do this. And you know, whenever, even when it comes to Concord, that app, right, you don't, it's not been a straight line. It's been some crazy acceleration and some plateaus, sometimes some problems. And you just have to keep going and keep going. And I think at the end of the day, it's really a question of commitment to your mission. I think, you know, when I see people that are just want to dedicate one year to a project, if it doesn't work, they want to move on. It's this is not enough. I've committed 10 years of my life to Concord. That's probably another 10 or 20 in front of us. So you just have to be okay with this. It takes time. It takes a lot of work, and it takes up, I would say that sort of humidity. There is so many things you don't know. And when you are a CEO, when you are a founder, you are literally facing problems every day that you've never been confronted to. And so you have to be okay learning, be okay, making mistakes and growing from that. So Right? It's not for everyone. It's a bit of a drug. Once you've tested it and you liked it, it's very hard to get away from but it's not for everyone, right?

Stephen McLain: 19:46

So so that in that initial phase when you're you may be failing or you may be plateauing, how do you stay focused? How do you get your team aligned when you're going through those initial troubles?

Matt Lhoumeau: 20:01

Uh, it's this is, this is a very good question. I think I especially because, you know, I worked in politics for Nicola Sarkozy, had the chance to see what someone who was running for president had to do to just mobilize people right and get them to vote for you. Or so. What's interesting is, I think at the end of the day, it's as the CEO. I think it all comes down to the vision that you have, and if people are aligned with this, I think that's really what matters at the end of the day. I think if you are, you know, creating a picture of a service, a platform, whatever you're studying, right? That really makes sense to people, that really connects with them, and also doing it probably in a way that can be different from what you see in the market. Then in that case, I think people will keep following you, even if things are complicated. I think that's really what it comes down to, right? Because, you know, I work in tech, right? So they live in a world in tech there, it's pretty easy to find a job, or case it was until recently. And so, you know, my developers, my sales people, they could probably find another job pretty quickly anywhere else. And so why are they staying? Is because they believe in the mission that we have and the way we're building the company. And so what's interesting, I think, here is, you know, personally, like, I've had moments of intense doubt, you know, I'd say, like, I have a clear vision and commitment, but there are days where I'm waking up and I'm like, we've been failing for X number of months, for time four years. What am I doing with my life? Why should I continue? But the good news is, like when you have a team behind you that you are responsible for, well you just keep pushing. You do your work, and usually after a few weeks or a few months, it gets better. I sometimes describe the role of a CEO, I guess on the startup side, a little bit like what I would say. I think a lot of single mothers experience every day. Okay, well, you you probably have to work two jobs. You have to take care of your kids. On top of this, it's very complicated. Finances are complicated. But at the end of the day, while your kids are here, they count on you, and so you're gonna have to smile when they're here and take care of them, and then when they go to bed, you probably cry a little bit in your kitchen. And the next day you do this again. And that's, that's okay. That's just part of life. I think it's true of anyone in general, but that's why I would describe it. So you keep pushing right, the team comes on you, and then it's fine,

Stephen McLain: 22:32

absolutely. I think that's the heart of leadership. I think you nailed it right there. It's, it's about giving that vision to your team, rallying them together with with that with that common vision, setting, that expectations, and then, and then you're showing that strength during the day to get them going over the next goal and then coming back the next day and keep going. It's not absolutely

Matt Lhoumeau: 22:54

and it's nothing different. I mean, you know, the military is exactly this at the end of the day, you're asking people to put their lives on the line here, right? And the only way you're going to be able to do this is by making sure that they share the vision what you're trying to achieve, and that they're going to believe in their leader, if you know, and that the person is going to be there for them, and making sure that they will have their back at the end of the day, that's really what matters,

Stephen McLain: 23:21

absolutely. So I'm also curious about your relationship with your CFO, or the person that was responsible for your finance and accounting in the early stage. What was your CFO doing in that early phase when you're trying to get this off the ground?

