It's award season again, and I was privileged to receive two great awards. The IFO named me one of the Top 25 Most Influential Financial Operations Professionals and I'm also a finalist for E&Y's Entrepreneur of the Year in NJ. Both are great awards. While I will get the award, and it will make my Mom very proud, the credit really goes to the folks at Billtrust that make me look good. Billtrust has accomplished a lot in ten years and it really truly is a team effort.
As I've blogged before, the awards a nice, but they're not the goal, they're just a brief stop on the journey.
Billtrust has so much more that we can be great at, that it sometimes feels like we're just getting started. I was reminded of this yesterday when I spent some time with a few Billtrust executives at a nearby public company. It was like a slap upside the face. This company has been around just a little big longer than us but is already 20 times our size. Different market, different business model, but a number of similarites. Most encouraging for me was that the CEO is always pushing to get better. Not a whole lot of basking in how great they are, no relaxing because of what they achieved, but a constant push to get better at what they do.
I attended a meeting this morning here at Billtrust on a topic we call eAdoption. This is how we help customers move their customers from paper billing to electronic billing and payment. By any measure we're doing great. Our customers love what we do, we're way ahead of industry benchmarks, and we have cutting edge technology. My response - who cares? Let's get better. And I was brutally frank with my feedback. Not to be a jerk (although some would interpret it that way), but because I view my job as the CEO to be the head challenger. As soon as we start spending time ruminating on how wonderful we are, is the same day that competition begins catching up.
So while the awards are nice, and it's always fun to pause and enjoy, don't pause for too long, because there's lots of work to do.
