ROI’s Into the Corner Office Podcast: Powerhouse Middle Market CEOs Telling it Real—Unexpected Caree... Kevin Akeroyd, CEO, Sovos
Kevin Akeroyd is CEO of Sovos.
From a small town in Missouri to Stanford business school and 3-time CEO, Kevin Akeroyd is not the proverbial polished CEO. A man who is not afraid to go off message and proclaims, be “overt, loud and challenging” to get things done. A CEO who declares it his mission to “keep business leaders out of jail” by helping companies traverse the complex and sometimes dangerous waters of compliance. A leader who puts his money where his mouth is and approaches diversity not with PR platitudes but by personally funding an annual college fund for underprivileged youth.
With countless mergers and acquisitions under his belt and having worked for small venture-backed endeavors to being a division head for industry heavyweights like Oracle and Salesforce, Kevin is a builder who works to understand where companies are stagnating, where to innovate and find their break-through potential and ultimately how to move from point solution to platform.
Kevin built the enterprise stack for the Chief Communications Officer at Cision, the Chief Human Resource Officer at Magnit and now is working at Sovos to deliver the global compliance system of record for the Chief Financial Officer. The Sovos Compliance Cloud is the first and only platform to bring together tax compliance and regulatory reporting into a single view for business. At Sovos he is building a new category, a new line of business for compliance, and taking the industry on a journey to conquer the complexities and challenges of compliance.
Kevin’s leadership philosophy is that it’s not enough to be brilliant. Transparency and communication are paramount and it’s the job of the CEO to look around corners and see what’s coming. Bad CEOs let things happen and good CEOs make things happen and at the end of the day, everything is your fault. Kevin brings this level of accountability to his customers, partners and employees. His mission at Sovos is to evolve compliance from its current state of being a painful requirement for business to being a force for growth in every company, in every industry and in every country.