Deanna Walker, CEO, Venturity
Deanna Walker, CEO of Venturity, discussed how the firm’s comprehensive solutions, including fractional-CFO and accounting services, have enabled the company to grow. She also highlighted how businesses are leveraging accounting as a tool for decision-making.
What have been some of the most important successes and milestones for Venturity over the past year?
This past year has held many monumental milestones for Venturity. Our biggest success is the opportunity to offer comprehensive solutions to our clients. We have augmented our outsourced accounting services with our fractional CFO practice. This additional layer has allowed us to be more comprehensive and to approach our client relationships from an advisory standpoint, focusing on client goals and desired outcomes. Additionally, we now offer financial shared services to middle market companies by wholly serving them as their back office. We have been able to meet our clients where they are while continuing to provide our world-class services.
How has demand for Venturity’s products and services evolved in the Greater Dallas accounting sector?
Venturity has been operating in an outsourced environment for over two decades, as a purposeful part of our business model and approach. Since 2020, many business owners, management teams and investor groups have come to realize that they do not need their accounting services to be done on-site. Companies are becoming more aware and comfortable with the idea that finding and bringing in expertise on a fractional and outsourced basis can be an ideal solution. We are equipped to get up to speed, learn about the company and introduce best practices in an effective way. This process has opened the market for new services and allowed us to tap into labor forces around the world.
What are the most important trends you have identified in the North Texas accounting sector?
The accounting sector is shifting from being a non-core, back-office, “necessary evil” into a strategic tool that business owners, management teams and investors are proactively using for decision-making. This has been done by marrying financial information with operational goals to tell the story of the business. We have leaned into this trend by incorporating KPI analyses, visuals and benchmarking into our reporting. The resulting story encourages discussions that focus on information that can drive decision-making instead of having just a direct performance report.
We are also seeing private equity firms place greater emphasis on transparency, ensuring that the accounting information driving their analyses is solid, consistent and reliable. This shift highlights the growing role of accounting as a strategic tool, rather than just a back-office function.
What are the most important challenges that Venturity faces in the accounting sector?
From a business standpoint we are in a dynamic environment, so keeping the pace, being purposeful and picking the right initiatives to invest in without spreading too thin has been challenging. Labor markets have also been a challenge for the accounting sector. We have tackled that by being purposeful in hiring for our values as well as leveraging our offshore team. We’ve also designed a thorough hiring process that becomes a mutual buying decision on both sides. When we can attract the right talent we keep it, which offers the continuity our clients can rely on. Another emerging challenge is how the AI movement has led people to believe that accounting can be more automated than it actually is. Accounting technology tools have come a long way but still require sophisticated skills and expertise to properly leverage- that’s where we can make the difference.
What are the biggest growth opportunities in the sector?
People often manage based on what is going on operationally, but reporting tools can allow for an ongoing distribution of information for decision-making. That is our main area of focus and where we see the most opportunities for growth. We see the biggest opportunity in marrying the C-Suite of the fractional CFO area with our accounting services to offer a comprehensive solution that gets included in the business discussion. The emphasis is on solid, buttoned-up accounting with an analysis piece that must also be an in-the-moment-tool to make decisions about where the business goes and what markets it should be in.
With the fast pace of our evolving business landscape, having timely and reliable information is a competitive advantage and asset. Marrying that information with the operational KPIs and client experience are two other areas that we emphasize. We need to not only provide accurate, data-driven accounting to clients but also have a seat at the table to have proactive conversations and bring a perspective that they value.
How is Venturity leveraging innovation and partnerships with tech companies to help clients streamline operations?
All investments and partnerships Venturity pursues are to ensure and increase our timeliness and ability to pivot quickly to the ever-changing business landscape. Venturity is software agnostic with the tools we use in order to cater to our client’s needs, build customized solutions and streamline their accounting processes. We’ve also adopted tools for things such as project management, videoconferencing, scheduling software and more to bring continuous enhancements and resource planning to the table. We are also exploring avenues around AI to target how we can use that technology to bring additional efficiencies to our team and clients.
How is Venturity preparing for a potential change in the federal administration and the possibility of new regulations?
We have a dedicated management team member that monitors and ensures we are staying on top of FASB pronouncements and GAAP compliance. Although we are a professional services firm rather than a CPA firm, we do have CPAs on-site to stay on top of updates and trends. We also purposefully attend industry pertinent events and collaborate with other experts in the field.
What is the strategy of Venturity to attract and retain skilled talent in the professional services team?
We hire in alignment to our core values. In 2012, we started purposefully investing in our culture and educating our teams to ensure that they understand who we are as a company. Today, we have seen an increase in attracted and retained skilled talent as a result of hiring the right people for not just the job, but for our culture.
Something that allows us to attract great people is that we have been practicing open-book management since 2017. That means our team members know where we stand financially as a company by sharing with them our balance sheet, profit and loss statement and all other financial statements. This empowers them to strategically contribute to the bottom line of the company. We also measure and track our goals through a bonus program, addressing setbacks and celebrating wins as a team.
Aside from being able to earn a bonus from impacting change, our team members are also developing an ownership mindset. We sold 20% of the company to our employees in 2020 and are on the way to becoming a 100% ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program) company. That is attractive to many because it inspires them to excel in their everyday jobs not just for the company but also for their personal long-term wealth creation. It has also allowed us to attract individuals who think long-term and those who are looking for a career and avenues for growth.
As the CEO of Venturity, what are your short- and long-term priorities for the company?
When I was appointed as the CEO in December 2023, one of my goals was to transition Venturity from being a founder-led company to a management team-led company. Venturity has been founder-led since its start in 2001, so this shift marks an important step in our evolution. In addition to my transition, we also promoted three individuals to our management team. We are building a leadership infrastructure as well as opportunities for people to grow and evolve in their careers at Venturity. That purposeful focus enables us to attract top performers and investing in them allows us to put our best foot forward with our clients.
We are also prioritizing our commitment to the comprehensive solutions and advisory spaces where we serve as consultants for clients. We aim to have a seat at our clients’ tables and be involved in their decision-making processes through our financial insights and the tools we have in place. We have developed “Client Experience” programs to have relationships and purposeful conversations with clients as well as a similar internal initiative, “Trusting Teams”, to ensure that we are respectful of each other and effectively collaborate to better serve our clients.
