Case Study: Interview with Johannes Benz, CFO at RAIDBOXES

Lightning-fast, secure and sustainable managed WordPress hosting – that is what it says on the website of RAIDBOXES. The founding team planted the seed of this idea back in 2013, and the first prototype followed in 2014. After that came learning, growing and developing, until in 2016 Europe’s largest early-stage investor, the High-Tech Gründerfonds, came on board with a seed investment.

With this investment and the commitment of the team, RAIDBOXES made the leap to become the number one WordPress hosting specialist in the DACH region. From our point of view, the sustainability approach taken by RAIDBOXES is particularly noteworthy. Climate-positive hosting is what the website says. RAIDBOXES states that a tree is planted for every WordPress site it hosts!

We spoke with Johannes Benz, one of the founders of RAIDBOXES and CFO of the company, about liquidity and the challenges of being a CFO.

Hello Johannes, you are CFO at RAIDBOXES. RAIDBOXES is all about “managed WordPress hosting”! Would you tell us briefly what that involves?

RAIDBOXES gives our customers more freedom by using our software to take the work of managing their WordPress websites off their hands. At the same time, after a free migration, websites are on average almost twice as fast.

You are the CFO of a fast-growing company in the high technology sector. What particular challenges does this business model pose for you as CFO?

As CFO, two things are especially important to me. On the one hand I need good budget control, since marketing expenditure in particular is considerable and the team members need an overview of how much budget they still have available.

On the other hand I need a good overview of the company’s liquidity at all times, so that I can make financial decisions at any moment. That is particularly relevant when we are approaching break-even, but just as relevant when unplanned budgets are to be created.

You closed a financing round at the beginning of the year. Congratulations again! Could you briefly describe how that process went from the CFO’s point of view?

Thank you! The process from a CFO’s point of view is probably always annoying. Fundraising processes always require a great deal of time, which is then missing in day-to-day business and in the work with customers. Without a good team behind you, everything would come to a standstill here.

And how important is the topic of liquidity for you? I imagine there is a time before and a time after the financing round?

Correct. Liquidity management is always important. Before the financing round it is of course more critical, because a hard cash-out can potentially occur. Here liquidity has to be managed to the penny.

After a financing round it is more a matter of establishing how much room there is to fully exploit unexpectedly positive developments in the form of a higher marketing budget, in order to achieve maximum growth without overreaching.

What advantages do you at RAIDBOXES see from using COMMITLY?

COMMITLY really is the tool I had been wishing for over the past four years. I always wondered why there was no suitable liquidity software for SMEs.

For us, COMMITLY’s main advantage is greater accuracy in liquidity management and a big saving of time when making financial decisions.

Especially in the beginning you had intensive contact with our support team. How would you describe your experience there?

The experience was consistently positive. There are only very few companies that truly master support. Since outstanding support is one of the hallmarks of RAIDBOXES, I can judge this well. Product feedback was implemented extremely quickly, response times were good and a bug in the software was fixed within a short time, so that we could keep working fast.

Who do you think a tool like COMMITLY can be important for?

From my point of view it is very important for all small and medium-sized companies worldwide. Especially, of course, for business owners. Every one of them can make significantly better decisions, which means that entrepreneurial potential can be used far better and that, in some cases, serious risks can be averted.

Many thanks for the conversation!

Credits: Photo by RAIDBOXES