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Recession-Proof co-hosts Kimia Hamidi, Head of Savings at Ramp and Alex Song, VP of Finance & Capital Markets, join us today to discuss how to save cash, control expenses, and still focus on growth, despite economic headwinds.
Welcome to Recession-Proof - a podcast by Ramp. Join us for in-depth, thought-provoking conversations with finance leaders, executives, and investors on the current state of the market and what this means for your business through 2022 and beyond. Hosted by Alex Song, VP of Finance & Capital Markets and Kimia Hamidi, Head of Savings at Ramp.
Alex Song: 2022 is a good reminder, I think to everyone, and all business leaders and finance leaders that, times are not always going to be so good. Companies are not always going to be so flushed with cash, but now more so than ever, there are these reminders from investors and from the markets that, "Hey, each dollar actually does matter." Welcome to Recession Proof, a podcast by Ramp.
Join us for in-depth thought provoking conversations with finance leaders, executives, and investors on the current state of the market, and what this means for your business through 2022 and beyond. I'm your host Alex Song.
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Welcome to Recession Proof, a podcast by Ramp, where we host a thought-provoking conversations with finance leaders, executives, and investors on the current states of the market, and what this means for your business through 2022 and beyond I'm your host, Alex Song. Each episode we will dive deep into how the recession may impact different part of your business, whether it's marketing, sales, tech, e-commerce, and of course, finance and the office of the CFO.
Listen right through to the end of each episode to learn about the guests we'll be bringing on throughout the season. Kimia, great to see you. It's been really awesome working with you for the last year plus or so, and it's really great to have you on the podcast.
Kimia: Alex, excited to dive in. It's been a pleasure working with you as well. I think we have a ton to talk about, so it's going to be a good way to kick off the Recession Proof season.
Alex: Very cool, and also it turns out that the two of us, probably, comprise something like the core of the Miami contingent. We're practically neighbors actually down in South Florida.
Kimia: That is very true. Hopefully, seeing more of you in person when our office opens up in the next couple of weeks, depending on when this podcast is released.
Alex: That'd be awesome. Here we go. For our listeners, would be great if you could spend a few minutes discussing your background, what led you to Buyer, and then subsequently Ramp? I think that will be really interesting story.
Kimia: Yes, happy to. I've been an entrepreneur, and started a few different companies, topically, and most recently, I started a company called Buyer, which was essentially a data company backed by services. What we've done is, we've rolled all that data into the buying process, and then we actually act as your on-demand procurement team again, and so over the last year we've built this out internally, and so it's been a wild ride, I'll say that. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun in saving our customers hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's great. It's been a great time.
Alex: It's a funny story. I'm actually curious, how did we even find you. A small, at the time, I think I remember, we were maybe about a 120 employees, if even that.
Kimia: 80.
Alex: Yes, and we were based in New York at a tiny little office. I still remember it, and you guys, I think were a few folks based in Canada. How was that match made in heaven? How did that occur?
Kimia: Yes, it's interesting. The background on the story is, Ramp, when we first launched, we did a bunch of behind the scenes just to prove the concept, build the database, make sure that we're delivering a ton of value to our customers. When we publicly launched, Emily reached out from Ramp, and I saw this company, I was like, "Oh, hot FinTech. They would make a great customer. I bet they're overspending like crazy. I bet there's a ton of value we can provide." Little did I realize how much value we could provide?
Emily reaches out and she says, "Hey, we're interested to learn more," and so I'm going through this as a sales motion, and Ramp's whole pitch, and this is for those who know, this is repetition, but for those who don't know is, the only financial suite that helps businesses save money. The interest and what we were actually driving to was very aligned, and so what we did was, we actually started off as a partnership, where at the time there weren't a lot of core savings businesses.
There were some on the fringe, but there was us, there was Vendor, and then maybe a few others on the optimization AWS side. Started off as a partnership, piloted it with the small amount of customers compared to now at the time, that went really well. We saved the customers a bunch of money. Then, I'll skip over some of the details, and we can dive into the specifics.
