#118 - Erico Palmerino, CEO of Botkeeper - On growing 3x by winning the hearts of a ‘late adopter’ market

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to solve the demand/supply gap in the accounting industry. My guest is Enrico Palmerino, CEO of Botkeeper.

Enrico’s background has been in automation, decision trees, and accounting with a triple major from Babson College in Quantitative Methods, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management. While in college, he co-founded ThinkLite, which automated lighting analysis, design, and manufacturing. ThinkLite grew from dorm room to 46 on Inc.'s 500 List. A a result of that, Enrico was ranked 2nd among America's Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 by Bloomberg Businessweek. After successfully exiting ThinkLite, he invested in a small accounting firm, joining as the company's Managing Director, and helped grow it from 7 to 40 people in 3 years. Beyond this, he advises, consults and invests in several startups.

Botkeeper caught my eye with its claim to create the future of bookkeeping, and this triggered me to invite Enrico to my podcast. We explore what’s inhibiting the accounting industry from transforming, and why the combo of blending tech and people in the right way is the secret to a better future. We also discuss Enrico’s vision to what it takes to build a remarkable software business.

Here are some of his quotes:

There are two big problems that we're trying to solve in the accounting space:

The one being, just there's a major shortage of people to do the work.

The huge supply demand gap and by the numbers, at least in the US, you got exponentially more businesses forming year over year.

And then if that wasn't bad enough, the other challenge you have is that in many industries there's been this over-amplification of all these little micro niche apps for the accounting sector. All those apps don't talk to each other, which means more siloed data sets that require more manual entry, and an unpleasant experience.

So the big problem we're trying to solve is two things. First, how do we automate as much of the basic pre-accounting or compliance accounting and bookkeeping work? And then how do we consolidate the app stack [to] free up the limited supply of accountants that are out there, to do more critical thinking, consulting, advisory, and complex accounting.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How, by looking at the big picture “app-stack” of our ideal customers, we can find major opportunities for remarkable productivity improvements
2. That to solve the shrinking workforce problem we see in many industries we need to approach the problem from a different angle to really solve it.
3. How to orchestrate 3x growth in a market of “Late Adopters” by creating a pull effect.