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What is Happening in the B2B Payment World in 2021?

payments

What is Happening in the B2B Payment World in 2021?

2020 was such an unexpected year. Even if you saw the pandemic coming, I doubt anyone would have guessed in March that we’d still be talking about it in 2021. Or grasped how much it would change pretty much everything. With that mindset, it almost seems ironic to make predictions. Still, some clear trends in B2B payments have emerged from the year’s events and are likely to unfold in the next twelve months. These are some of the trends that I see taking the driver’s seat in payment automation this year:

Checks Payments are Losing their Luster

The payment automation business case has largely focused on cost savings and AP efficiency. COVID-19 and remote work bolstered that business case—for safety purposes, many companies still hesitate to send employees to the office to cut checks. But what we’re hearing even more is that their suppliers don’t want to receive checks, and they’re asking buyers to start making payments by ACH. With suppliers adopting digital payments at a more significant rate, it feels like we’ve reached the tipping point where checks are becoming obsolete on a broader scale.

ACH Pain Hits Home

As organizations pay more suppliers by ACH credit, they realize the true cost of ACH payments and the risks around them. At $.25-.50 per transaction, ACH looks cheap, but when you consider the time, expense, and liability of supplier enablement, the real cost ends somewhere between $1.40 and $3.79—similar to what it costs to process a check. And that doesn’t include the cost of fraud prevention. ACH payment fraud is on the rise—particularly Vendor Email Compromise (VEC) schemes, where scammers pose as vendors and convince AP teams to send ACHs to fraudulent bank accounts.

Most enterprises have mature controls around check processes, and banks offer controls via Positive Pay and Positive Payee. However, those controls don’t always exist for ACH, and banks often struggle to offer fraud protection for this payment type simply because check fraud was the main focus for so long. But now ACH fraud is rising, and the risk is greater than with checks because the ACH payment process is worlds faster. It’s almost impossible to recover stolen funds if you don’t recognize the problem before the funds reach the bad actors. All these challenges are likely to push more organizations toward outsourcing their payment process to alleviate their overworked teams.

Digital Transformation Ripple Effects

We’re likely to see businesses sorting through some ripple effects in 2021. Organizations had to move forward urgently, and there wasn’t time to plan for some of the changes that would normally take time to implement.

There may also be impacts on external stakeholders. I think we’ll see similar ripple effects from rapid, tactical digitization across departments and industries. That will lead to a second, more strategic wave of transformation and automation with solution providers addressing emerging needs.

Electronic Data Speeds AR Processes

One of the hidden reasons checks held onto their popularity for so long is that they’re easy for AR to reconcile. The funds and data appear simultaneously, with the remittance data right on the check stub. From there, AR knows exactly how to apply the funds against their invoices. If they have a lockbox service with their bank, they don’t even have to key in the check details.

Until recently, that simplicity didn’t translate to ACH payments. AP staff would see ACH deposits in their account, but they wouldn’t necessarily be told how to apply them, because the data didn’t travel with the payment. NACHA (National Automated Clearing House Association) and the RTP (Real-Time Payments) network have improved ACH remittance data transfer. Although the number of fields and characters are limited, it’s a big step in the right direction.

Digitization Unlocks Supply Chain Financing

When it comes to supply chain financing, the U.S. is behind the times when compared to Europe, which has had electronic invoicing in place for a while. There’s a massive opportunity in the U.S. to create more fluidity and working capital for suppliers and buyers alike by using data to accomplish a faster and more dynamic kind of underwriting.

Smarter systems with access to the whole data stream—from PO issuing to payment transacting—can support pre-approved discount and financing options. This wasn’t possible in a paper-based environment, but we’ll see more of these offerings as businesses digitize their data.

A Transactional Social Network for Business

It’s becoming old-fashioned to think of buyers and suppliers—and AP and AR—as separate and independent organizations. Every AP team has a corresponding AR team. All companies are both buyers and suppliers. By looking at all connections between them, you start to see the huge social network of finance professionals behind the constant exchange of funds, POs, invoices, contracts, and other documents. However, for all the highly sensitive data, businesses are not equipped to handle these as securely as they should.

Some financial companies are using the B2B social networking concept to build proto versions of a “Facebook for Business” into their product. Still, we have yet to see any with broader functionality or mass adoption.

Whether a collection of technology firms share their vast network, or a single company creates and markets the right solution, the market is ready for a new business standard. Somebody is going to create a platform that brings businesses out of the virtual Dark Age and into a Renaissance—and it will be very successful when they do.

