The number one reason why small businesses fail? Cash flow.
Owners often have little to no insight into their cash flow and there is constant friction between how quickly they receive customer payments and how long they can defer payments of their own. Without a dedicated finance manager, there is no-one to focus on these problems full time.
This is where Tola comes in. Created by co-founders Alen Cvisic and Guillaume Simard, Tola gives small business owners a consolidated, simple-to-use tool for managing their finances, giving them full control over when and how payments are made.
As the first and sixth employees of Pleo, a European expense management platform, Alen and Guillaume fully understood the challenges SMBs face and knew the value that Tola could bring.
We caught up with Alen to discuss building Tola, their US go-to-market strategy and why ‘humans in the loop’ are key to building trust with their customers.
Alen, what drove you to leave your role at Pleo and start your own company?
I’ve always had this urge to build things. I started my first company – an e-commerce business – when I was still in college and I’ve always loved the idea of going from zero to one.
But I joined Pleo as its first employee and thought the product was amazing. I felt that I would learn a lot more by joining this rocketship than starting my own thing. The culture at Pleo, in the early days, was very entrepreneurial and I learned a lot about the space, about creating new categories and also the SMBs we were selling to.
I’d experienced the ‘cash flow’ challenge that many SMBs face when I was running my first start-up. We’d collect payments from customers, then place orders with suppliers, creating a cycle of fluctuating cash flow. Some clients, especially large retailers, could secure 30, 60, or even 90-day payment terms, but our suppliers typically demanded payment within 15 days, leaving us in a constant cash crunch.
This is a common reason SMBs fail, and it made me question the real nature of the cash flow problem. Is it just a need for loans? If so, why are defaults so high in SMB lending? I believe it’s because many businesses don’t fully understand their cash flow or have the right tools to manage it. That’s why we created Tola – to focus on providing insights, tools, and flexibility to help businesses make smarter cash flow decisions.
How did you go about selecting your investors to join you on this journey?
My co-founder and I wanted to work with investors that understood our level of ambition and could support us as we go on this long journey.
Being founder driven was really important for us, too. We needed to pair ourselves with the right investors who understood how messy and unpredictable the journey is and who would back us during the ups and the downs.
You set up shop in the US. Tell us more about this decision.
There are a few factors behind our decision to build in the US. Firstly, B2B payments is a massive industry in the US; if you just capture 1% of the market, you’ll build a really big business. B2B payments are also still very manual, compared to Europe.
Needless to say that fintech in Europe is much more advanced compared to the States and, you know, it probably would be very logical for us to build in Europe. But the US has a lot more potential. I feel a lot of fintechs have been building really solid consumer and business banking businesses in Europe. But it’s hard when you build all these processes, comply with all different regulations, make the product ‘fit’ culturally, and then make that transatlantic leap. That’s why we decided to go and take a harder market – the US – from day one. We understand if we just get a few percent of that market, it’s a much bigger business potential.
Today, about half our employees are in North America and Canada. Everything that is customer related – customer support, onboarding, compliance, risk – is in the States.
And how have you tackled building a culture with a remote and globally distributed team?
We decided to be remote from day one. And it comes with its pros and cons.
In the early days, when you’re in the process of proving product market fit, it’s difficult not being in the same room. So we make sure we have team offsites regularly to instill our company culture. We also try to have daily catch ups, water cooler conversations, and certain rituals that can kind of facilitate a remote culture. It’s not just applying yourself professionally at work, but also a little bit personally so you can build relationships. And I think we’ve been good at that.
Hiring in the US was much harder in 2022, when we were just starting out and the markets were in a boom. There was just insane amounts of money being thrown at talent.
But the dynamic has changed dramatically in the past year. All the layoffs and the policies around coming back to the office after working remotely has left a big pool of really talented employees who moved out of the big cities to work from home. I see this as a great opportunity to snap up talent if you’re a remote company.
Switching gears to growth. You led the product-led-growth motion at Pleo. Is this the approach you’re taking for Tola too?
At Pleo, we actually onboarded the first thousands of companies by not having pure product-led-growth (PLG), but by having humans in the loop. There was a lot of handover between marketing, sales, customer support and compliance but it actually made us better.
Why? Because financial services is a business of trust. Having humans in the loop to help you – especially in the beginning – increases trust, retention and activation, which is really crucial. Because, let’s be honest, the easiest thing for people to do is sign up for a free trial and never do anything, right? You’re much more likely to be invested in the product, if you have humans helping facilitate you through that process.
So, that’s what I did at Tola as well. We try to guide people into the solution. We ensure customers are well taken care of, understand the platform and have connected the right tooling. Yes, these things take a little more time and are a little more costly at the beginning but ultimately it will lead to better customer retention, activation and also advocacy because the people will have a better experience.
That’s why I think it’s really important to not just go head-first on a PLG motion from the get go. That can come later.
You got a lot of praise for the brand your team built at Pleo. What have you learned from that experience?
Every touch point needs to be extremely high quality because, again, finance is the business of trust. People have to trust that this is a stable solution that is going to be here for a while and you’ve built something with care and craft. That’s why the first wave of fintech startups really doubled down on usability, easiness and friendliness, focusing on the UI and the UX experience.
At Pleo, it was all about people empowerment. We were very focused on humans and people because that’s not something traditional financial companies do. When you’re selling in B2B, you’re actually not selling to a business, you’re selling to a ‘Bob’. You have to talk to the person – Bob – on the other side, and we definitely implement this approach at Tola, just in a slightly different way.
For example, we help business owners think about some of their processes in simpler terms. I think accounting and financial technology has built these walled gardens of unnecessarily complex terminology to kind of fit their process in a certain box.
So, we talk to business owners in a more direct and more approachable way, across every piece of the product we have, and have invested a lot into the design of the platform.
Your experience at Pleo has taught you a lot. What do you think are the other benefits of being an operator before becoming a founder?
I think the biggest positive of going from operator to founder is that you’ve been through a successful journey of scale – in revenues, in product, in people – and you can see that it is doable. These things are really hard and they require a lot of resilience. They require a lot of inventiveness and they require a lot of energy. But you have seen that it’s possible. And I think if you’ve not been a part of that, it’s really hard to imagine how scaling is possible.
The other benefit is that you build a lot of knowledge in a certain sector – in our case, fintech – and also a lot of expertise in your field – in my case, marketing and growth. This domain expertise can be a blessing and curse when you become a founder though! As a domain expert, you need to let go. And it’s really hard to let go of the area where you’re really good.
The other drawback to being an operator first is that you haven’t been exposed to the bigger picture and what goes on behind the scenes. Sure, building technology requires product growth, distribution and strategy etc. It’s also about people – and people require quite a lot of time. Managing people cannot be an afterthought. You need to build a culture and you need to build the systems and processes to make sure people can do their jobs.
Well said. And last question, what are you most looking forward to this year for Tola?
Getting out to more people and developing more product features. We are, of course, looking into how AI can improve the product but we are mindful that it needs to genuinely add value for our customers and help them better manage their cash flow. It can’t just be a gimmick.
If you want to read more about Tola, you can visit their website here.
And you can read our other founder stories here.
