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“I’m pretty competitive and I like to win,” said John Vogelaar.
But when John joined Brokers International as their CFO in 2019, the 130-employee insurance brokerage wasn’t positioned to win. After nearly four decades, they’d just completed their first budget—on offline spreadsheets—but still didn’t know where revenue came from or where opportunities were. They closed months on the 21st.
“It was almost useless … Once we found out what our financials were, we were already a month behind.”
And when items constantly went into incorrect accounts, their finance team had to reclassify and resolve reporting discrepancies. John needed timely, trustworthy data—which he wasn’t getting.
“We didn't have great financial acumen. We didn't know how we made money. We didn't know how to slice and dice our information to make decisions. The visibility into the data was slow.”
And then, adding another layer to an already complex situation, the family-owned firm put Brokers out for sale.
In the midst of uncertainty, John was still excited. Brokers had never had a CFO with his high-growth experience. He cited “educating the business” as a top CFO priority. He welcomed this opportunity to “leverage his experience and apply those best practices” to educate his team and position Brokers to grow—and win. But John also knew that to do this, they needed a complete planning platform.
He had used Workday Adaptive Planning, but didn’t have enough institutional knowledge of Brokers’ operations yet, which implementing Adaptive—and its “inflexibility” according to John—would’ve required. Amid precarity in ownership and organizational structure, he wanted to retain flexibility in their FP&A processes and models. He chose Vena for its Excel native interface and flexible planning experience.
After implementing Vena, with automated spreadsheets for budgeting, forecasting and reporting, John eliminated any need for reclassifications, removing ambiguity and irregularities surrounding revenue and expenses.
With real-time access to a single source of truth, he doesn’t have to be active in budgeting like in previous roles. He only reviews financials near the month end to monitor for leading indicators, as Brokers now closes on their seventh business day—a nine-day improvement. It’s also accelerated their board reporting, on which they “used to spend days and days” but now takes under 10 minutes.
Brokers can now quickly reforecast in Vena. They reforecast revenue and OpEx every month. John expects to implement a company-wide 12- or 24-month rolling forecast soon, which is especially valuable for retaining flexibility.
As John became Brokers’s lead Vena manager, he knew a project-based process would cost him too much time—valuable time better spent on refining internal strategy. With limited resources, he didn’t want to overload his small finance and IT teams. Instead, he pursued Vena’s Expert Managed Services Plus (EMS+), a tailored and unique experience for Vena customers who lack appropriate time or resources. EMS+ provided Brokers with a dedicated Vena Expert, Alex Young, to serve as an extension to his team and maximize Vena’s impact on the organization.
When their new parent company came aboard, Brokers would’ve had to consolidate data manually by loading from Microsoft’s Business Central into NetSuite. Alex—using Vena’s ETL (extract, transform, load) connector—automated this process. Then, she redesigned and migrated Brokers’ chart of accounts and general ledger. Upon completing this process automation, she identified a gap in Brokers’ operations: lost revenue.
“They don’t invoice their customers,” explained Alex. “Because they get paid through their carrier partners from data feeds, I saw they were vulnerable to missing out on a lot of revenue. To find missed payments, we had to match the production with cash. I’ve been reconciling that production data with their cash receipts in Vena so they don’t have to manually validate millions of transactions every year.”
“I love the idea that we could use Vena for other things around data without involving our IT team,” John said. “We had no idea if we were getting paid on everything.”
As Brokers’s Vena Expert, Alex educates their team on intuitive ways to present their data and further data reconciliation opportunities.
“She understands our business,” said John. “I love being able to run ideas to her around business challenges that we have and have her bring solutions. It feels like she's a part of the team. I'm able to control our own destiny relative to our resources, which is always a good thing when you're looking to get stuff done on your own timeline … It’s felt like a good partnership.”
After exploring the addition of Power BI into their reporting stack, John realized he didn’t have enough expertise, nor did his team have the bandwidth to do this successfully. It would’ve taken their IT team “months and months to build.” Following a conversation with their Customer Success representative at Vena, John added Vena Insights (Vena’s intelligent reporting and analytics solution), which launched in three weeks.
By turning static reports into interactive dashboards—customized by audience, from analysts to C-Suite—Brokers can slice and dice data by carrier or customer, or drill down to project-based data in real time. They can answer questions immediately, much sooner than the end of the month as they were constrained to previously. Their users have uncovered OpEx insights in real time.
Presenting their data in an interactive way has elevated Brokers’s financial acumen business-wide. “At the end of the day, I don't want to be the hold up relative to somebody being able to answer a question,” John said. “So the more that they can do that on their own just helps the business get better faster. Now, people are focused on the right thing.”
When Brokers was on the market for 18 months, John used their Vena data model to quickly forecast the company’s value—under a number of scenarios—for investors. He demonstrated their potential for growth and scalability in the first Quality of Earnings report he’s ever produced. “That was probably my proudest accomplishment that I managed that all on our own. And I don’t think I could’ve done it without Vena … a spreadsheet would’ve been insurmountable, relative to all those scenarios.”
Now as their Executive VP of Sales and Marketing (and CFO), John continues to educate the business on how to grow. In the last three years, their new parent company has acquired about 200 other business units, approximately 30 of which have similar product lines to Brokers.
A few months ago, John flew to their parent headquarters to deliver a presentation on how Brokers uses Vena to model revenue and COGS, demonstrating how to distill business units to key levers. The maturity of Brokers’ FP&A processes proved to be far ahead of those similar business units acquired by their parent company. It’s turned John into a central figure at the 5,000-employee enterprise. “It just solidified us as being subject matter experts,” he said.
With an IPO and subsequent business consolidation looming, he’s proud that his educating the Brokers finance team has prepared them for larger opportunities in the future—made possible by shifting their time from reclassifications to analysis. One discovery: His team eliminated a product that created recurring challenges for their operations team. It was sold by only 0.25% of their sales team.
And these faster insights have paid off: last year was Brokers’ best year financially. This year, they’re on track to achieve a 60% revenue growth YoY.
John acknowledged that financials are important to winning, but emphasized that driving the best financial outcomes and “rowing in the same direction” requires:
“That’s all part of winning—and it's super exciting; we're doing a ton of that across the business. Vena's at the core of us winning. And making my life easier? Well, that's winning in of itself.”