Basically, Emily was-- I'm sure there were conversations in the background, and Emily, basically, broached the conversation, "Have you thought about an acquisition?" We were growing so fast at the time that we hadn't. I thought about it, and obviously, I said, "Yes", because it's been over a year since I've been here.
Alex: Very cool, and for our listeners who don't know, Emily was and still is currently the leader of our product partnerships team, and has been instrumental in helping us secure a lot of our partner rewards, et cetera. A lot of the stuff that you see on ramp.com. That's super cool. I actually want to dive into, first of all, just the procurement kind of business, and the nitty-gritty of it, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about the macro economy, and what we're hearing from customers.
One question before we actually get into all of that, which is the Buyer business, which is now Ramp savings. I think I know what it works. Just how it works, just because I lead a finance team myself. Procurement is obviously very top of mind for me, but it sounds to me like, in order for Ramp savings to work and really work well, you need two things. I want to hear this from you, actually, but one, I think you need good pricing benchmarks.
You need a lot of transactional data that you can trust, so that you can actually go and be confident in your negotiations. Two, I think you just need a team of really good negotiators who do this day in and day out, and they're extremely experienced. What else would you need to build a great business?
Kimia: Even backing up on that, I think the core of it is, you have to care about your cost. We can talk about this on the macro side, but everyone says they care, but not everyone actually cares. Everyone says, "Of course, we want to save." The really big thing that, where Buyer really excelled is just the blocking and tackling of the constant barrage of renewals, as your organization expands and contracts and changes.
That starts with transparency and visibility into your spend. Oftentimes, when we'll drop into a company's pre-ramp, their contracts were in drive somewhere, they didn't really understand how their pricing broke down over here, and it's just a mess. The first thing is really visibility, where are you spending? Then, it's the benchmarks. Because you can go into a negotiation exactly like you said, where you can say, "I don't want to pay $1 for my million-dollar Salesforce instance," and Salesforce is going to say, "No way. Of course not."
You need a realistic benchmark, you need the quantitative, and you also need the qualitative. In the negotiation, why should Salesforce HubSpot, insert tech company here, work with you on your company? They're obviously incredibly smart, they've done this a million times they have their pricing down to a science, and if companies are getting a lower price here, and you're getting a higher price here, you need to understand how to bridge that gap.
That's often both quantitative and qualitative discussion. Then, the other piece is just the blocking and the tackling of the actual conversations. To fully automate this is a challenge, both because, as you'd understand this better than anyone, finance leaders are incredibly busy to tackle your 50, $25,000 contracts is sort of a-- I don't want to say a waste of time, but you have nine $1 million contracts that you need to go tackle, why would you tackle the tail end spend?
Then, to hire someone on to make sure they're a good negotiator, but who is also doing a lot of other tasks, is really a challenge. Just dedicating the time to it. Also, the timing of it too. Getting ahead, making sure you have the visibility into when that renewal is coming up. Sometimes contracts have a 30, 60, 90-day auto-renew, and so if you're not reaching out four months in advance, it's automatically renewed, and then that spend is just gone.
I think, as a business, really, it backs out to how set up are you? How much visibility do you have? Then, do you have the pricing benchmarks? Do you actually have the bandwidth to go tackle this? I think going into, in the years to come, I would say the music, probably, still is playing. It probably hasn't stopped yet, and a lot of companies haven't felt the pinch. When they do, this is going to become a priority, and they're really going to think about how to save.
Alex: That's fascinating. Let's talk maybe about your view of the procurement business, and the underlying demand here. Let's pretend I know nothing. Let's pretend, we hadn't met, and let's pretend I was just an archetypal finance leader. I work at Ramp, and let's say we've got a couple of hundred, 300 to 400 employees right? We've got a fairly lean finance team.
