It had always taken Joe Randesi, Co-Founder and CEO, a week to prepare to present to the board. “I was intimately in our books because we have great finance people but nobody at the CFO level,” he says. “It was just an enormous amount of spreadsheet work—row-by-row analysis, tracking down numbers, and exporting the profit and loss statement from QuickBooks to forecast.”
This would have been fine if that was Joe’s full-time focus, but it wasn’t. As CEO, he had to oversee all operations for their agentic AI product and ensure their healthcare clients were seeing value. That’s why Joe hired Pilot for CFO services, which cut down that weeklong board prep to half a day. “Pilot saves me at least 15 hours every week,” he says. “It’s one of the best decisions I ever made.”
Joe knew he needed to wrestle his time back. “The message from my private equity firm and from everyone else I trust was, ‘It’s a misuse of your time to be a CFO.’ That's kind of what I was trying to do, and I'm not a CFO by any means,” says Joe. Yet he had to do this work to have the data he needed to make decisions about where to invest, where to pull back, and what to build or buy.
“It was an enormous amount of spreadsheet work and extremely frustrating,” Joe recalls. The reporting only grew more difficult as they scaled. What was difficult at six people became near impossible at 50. “I was running into situations where I couldn’t make decisions because I didn’t know the financials behind it,” he says. Neither his finance team nor Joe was trained as a CFO so they couldn’t know if their outputs were right or wrong. “I like to surround myself with people better than me at things and my finance person and I got to thinking, ‘Who’s smarter in this situation? Who can we turn to?’ That’s why we went to Pilot. Their CFO services team is top-tier.”
This isn’t Joe’s first startup and now, five years in, the rapid experimentation phase is giving way to refining what they know works. He engaged the Pilot CFO services team at a point where Element5 was no longer chasing product market fit and instead, was concerned with scale—how could they keep more customers? Upsell? Identify new offerings? Iterate toward greater and greater fit?
“After a bunch of implementations and activity in the product, you get to a point where you’re not surprised every day,” says Joe. “Because of that, you can be predictable. Because you can be predictable, you can build processes around that prediction and the operational governance around what we know is coming so we can manage different things. So at our stage, we need to know we’re planning appropriately and metrics are essential for that.”
To do this well, Element5 needed more than just the standard software metrics.
“There are the SaaS metrics like growth, annual recurring revenue (ARR), activation, and customer acquisition cost (CAC), and those are all good, but I feel the real challenge is in actually applying them to your business,” says Joe. “Every business acts differently and that’s where Pilot has been really helpful. Pilot has helped build out dashboards and a lot of models around subscriptions, retention, and churn in aggregate, and at the product level.”
Viewing the metrics by “level” is important if Joe wants to answer questions that actually matter to their growth. Aggregate subscriptions won’t tell him if demand is tapering off for a particular product, nor help him investigate why that is. Is it a fluke or a trend? Are customers churning because they changed their strategy or because Element5’s product is falling behind? With the new models, Joe can look at the SKU level to ask and answer questions, and segment with complete confidence.
“If you are relying on some basic software with canned metrics, you’d better have a canned business or you aren’t going to get what you need,” says Joe. “You need someone to take that extra step.”
Joe uses the Pilot-maintained models to answer:
Pilot also helps Element5 with reporting to their bank and a whole suite of financial planning and analysis work. “The financial modeling has been huge—that’s a ton of aggregation of inputs, but it also helps me think through the actuals and assumptions for cash runway,” says Joe. “I really can’t make decisions as a CEO without that data.”
“Pilot is the easy button. You’re probably Googling ‘CFO, fractional CFO, FP&A, bookkeeper,’ and Pilot is all of that,” says Joe. That’s because Pilot isn’t just great software—it’s a 50/50 mix of software and people applied to solve your startup’s unique problems, at each stage, with CFOs who have experience in venture, investment banking, and private equity.
“I vetted software applications instead of Pilot and I would not go with Pilot if it was just tech because you need someone to talk to,” says Joe. “I ping Pilot all the time. They’re in our Slack. They’re in our Google Docs. We go back and forth on things. They bring the tech side and they bring the people side and that’s what makes financial planning and analysis really work.”
“Plus,” he adds, “I think it’s fair to say that they do it at a reasonable rate. It’s really hard to hire a CFO who wants to do FP&A work and it’s hard to hire an FP&A person who can do CFO work. So, how else are you going to find that unicorn? Who isn’t super highly compensated?”
“So yeah, I’d say Pilot is the easy button. Pilot can also meet you on your journey, which was important, because we weren’t ready to hire a CFO full-time,” says Joe. “But also, my needs are different than they were three years ago and the Pilot relationship has evolved nicely. That’s been just a huge, huge benefit to have them, no doubt about it.”
Element5 is an AI automation platform that helps healthcare companies support caregivers, overcome staffing shortages, and save everyone from admin work.