Matt Lhoumeau: 23:38

Yeah, absolutely. I think at the beginning, first of all, when you're really starting, you don't really have a CFO, right? When you start to have a CFO, when you have it's quite a few million dollars in revenue. But the truth is, I have, now, now I have an amazing CFO. She has been transformative for the company. She's been with us for probably about two years now, and we had, we had CFOs in the past before that, but you know, so let me know, startup, you don't necessarily understand what a CFO should be doing for you really. It's obviously way more than accounting when you're studying. It's not something that you necessarily have in mind, especially, you know, we raise money with, with a different VCs, and so you're not really looking into every single dollar right away. I realize now that this was a massive mistake. I wish I had hired a great CFO like we have today, way earlier in the company, because, yeah, and you know, that's with pain that I that I learned all of this. I think at the end of the day where even when you are a high growth company, even when you have VC money behind you, you should still be managing your company extremely seriously when it comes to your cost, when it comes to your projection and things like this. I you know every single company, when you. Start being a bit more successful, you probably don't look as much into your margins, and then eventually that will creep up on you. And so, you know, it's a small things, but if you don't make an a bit of renegotiating every single deal that you have with your vendors, if you don't measure at the end of the month that you're really getting what you're paying for, then very quickly, you're going to see this 10, 20% margin disappear, and that will hurt you very, very hard, long time. So I think for me, for a startup, I would say, get a CFO the minute you probably are in the two or 3 million Arr, it's absolutely needed. There is a cost obviously behind the CFO, but you will recover that cost so fast. I mean, I think my CFO, when we hired her, she probably pays for salary in just two or three months of right,

Stephen McLain: 25:51

running the business, right, exactly. So you, you were you doing most of the finance functions at the beginning, you're doing it yourself. I

Matt Lhoumeau: 25:58

was, absolutely. I was, and then quickly, we obviously had accountants, so, you know, external parties to help us with all of this. But the truth is, you will never get from a third party the type of service that you would expect from a CFO internally. And I think it also here comes down, really, to the type of CFO yet to hire. I think you need, at least for, I see work very well is you need someone that's going to be negotiating every single dollar. I think $1 is $1 it's just a principle of this. You have to be behind this. And this is extremely key as a startup, because, once again, you can raise money, but you never know when the next round is going to happen. You never know if you're going to face like a pandemic, like we did during COVID. And so you should have a very strict control on these finances. And so that's, that's, I think, the most important part for a CFO at a startup level is making sure your cost doesn't creep on you. And the second thing, obviously, is about the projections we have the ability nowadays, especially with the way we use Concord for ourselves, really have a clear understanding of what's coming forward, and that is helping us just make faster decision, be just more agile.

Stephen McLain: 27:09

Awesome. I love that. Hey. I also want to ask you a couple of questions. You've mentioned your CFO a few times. I do want to hear a little bit about how your What are you looking for? You already mentioned about the negotiation, negotiating for every dollar for all the services that you are receiving, what are some of the other things that you're doing? Or what are you using from your finance teams to help you make better decisions?

Matt Lhoumeau: 27:38

Obviously, aside from the accounting and the negotiation part. It all comes down to, I would say, ratios and different KPIs that help you exactly know if you're performing or not. So a simple thing here. But you know, as many companies, we are focusing on getting more customers, that's just what everyone does, and marketing as a cost, right? And so the real question is, how do you know if your initiative in marketing are really paying off? It's a very complicated thing to do, when you think about it, marketing cannot attribute properly what comes from the different channels they have, and so you basically will rely, at the end of the day, in part, on your CFO to really understand your metrics here. So whether it's you know, the sales and sales and marketing efficiency metric part, for example, this is the type of thing that we use to clearly see if we should invest more on a channel or in general, like we've heard, the different initiative that we have versus just stopping. And that's the kind of thing that you can do nowadays, because, you know, thanks to online advertising, you will clearly see your numbers very quickly. If you have a very good understanding, thanks to your CFO, for instance, of your numbers regarding pipeline and conversion, then you can make decision faster based on leading indicators instead of lagging indicators right. And one thing that I would actually probably say about this is that I believe that a CFO is also here to bring you, as a CEO, data that you can trust. And what's interesting about our the way we built out the finance function at Concord, is that our CFO is also directly looking into the numbers coming from sales, coming from marketing. And I think this is important, because at the end of the day, you probably want to avoid people self reporting their own metrics, because that's how problems start to happen. Because sometimes you know, but sometimes you just don't know how to do it very well. Sometimes you forget about it. Sometimes you only want to show the metrics that look better to your boss versus the other ones. So I think that the important tag of the CFO here is you have these numbers, you can trust them, and that makes all conversation after that very easy. It is just about math. Are the numbers working or not? And let's make a decision, right exactly

Stephen McLain: 29:59

so you hit on a. Very good point. We what we typically call the finance and accounting teams, your trusted advisor. So the ones that are going to bring in that truth to numbers of what's actually happening around in your company, so that you can make better decisions you know going forward. So I think you hit it right on. Really perfect. So what types of conversations do you have with your CFO? What