Am I the archetypal customer for this? At what point in time is it right to bring in procurement, or to just centralize it, professionalize it, and potentially bring you guys in. For context, there are folks who are listening to this podcast, who are probably very, very early-stage, very small startups, all the way up to large public companies. I know we also have some investors who listen as well, so you have a mix of investors and operators. Help us contextualize, "Am I the right fit?" I guess, is the question.
Kimia: It's a good question. I think the challenge, I would break it out into two buckets. The first is when to professionalize a procurement function within your organization and then the other is, how do I know if I'm a good fit for a service? Then there's some middle gap in between, right? I think spending time on, what signals do I need to watch out for to really make sure that I know I need to bring in a procurement team?
The challenge is, you always act too late. I think the core function, at its essence, of a great procurement leader is strict cost controls. The balance with a small, rapid, nimble team is, you do not want someone telling you, "We need three months to negotiate this contract. We need this yesterday, because we need to run 17 tests that's going to improve our ROI." That balance is a tricky one, and it's going to depend on the organization.
What I would say is, and it sounds simple, but it's not simplistic, is really ensuring that all of your team has ownership mentality, and treating it as if it's their own money. Do we actually need to spend? Do we need all the features on this? Who actually needs to approve this? Then, after they've done that, then it's-- There is a tipping point. I would say a classic benchmark is, if you were around 150,000 to 200K in annual SaaS spend, you should start thinking about operationalizing your procurement, because at that tipping point, your business is now big enough, where your spend is really going to start to explode, because it's really a slope up.
There are services, obviously, Buyer is one of these, and this is why our business grows too fast is, there is still a long slope up to where you need a procurement manager. The beauty of this is, if you have an on-demand procurement team, you can get 80% of the benefits with 20% of the actual effort, because you have this team who can drop in, and not shilling Buyer, obviously, but just to illustrate.
You can really have this professional team drop in, manage your renewals, manage your contracts, build that professionalization. Then, once you're around the three to five, maybe seven million in spend, I'd say seven is probably a bit high. Then, I would really encourage starting to look for an actual procurement manager. The challenge too is visibility. We had this challenge at Ramp, right?
Where there is just so much spend fragmented across the organization. It's lucky for us that, obviously, our product solves this core challenge, and it's very easy for us to just suck in all the data, but really having the base of visibility. "Okay, we've spent this, it's here, we can see it, we know when the renewal is coming up." You either need some on-demand team, and then some manager to have this.
If you don't have this past three million in spend, it's going to get way worse. Tackling this problem early is going to be helpful. Then, on the other side, on the-- How do I think about a procurement team in an organization? I think it's really when you have core large contracts that really need time and attention, and are critical to the business.
We have a few vendors we rely very heavily on for our end customer experience. Those commercial terms and the SLAs, those really matter. There's this very long tail that you can hand off, but I think that's another tell-tale sign of, "Okay, there are these things that I no longer have time to deal with as a finance leader, because I'm working on the actual operations, but it is core to our business and the actual service, and I really need to think about building out a procurement organization."
Then, on the long tail of stuff work with a team because you're going to get economies of scale in this on-demand fashion, where whatever the headcount will cost you, this will cost you 4X less, with again 80% of the results, while spending 20% of the money.
Alex: For now, it seems like, is your focus predominantly on subscription-based technology services and SaaS, or does it also encompass other commercial agreements and whatnot?
Kimia: We've found the core customer draw, and what our customers are really asking for, is help in taming the proliferation of SaaS spend. I think the reason why that is, is because if you're looking at a services contract, you see it, you interact with it, right? If there is some on-demand infrastructure service, again, it's very core to the nature of what you're trying to build.
On SaaS spend, it's a little bit different. You might have your organization grow by 20%, you got all these seats, and then you can track by 10%. What happens to these orphan seats? Then, on the other side, there is all-- I'm sure, I'm actually curious if you see this, where there's always back-channeling going on. "Hey, WhatsApp group, how much are you paying for Salesforce?"