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Josh Cyphers is the President of Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company.  For the past 20 years, Josh has managed successful growth for a variety of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies.  Prior to Nvoicepay, Josh held leadership roles at Microsoft, Nike, Fiserv, and several growth-stage technology companies.  Josh is a lapsed CPA and has a BS in Economics from Eastern Oregon University.

fraud

Here are the Top Tips for Preventing ACH Credit Fraud

Forced to work from home during COVID-19, accounts payable departments have accelerated plans to move away from paper checks and pay more of their suppliers by ACH. That, in turn, accelerated another trend: fraud. Through social engineering, fraud attacks on ACH credits are most commonly known as Business Email Compromises or BECs.

According to the 2020 AFP Payments and Fraud Control Survey Report, for the first time, in 2019, BEC schemes were the most common type of fraud attack experienced, with 75 percent of organizations experiencing an attack and 54 percent of those reporting financial losses. ACH credits—outgoing payments from buyer to supplier—were targeted in 37 percent of BEC schemes.

The problem has only gotten worse in 2020. In the September edition of their Fraud in the Wake of COVID-19 Benchmarking Report, the ACFE reports that 90 percent of respondents have seen an increase in cyber fraud frequency from July through August. This included BECs.

Three-quarters of respondents said that preventing and detecting fraud has become more difficult in the current environment, and more than 90 percent expect attacks to increase. Organizations are under siege, and nearly one-third have received no guidance from banking partners about mitigating ACH credit risks.

What can organizations do?

Defeating BECs requires a multi-pronged approach. Ongoing anti-fraud training is important because these emails are getting more convincing every day. Fraudsters have become experts in user data and A/B testing, which reduces elements that alert their victims of illegitimate changes to their accounts. Strong internal controls are also important and network security, which prevents parties from gaining access to internal systems.

Here are four ways to help reduce your risk of ACH credit fraud.

1. Handle with Care

Thwarting ACH credit fraud is all about handling supplier banking data securely, which accounts payable must have on hand to transmit their payment file to the bank. This data is often stored in the ERP system, or sometimes on an Excel spreadsheet, where AP staff has been recorded during supplier onboarding. Sometimes it’s stored when a supplier updates their information. Fraudulent change requests are one of the most frequent avenues of attack.

Let’s say you’ve got a new person in accounts payable who isn’t fully trained yet. This person gets an email from a supplier, asking to update their bank account information.

Your new hire, eager to please, fulfills the request, inputting a new routing number and bank account, unaware that a million-dollar payment to that supplier is going out the next day. Nobody realizes what’s happened until two weeks later when the real supplier calls, asking for payment.

By then, it’s too late to reel ACH payments back in. You can call the FBI and the bank. They may try to help you, but if the thieves are sophisticated enough, they’ve already moved the money to offshore accounts, and it’s completely gone.

2. Secure Information

You should never use an unsecured email for banking information updates, although a surprising number of companies still do. It’s too easy for a hacker to intercept one of those emails and use the information within it for their own means. If they get contact or bank account information, they can pose as legitimate suppliers and circumvent internal controls. Some businesses even keep information in spreadsheets or their ERPs, but systems like those aren’t designed to store data securely.

Some companies allow suppliers to update their own information in supplier portals. That might work, provided that companies manage secure portal access and verify all updates. However, if suppliers can log in and update information, it’s likely that hackers can access the same information with very little resistance.

The most sophisticated approach that I’ve seen so far includes a trained procurement team, who verifies and validates all changes that come through.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this approach. It’s a big IT investment with plenty of labor asks. Even then, it’s still prone to internal fraud. At the end of the day, even the best systems will still have their risks. The goal is to minimize them.

3. Look at Fees

Companies often try to shift the risk and time burden to others, with some success. For example, they may choose to pay their suppliers by card., which puts the risk on credit card networks. In cases of card fraud, it’s more likely that payments can be canceled or refunded.

Virtual cards offer even more security because they provide unique numbers, which can only be used by a specified supplier for a specified amount. The big drawback is that not all suppliers accept cards—there are fees to consider.

An organization I’m familiar with pays many of its suppliers with PayPal. Their supplier­­­­—most of them small businesses—are located around the world. AP doesn’t have the time or staff to verify payment information, validate bank accounts, and deal with ongoing updates. As the intermediary, PayPal handles all that and guarantees that the funds go to the right place. But, here again, suppliers pay a hefty fee—in the neighborhood of three percent.