Matt Lhoumeau: 30:26

type of Do I not have with my CFO? I think at the end of the day, my CFO is part of the leadership team. So first of all, she's involved in every single decision of the company. We tend to be very transparent and horizontal at that level. So she is literally part of every single conversation. But when I what I will talk about most of the time with her at the end of the day is really about projections. How are we doing in the different initiative? You know when, when you have, you know, your your accounting, your cost control, etc, the processes in place. Things are kind of running by themselves. So it's really more about, how do we put out the company moving forward, and how do we mix makes things happen faster, typically. So that's really the type of conversation that we have on a regular

Stephen McLain: 31:12

basis. Awesome. Very good. So I'm curious, from your perspective as CEO, what specific skills would you like to see finance professionals develop? What are you looking for in someone coming into your company with the specific skill set? I can

Matt Lhoumeau: 31:29

only obviously speak for myself here, in the context of tech startup, etc, I would be a fortune 500 CEO. Probably have a very different type of answer for you. But I think you know, if I look over the over the last 10 years of the finance professional that I've worked with us, what I think has been important to be successful in our company is, once again, that desire to fight for every dollar. I think this is key. And I think, you know, this is a something that I would expect from a customer success healer. You fight for every single customer. You try. You don't accept someone to churn without fighting for it. I think it's the same thing for a CFO. You have to want to fight for every single dollar. That's the first thing. I think the second thing is trying to be a bit the guardian of the processes of the company, you know, especially at a startup, yes, startup, you want to move fast. You don't want to have too many processes, because they will slow you down. I hate processes. I think they're the they're needed, but they're evil, right? If everything were to work by them, by itself, you don't need processes. It just works. But you do need them, right? I think a CFO is here for that. It helps you realize that, yeah, we can do this this way, but this is what we're going to probably face very quickly if we don't make it a bit more smarter on the on the processes. So yeah, I would say the guardian of the processes and fighting for every dollar.

Stephen McLain: 32:56

Okay, awesome, Matt, you just mentioned really talking about your processes. I'm very curious about your monthly close process. How long does it take when you close the month, when you're at the end of the month, how long does it take for your finance and accounting team to close the books and get you some get you the results for the month? How long does that take? Usually,

Matt Lhoumeau: 33:19

that's right now, about two weeks. Okay, yeah, about two weeks right now. What's interesting here is really, once again, where we're coming from and where we are right now and where we're going next. So we used to not do monthly closing whatsoever. As a startup. You don't necessarily need it as much. So we used to do more quality closing here, and the quality closing would take us a month or two to get close. It was complicated. So that was, you know, what our investors required. It was fine. It was working well enough. But our new CFO, who joined us two years ago, was Richie fully, rightfully so, saying that, well, this is not okay. We cannot wait five months to know exactly how we're doing. We should know right away, right? And so she moved us to a monthly closing. Thank God. That was really needed. And as of right now, we are on two weeks window here, okay? And the idea this year is actually to cut this down more to three or four days. Currently working forward. The great thing about this is technology is getting better and better. There's a lot of things that can be automated now. And I think the ultimate goal on SV is that there won't be any more clothing in the future. You're right. It will be done live. The concept of a closing is kind of wrong. Why did you need a closing? Every month you could do a closing, usually every day, at the end of the day, absolutely,

Stephen McLain: 34:38

you hit you hit it right there, because the industry is trying to move to a day zero close, and the technology is getting better and better every day, especially with AI being able to get those books closed, get those temporary accounts to where they're supposed to be, and get it closed to get you financial statements and a little faster, and the information that you need is. CEO a little faster, so I think you hit it right there. It's perfect. Hey, I've got another couple of questions for you. Particularly early in this conversation you were talking about the startup, as far as you know, you're going to have to fail a little bit. I wanted to ask you about success. Now. What does it take? What does it take for a leader to become successful? Just walk me through that a little bit

Matt Lhoumeau: 35:29

is a very tough question, because I think success is very different for everyone, right? I think it depends at one level. I think as a founder, success is going to look different from your leadership team. So it depends on the type of success that you like. What are the type of success that I've seen typically, overall? Well, there are people that are motivated by a mission. That's my case. For instance, I believe in contract management. Or personally, I think contract management sucks, and I think it should be done better. So that's the mission that I have. That's why, which is our second company in this space, hopefully the last one. But that's the mission. It is not about the money. It is not about, I mean, you know, the power or recognition. It is really just making sure that we are solving that problem. But you know, success for people is very different everywhere. So you could sometimes people are going to be motivated by by the power, by the money, by helping people in their team grow. And so I think the biggest problem that I see here, quite often, is not the type of success people are looking for, but more the misalignment between what they're looking for and what really is important for them. And I think, you know, sometimes people tend to chase the wrong thing. Some money is a good example of this or career. We work crazy hours until we're middle aged, like like I am now, and at some point you end up in a midlife crisis, because you realize that you'd be chasing the wrong thing, right so I think the right way to be successful is just really understand what is important to you and then really try to go after that.