Alex: Yes, of course.
Kimia: Is this the right price? How do I negotiate this? Because I think there's a lot of just newness in all this, and people aren't equipped to deal with it. I think the core of it is really around SaaS, just because of the lack of transparency and visibility. Oftentimes, it's price-to-budget. There's no real method to the madness, and so making sure that there's this actual, "Okay, well, we understand where our benchmarks lie." I mean, in shipping, this has existed for years to just pull a quote out of thin air on shipping is insane. The fact that it's commonplace in SaaS is quite surprising to me, and that's part of what we're trying to fight.
Alex: Yes, that really resonates with me. You have the perfect storm, which by the way, is why SaaS is a phenomenal sector to invest in, because you have a perfect storm where pricing is very opaque. Which is awesome, if you're the seller, not great if you're the buyer, that's one. Two is, oftentimes, the service itself is mission-critical. If it was Google Cloud or AWS or Salesforce or Cloudflare, whatever it might be. It's mission-critical.
You're like, "How much leverage do I actually have to negotiate? Because I'm going to buy it." Let's face it, I'm going to buy this anyways. I think those two combined, creates this perfect confluence, where I think probably most businesses. Most SMBs, mid-market, probably, even enterprises, are in this weird position, where it's like, "I don't know how hard I can negotiate, because it's mission-critical," which is where you and your team comes in. That's really cool. I think this is really cool.
Kimia: Yes, I will say as well, I think the other thing too is, there's often this stigma around negotiation, where it's, used car salesman get the best price. It really isn't like that, and to your point on the mission criticality, if you're like, "Hey, look, we're ripping out Cloudflare." They're like, "Okay." Where are you going to go? It's not like that. It's really the combination of, we understand there's a lower price. We want to be partners for the long-term.
Help, let's work together on this to be business partners for the long term. To go to your like Red Seal Carpenter, who's building your deck, and just grind them on price, is probably not that safe if you have your kid running around on your balcony. You really want to treat them well, and I think this analogy really extends to all these contracts and these mission-critical infrastructure pieces, but there's a lot of SaaS that isn't mission-critical, your whiteboard software that's charging you $4,000 extra a month for SSO, that's insane.
Alex: Yes. [laughs]
Kimia: It's ridiculous, but I'm curious, I want to flip the question back on you, as the pre and the post of Buyer, I guess, and experiencing the service. Where have you seen the extension of that for companies that might need this, given that you've experienced the core savings firsthand?
Alex: Yes, absolutely. I think the biggest thing that I personally experienced with you guys, your team, the folks who now comprise the savings team, is it enforces a certain amount of discipline, which is great. It enforces a certain amount of discipline even before you've set up centralized procurement. In the sense that, now you do have this schedule of licenses and subscriptions that are coming up for renewal.
Now, automatically, you're just like, "Okay, cool. Well, I have this service. I have these folks who would help me with this." Well, now we're 90 days ahead, we're 60 days ahead, we're 30 days ahead, let's really reach out, crank it out. Let's set the context, and start negotiating. I actually do think, and this is maybe a word to our listeners, like tip number one is, actually, just start early.
If you give yourselves the benefit of time, whether you don't have Ramp savings, or the Buyer team, or you just have an internal procurement function, starting early is probably just the single biggest tip. Just give yourself time to actually go through the rigmarole of contract negotiation. It's not that different than negotiating a debt facility, with one of our institutional lenders.
I think if you have time, I think then you will be able to rigorously and honestly go through, and build these long-term partnerships. I think that's probably the biggest observation is don't leave anything until the last minute. Then, obviously, more time and more bandwidth always helps.
Kimia: Yes. I'm curious as well, where on the-- Because this is the challenge that we always see. It's like, "Yes, we know it's important, but we'll get to it later." How do you think about prioritization in your finance org? If you were talking to another finance leader, where would you stack rank procurement versus the litany of other things?