4. Shift the Risk

There really is no perfect system in place, which is why we’re seeing ACH credit fraud rise in tandem with the rise in ACH payments. But there is a perfect way to shift the risk to companies that are built to withstand the verification and validation burdens. Today’s payment automation providers manage supplier information, so individual companies no longer have to spend valuable time on it. It’s similar to handing the reins to IT and procurement departments to lock down the database and institute controls. The difference is that working with a provider removes the time investment and liability.

Think of payment automation providers as a means to outsource risk. Their sole focus is to ensure secure, on-time payments to your suppliers without causing costly overhead. They have perfected the systems and processes for hundreds of thousands of AP departments across the United States, and in ways that businesses would be hard-pressed to replicate.

Businesses used to worry about check fraud above all else. While they still have to pay attention to that aspect, it’s become a low-tech form of fraud that’s easy to understand and plan for. As companies shift to electronic payment means, they’re increasingly experiencing sophisticated cyberattacks, which target much larger sums and are harder to defend against. With such attacks growing, businesses may find that outsourcing professionals is the best defense.

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Josh Cyphers is the President of Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company.  For the past 20 years, Josh has managed successful growth for a variety of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies.  Prior to Nvoicepay, Josh held leadership roles at Microsoft, Nike, Fiserv, and several growth-stage technology companies.  Josh is a lapsed CPA and has a BS in Economics from Eastern Oregon University.

B2B

LATEST: 2020 is Shifting the B2B Payments Scene

B2B payments have historically been slow to adapt to automated payments but COVID may be the vehicle to forever change how business payments are processed. Josh Cyphers, President of Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR company that transforms the way firms pay their suppliers, provides insights into the changes and trends businesses are experiencing in B2B and mobile payments and how it’s impacting businesses moving forward.

What are some of the big trends driving B2B payments?

Paper checks still reign supreme in B2B payments, but COVID has created a compelling event that is really pushing companies toward fully automating payments. This is a big shift. Over the course of the last 10 to 15 years, check use has been ticking down ever so slowly. According to the 2019 AFP Electronic Payments Survey Report, organizations made 42 percent of their supplier payments by check in 2019, down from 81 percent in 2004.

Now that accounts payable departments are working remotely, companies are trying to minimize the amount of manual work that requires trips to the office, or to employee’s homes to get them to sign checks. Suppliers are asking to be paid electronically because they get the money faster and they don’t have to go to the bank. It will be interesting to see the 2020 AFP report and see if the pandemic pushes organizations to finally give up checks.

The other thing that’s happening is an extreme focus on managing cash. Given the economic environment we’re in, a lot of companies are looking for ways to conserve cash. They’re looking at the timing of payments; extending payment terms to suppliers or delaying payments. With an automated solution, all of the payment approvals and workflow are online, and you have visibility into every payment as it moves through the system, and that gives you precision control over cash flow.

What are some innovations you’ve noticed in contactless payments lately?

In B2B payments, I would define contactless as not having to do manual work. Cloud-based software is enabling accounts payable departments to automate work they’ve previously had to do manually. That includes the handling of paper checks but also a lot of the work that goes into electronic payments as they’ve historically been done through banks. For example, if you want to do ACH payments, you have to pick up the phone or send out emails and collect suppliers’ banking information and probably manually key that into a system. For card payments, you have to phone or email to find out who will take a card payment, and then you might have to phone the supplier with the card number, and then they enter it into a terminal. There’s a surprising amount of manual work that has to be done to get the funds to move electronically through the banking system.

The cloud is what is enabling payment automation providers to transform that disjointed process, with all its manual touchpoints, into a single automated workflow.

 

The cloud also makes implementation very fast and easy, so automating payments is something that an organization can now accomplish in a matter of weeks.

How has COVID impacted mobile payments?

Having a cloud-based solution allows accounts payable professionals to make payments anytime, anywhere. But up until COVID, that kind of mobile capability was a nice to have, not a must-have for business payments. I’ve never in my finance career seen an AP team that was completely remote. With everyone in the office, mobile just wasn’t a consideration. The construction industry is one exception; in that industry, many of the people who approve payments are out in the field, so mobile capabilities are a real selling point for a payment solution. Now that AP teams have been out of the office, every industry is looking for payment solutions that allow them to work remotely as much as possible.

What do you see as the biggest future trend for mobile payments?