Stephen McLain: 37:12

Right now, I like that. I like that you were telling me earlier about an interesting hobby that you have, so please tell me about a favorite hobby that you have of yours?

Matt Lhoumeau: 37:23

Yeah, absolutely. So when you don't find me in my company working every day, you will find me several week during the year doing white water rafting. So I, you know, I'm a tech CEO, but interesting enough, I actually kind of hate technology. I think it's very useful, but I think it's very nice to be able to disconnect from it entirely, sure. And so I typically spend anywhere between four to six weeks a year just going down rivers in the US or other places in the world and camping on the side of the river for a couple of weeks. So I was last year in between the Yukon Canada and, oh, nice Alaska on the tachinic Chi River. It was a great trip. I had the chance to do the Grand Canyon in the US. I was a couple of years ago. I was in in Chile, in Patagonia over there. So that's, that's how I typically recharge my batteries is by being very far away from the internet and my cell phone and my computer and just being in nature. Awesome.

Stephen McLain: 38:27

Very good. So again, like to hear what's next for Concord? What's What do you have on the horizons for the for the service?

Matt Lhoumeau: 38:37

Yeah, absolutely. I think probably 2025. For us is, I would say the one of the most exciting years that I've seen for a long time in the company. It kind of felt like the early days. The reason behind this is obviously all the progress that you see right now with ai, ai has changed literally everything in our industry and other industries too. But it means that what used to require a lot of work from people entering data manually. There was no other trust in the past. This is over, so you can get your contracts done and immediately you have all the information that you need from that. And so what's very exciting at Concord is that we've been working on this for quite a while now, and we are releasing this here, basically a new version of the app that is just entirely AI first, the idea of the future of contract management is not about giving you more ability to put fields everywhere in your documents, is to actually remove things from your plate. And so you know, when it comes to like a let's take a little bit of a contract. For instance. You know when you want to sign a contract today? Well, you're gonna you put your data of your customer, how much person is going to have to pay, and you're going to have to maybe format your document, et cetera. This is over with AI. I don't think anyone moving forward is going to format a document. Why are you spending time choosing if it's to be bold or italic or a different font? I think the AI should be doing this for you. Yeah. Why are you. Entering fields. I think the AI can probably put the fields in there for you too. Why are you reviewing the document? The AI should be able to do that and flag the thing that are really important for you, instead of it to do it article by article. And that's basically what we're building right now. I believe the future of contract management is not this complex user experience with you know, a lot of data everywhere it's to be able to get you that power, but with the simplicity and so the Concord, moving forward is going to look more and more like chatgpt. Basically, you can really have a conversation with with an AI to get you the result that you have. So you don't have to build reporting yourself. By selecting every single field that you want to appear in there, you'll be able to just ask the AI and get your reporting done. Awesome.

Stephen McLain: 40:50

Hey, please share the website address again. Concord, dot app. Concord. Dot app, awesome. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today on the finance leader podcast. I really appreciate your time. I think you've shared some amazing some amazing information and Nuggets with the audience today, and thank you, and I wish you the best of luck with you and your company going forward. Thank you. That's my pleasure. Thank you so much. Now, wow, that was a wonderful discussion with Matt. There are three lessons I want to highlight before I close. Number one, I have worked with contracts for decades, but I learned so much listening to Matt explain the contract process. The use of AI is going to change how we manage contract requirements, due dates, terms, everything. It will be exciting to see where Concord goes in this industry, and since business is essentially contracts, how we track and conduct our business with AI will be important to monitor. Pay attention to contract management. Number two, Matt's thoughts on startup leadership are critical. He talked about the need for a CFO and startup phase and when to bring them on. He told us to fight for every dollar and for accuracy in order to make better decisions, continue to analyze and negotiate your costs. And finally, number three, regarding monthly close. I really liked Matt's thoughts on monthly close by using AI to eventually establish a day zero close, the idea is to work through close during the month with the expectation that accurate financial statements will be available today after the month ends. The quicker we deliver accurate financial information to decision makers like Matt, who is the CEO, the better position your company will be now. Please visit Concord dot app for more information about Concord, the link will be in this episode show notes, along with Matt's link to his LinkedIn. Thank you again to Matt for joining me on the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. If this episode helped you today, please share with a colleague until next time you can check out more resources at financeleader academy.com and sign up for my weekly updates so you don't miss an episode of the podcast and now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you. You.