Alex: I think it definitely varies. It varies depending on where we are during the year. There's some seasonality to it. Obviously, there's always going to be competing priorities inside the firm. For our fundraising, if we need another debt facility, probably, I'm going to be paying a lot more attention to that than internal procurement. That being said, I actually do think that-- This is probably a good segue for us to talk about recession-proofing in the face of 2022, but I will say that, we now have much more of an imperative, and much more focus on driving efficiencies in operating expenses, and 2022 is a good reminder, I think to everyone, all business leaders and finance leaders, that times are not always going to be so good.
Companies are not always going to be so flushed with cash. It's a mission that I think we believed in since forever, but now more so than ever, there are these reminders from investors, and from the markets that, "Hey, each dollar actually does matter." Figure out what your internal cost of capital is, figure out what your investment hurdle is. Make sure that internal projects and internal expenses exceed that investment hurdle.
I think it is situational-dependent. Depending on the size of the company, depending on the stage, depending on the ticket size. Certainly, that matters. I think that over the course of this year, it's been shown in stark relief. That this is not something that you could just punt or ignore forever. This is something that persists over time.
Kimia: The part of what you've said on discipline. I agree, that was my next segue on this is, I think there has been a lot of operating without discipline. Let's try 90 things. Let's see what happens. Your comment on enforcing discipline really matters. If you're going to do one thing, do it really well. What is that thing going to be? That thing should be generating cash.
Given that the cost of capital has increased dramatically. I think there should be an absolute focus for a lot of these businesses on, if not increasing the generation of cash, that should be the immediate near-term focus. I'm curious on the macro, you have the interesting lens of the investor side, as well as a core operator inside of Ramp. We've certainly felt the shift internally.
Are you seeing the shift externally? Because I get a mix, I'll talk to some companies and they're like, "It's pretty good, business as usual." There's other companies who are really concerned.
Alex: I have actually. I think what was interesting was, if you remember a few weeks ago, we released our inaugural pricing benchmark reports, where we outlined how spend across the Ramp platform has evolved over time, and how that's evolved differently between segments. That's probably the most interesting observation, actually, I would say.
By and large, I think, anecdotally, conversations with whether it's other CFOs or other investors, or people who with a lot of different portfolio companies, I would say that this year has been so a wild drive for a lot of people, and how people have reacted has been somewhat differentiated.
For the most part, people are much more concerned with operating efficiency and garnering ever greater operating leverage, for sure, for a fact. That's the first thing. The second thing is, there probably is a little bit of dispersion with respect to recession calculus. Some people think it's coming. Other people think it might be over the horizon. Other people don't believe in it at all.
Certainly, you are going to react differently depending on what you think about the macro environment. However, we can all agree that inflation was high, interest rates are increasing, investments have slowed down. Weighted average cost of capital should increase. What that's meant is-- I think this is probably categorically true. I think budgets have been cut. How much though? Again, depends.
I think growth forecasts have definitely been cut across the board, across all different types of businesses. I don't care if it's services, manufacturing, SaaS, IT, healthcare. I think we've seen our fair share of customers in each of these segments. I think growth forecasts have definitely come down. I think in tandem, probably, head count planning has come down, and I think with respect to spend.
We saw this in our benchmark report. I think, incrementally, companies are spending less money on advertising. That's been shown across the market even outside the Ramp ecosystem as well. I think that, that's the challenge today. It's a question that, on my team, we ask ourselves every day, which is, if you had an extra dollar today, where would you invest it across the business? If you had one fewer dollar you needed to cut, where's the first place that you would cut?
I think, again, now more so than ever, business leaders are faced with that challenge. Whereas I think historically, maybe for the last two plus, three plus years, folks really haven't had to think through that, but generally, I think one observation's probably that, for better, or for worse, or maybe just because they can be more nimble, I think across the SMB and lower middle market segments, you see a little bit more of sensitivity with respect to spend and OpEx. Whereas I think across enterprise customers, public companies, upper mid-market, we haven't seen as much volatility in spend and OpEx.
