The Modern CFO: Navigating SaaS Finance, Tech Stacks, and Revenue Agility
The Modern CFO: Navigating SaaS Finance, Tech Stacks, and Revenue Agility
The Nue Team
Description
In this episode of The Lift, hosts Mark Evans and Nue CFO Brian Keare are joined by Ben Murray, widely known as The SaaS CFO.
With over 25 years in finance and FP&A, Ben has become a go-to voice for SaaS leaders navigating the complexities of modern finance. He shares his journey from starting a blog in 2016 to building a community of 90K subscribers and becoming a trusted advisor to CFOs everywhere.
The conversation dives into today’s hottest finance topics: evolving SaaS pricing models, the challenges of ARR and retention metrics, and how CFOs are rethinking their tech stacks in light of AI and hybrid revenue models.
Ben emphasizes the CFO’s expanding role, from simply closing the books to becoming a strategic partner driving growth and efficiency.
Transcription
Mark Evans: Welcome to The Lift, a podcast about the decisions, tools, and thinking shaping the next generation of Rev ops teams. I'm your host, Mark Evans, and today we're talking about one of the most critical roles in SaaS, the CFO. As go-to-market strategies become more complex with usage-based pricing, PLG, and hybrid revenue models becoming the norm, finance leaders are building the systems, processes, and forecasts that guide the business forward. And few people understand the demands of that role better than today's guest, Ben Murray, known widely as the SaaS CFO, who has become a trusted guide for finance leaders across the industry. And Ben just doesn't talk about SaaS finance.
He's built a community and platform around helping CFOs lead with clarity and confidence. With over 25 years of experience in financing, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), Ben has turned financial clarity into a competitive advantage for the companies he advises. If your CFO is rethinking your revenue architecture, this conversation with Ben, Nue CFO Brian Keare, and me will deliver valuable strategic and tactical insights.
Welcome to the podcast, Ben.
Ben Murray: Thanks, Mark. Appreciate the intro. Great to be here.
Mark Evans: You've built one of the most trusted communities in content platforms for SaaS finance leaders.
Let's go back and talk about what inspired you to start the SAS CFO. And how that journey has shaped your perspective on the role of the modern CFO, which obviously is a really interesting place to be right now, given the fact that the landscape is changing, if not every week, every day.
Ben Murray: It's very cliche. It all started in 2016. I started a blog to share my content, and I was a full-time CFO who rose through the ranks of FP&A in the airline software industry, transitioning to SaaS, and then became a CFO and founder of PE-backed companies. I was a [00:02:00] learning along the way, checking out content online just to see what I should be doing in these companies.
I saw a lot of blogs and different things, and some of these sites really didn't share everything, didn't share the secrets or maybe the template. And in FP&A finance, it's as if we rarely start from scratch. We don't build a forecast model from scratch. We like to use templates, so I thought, as I'm learning, I'll share the templates. I'm creating my forecast models and sharing these online and in blog posts.
And that's how it started. And it slowly built up growth over time, evolving into the newsletter and community it is today.