Maybe that's just because rebudgeting takes a little bit longer, or maybe they just have larger war chests, and more liquidity. They haven't had to react as onerously, but that's one observation we saw across our portfolio of customers.
Kimia: I think on the, on the spend report as well, one of the interesting things that I was paying attention to was the infrastructure costs. If infrastructure costs are changing, if yours [unintelligible 00:25:52] spend is way down, that means your actual product usage is down, as opposed to your growth. I think, largely, it's increased, which means that, while growth projections have been cut, companies are still growing.
Again, on the SMB side, it's pretty wavy. On the enterprise side, it might be a little bit slower, but again, will these growth cuts impact infrastructure changes later? Will we see an actual slowdown in product usage? Maybe we haven't seen the effects yet. I liked your line on a dollar more or a dollar less, where does this go? It reminds me of the Frank Slootman, "If you have one thing to do, if you could focus on only one thing for the year, what would you do?"
I think it's really important for companies to really internalize that, and think through, "If I have this $1 to spend," really being thoughtful about it, versus just, "Yes, we should try these nine different initiatives, and really go for it." It's a hard time, hard times create great companies, and I think we've seen this over history.
Alex: It's definitely a very interesting, and it's a challenging environment for everyone. Clearly, this is one of those times where I think business leaders and founders are challenged, because there's two things. It's like one is strategy. How good was your strategy before? Pre-2022, how good was your strategy? How good was your go-to market function? How good was your R&D? Are you focused on the right things? In theory, if those things were correct, and you had a good corporate strategy, volatility in investment rates or hurdle rates, shouldn't really impact that.
At the highest level there really shouldn't necessarily be large pivots in the business, but certainly, that deserves a little bit more scrutiny today. I think the second thing that is challenging is, I think there is now a much greater focus on execution. Strategy is one thing. Now, you have to be in the weeds. You have to really think about, "My goodness, we do have these 19 different experiments going on."
Now, instead of picking the top 50%, we're just going to pick the top two to really double down on, and what are those two? Let's really go deep on these metrics. Let's really go deep on the data. Now, I think more so than ever, there is definitely pressure for folks to scrutinize, and really go through in detail financial models, and very, very rigorously go through financial planning, and be extremely detail oriented.
I think that's going to make some people feel uncomfortable, it's going to make some people feel challenged. In certain instances, there could be managers that feel like, "Well, now I'm being micromanaged by my boss." I think those are all things that we see and we hear about. I think that, that is one of those things that-- Again, it's tough times where they create great companies, because these things are uncomfortable.
Kimia: Yes. I think the other point as well on just like the operating and being great at executing, in the weeds, it's unsexy and hard and just-- The blocking and tackling and doing the basics, and just being relentless. Complexity does not scale, simplicity scales. I was reading the Sequoia Deck, which I think there's just so many great lessons in there, but the whole time I was going through it, I was like, "Yes, this makes sense. This makes sense. This is fairly obvious."
If you find yourself saying, "It's fairly obvious," but not following through on your point on strategy, you've just missed a ton. I think the really back-to-basics, like how do we just build a great organization, so we get everyone to buy in, even if they don't agree, disagree and commit, and move forward as a team, I think that's super important. The other thing that comes to mind just as an anecdote is, I was thinking back to Patty McCord who built the Netflix Culture Deck, like how do you build a great organization.
When you ask super high-performing people in their organizations, what do you remember most fondly? No one said, the massages, the ping pong tables, the happy hours. It was all, we rebuilt streaming infrastructure from the ground up, because DVDs wouldn't scale, or the hardest part of your professional life was the most enjoyable, and looking back on this. I think part of this is, there is more operating discipline.
You need to really focus. Focus on making things simple and scalable, but also this is the time for people who are really motivated to shine, and for the companies that really, really are great companies, or angling to be great companies, this is the time that you go through the crucible, and come up victorious.
Alex: Yes, absolutely. It's tough. It also does mean that some sacrifices, you're pulling now longer hours, et cetera, but again, I think the idea is that you're laying down the groundwork, hopefully, for a better business, a more sustainable business.
Kimia: On the question of how do you create impact directly on the P&L for companies, I'm sure a lot of the listeners here would love to understand how you're thinking about this. I think it's very motivating, and some teams say like, "We don't share financials with our internals. Other teams are a open book, we share everything." I think if there's one thread, like a common thread across an employee is, they really want to feel like their work matters, and especially, in times now, where creating impact on the actual business on a P&L is really going to matter. I'm curious, how are you empowered, or how are you even thinking about empowering teams? What tips would you give to listeners?
Alex: I think directionally speaking, we're probably on the side of the spectrum where we share quite a bit, in the sense that, internally, I think we do believe very strongly in building out and open. I think we actually do share board presentations and financials with our employees. Certainly, anyone on our team who should feel very open, reaching out to myself, or anyone on my team.
I actually do think that that engenders a greater sense of ownership, and more alignment culturally. That being said, I think it also is very empowering just to say, "Hey, guys, what you're working on is very important. It contributes X percent to revenues. It contributes Y percent to contribution margin, and more importantly, if you can do this one thing to make this one metric 1% better, here's what our P&Ls going to look like differently six months from now, 12 months from now."
We actually believe in very crisp, clearly conveying some of those deltas, which by the way, we have a whole slew of internal presentations, where we outline maybe four or five of these deltas, where it's like a 1% change in this one metric, results in X hundreds of thousands or millions of additional P&L. It's one thing that, I think it's still a work in progress, but that's one thing that I do actually believe in quite a bit in conveying that directly to different teams across the org.
Kimia: Yes. Even pre-acquisition for my company, here's the monthly revenue, here's the customer CSATs, here's how we're doing, here's our burn, here's everything you need to know. I think it's really empowering to see. It's funny making this more personal. We were talking about this last month. How does the savings team, as we grow directly impact Ramp's business? It's great.
I think it's fantastic, and I would encourage other companies to, especially, in times of strict discipline, really, really make sure that they're showing how each individual employee or teams directly impact the business.
Alex: Which, by the way, I think maybe this will be my last comment on this is, obviously, you and I both believe very strongly in this, but I think, at some point, you have to start with the basics. I think basic financial literacy, probably, is one thing also that we believe pretty strongly in. You can't really come in, and just start talking about EBIDTA margins of free cash flow yields with someone who's potentially fresh out of college in a different discipline.
I actually do think that the ability to have additional transparency, a shared language, a shared jargon does help, which is why a few months ago, I led this whole internal ECON101 presentation to the whole company going through the macro, the micro, and whatnot. That's something that I do strongly recommend to other finance leaders, and other business leaders at large, which is be transparent, make sure you're able to develop a shared vocabulary. If you do want to push P&L culture, make sure people actually know what P&L stands for. I think that's just one tactical recommendation.
Kimia: Yes. I can back this up, both the presentation was excellent, and you host weekly finance office hours, right? Open door, ask whatever you want. No question. There are sticky questions that you answer. I'll sit in and there are questions that some people have that, the strength of the business. What does this mean? I don't understand this, and really preaching that financial literacy, which I think goes a long way and empowers teams.
Alex: Yes, absolutely. Well, Kimia, it is now at the top of the hour. You've been really, really generous with your time. It's been great having you on the show, and have you in this episode, it's been absolutely phenomenal, just bantering with you and chatting about the Buyer team, savings function, negotiations, and the macro. It's been awesome.
Kimia: Alex, this has been a ton of fun. I'm excited to see how the podcast unfold. I'm going to be hosting a few episodes myself, and for the listeners, you'll hear a little bit more of my voice. Again, thank you for your time as well. I know you are incredibly busy.
Alex: Very good. Thank you so much.
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