B2B payments are about ten times as big as consumer payments, yet the adoption of cloud-based solutions is still in the single digits. Given the size of the market, the adoption of mobile payments by businesses is a big trend in and of itself.

Mobile payments have changed consumer life by making payment so easy and convenient that you hardly have to think about it. That has had a huge impact on how we live our lives and has really sped up commerce and increased our options. When you think about that same kind of frictionless, mobile payment experience becoming widespread in the business world, which it inevitably will, I think it will fuel all kinds of innovation and change.

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Josh Cyphers is the President of Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company. For the past 20 years, Josh has managed successful growth for a variety of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Prior to Nvoicepay, Josh held leadership roles at Microsoft, Nike, Fiserv, and several growth-stage technology companies. Josh is a lapsed CPA, and has a BS in Economics from Eastern Oregon University.

supplier

Why is the Supplier Experience Important in Payment Automation?

It’s a difficult time to be a supplier. As companies conserve cash amid difficult economic conditions, suppliers are often the ones who feel the financial strain. Payment terms get extended. Buyers seek to renegotiate contracts to optimize their processes and adapt to new solutions. But then their suppliers are left out of the discussion until they’re presented with their marching orders.

Even though a company’s first responsibility is to its bottom line, it cannot afford to forget that suppliers are ultimately responsible for their ability to deliver revenue. It’s especially important right now that companies take care of their suppliers for the supplier’s benefit as well as their own.

Nightmare Scenarios

If suppliers don’t get paid in a way that works well in their processes and systems, it causes many nightmares for their accounts receivable team. Those nightmares can spread throughout the organization, causing stress and frustration. That frustration sometimes manifests as a conflict between buyers and suppliers. In my prior finance roles, I saw my fair share of suppliers who went to great lengths to make their dissatisfaction known, from verbally assaulting my unsuspecting colleagues to threatening lawsuits.

When suppliers go to these lengths, it’s because they’re desperate for action on the buyer’s part. In today’s environment, their distress is twofold. Payment amounts that seem negligible to buyers make a significant difference to suppliers. The constant flow of payments from AP to AR teams has slowed as companies conserve their funds as long as possible. The ebb and flow of this process has always been present—it’s how many companies do business. But this year, suppliers are feeling the strain more than usual.

Increased Collection Pressure

In 2001 and during the Great Recession, we saw that when the economy struggles, finance departments add aggressive collections specialists to their accounts receivable teams to collect overdue money from their customers, relationships aside.

In my experience, AP people are helpful, conscientious, and tough. They have to be, as the liaison between their company and its suppliers. Right now, they’re on the front lines, battling to conserve cash. If past downturns are any indication, they’re currently bogged down with calls, and morale is dipping as the number of irate callers spikes. What’s worse, that stress and emotional exhaustion can cause high turnover rates, which in turn leaves companies in a constant state of training new-hires—a drain on already-limited resources.

From a strategic standpoint, if you’re not getting payments to suppliers in a way that’s conducive to their operations, they could go out of business. They might also choose to stop working with your company altogether. To them, not all customers are ideal, and as more of them abuse the “customer is always right” notion, suppliers have to withhold the benefit of the doubt and act in self-preservation.

I’ve experienced both positive and negative aspects of the financial battle. On the one hand, I’ve negotiated with large retailers who ground businesses down to the thinnest margins. Smaller companies who rely on their enterprise customers to stay afloat are often forced to accommodate them, knowing that they are expendable and replaceable. Conversely, I’ve worked with a global manufacturer that valued its supplier relationships and would only offer early payment discounts and supply chain financing if they knew it would benefit the supplier. This company holds stress-free, decades-long relationships.

When suppliers don’t get paid on time, they may decide to deprioritize the offending customers. By becoming a nuisance in their process, your supply chain could feel the impact. Ultimately, this translates to your inability to generate revenue.

Buyers Care

Fortunately, more companies seem to value their supplier relationships than not. I recently participated in a third-party study to understand what potential payment automation buyers value the most about adopting such a solution. Supplier experience took the third spot after efficiency and fraud protection.

Supplier experience appears in our buyer persona research too. When I meet with customers, they want to ensure that we treat their suppliers well. It’s not only part of the company culture they wish to instill in all of their relationships, but they also worry about the impact on their AP team and the supply chain if something goes wrong. They understand any economic impact on their suppliers ultimately translates to higher prices.

Supplier Experience Now

Supplier experience has always been a crucial part of our value proposition as a payment automation solution, and why we continue to focus on building upon the improvements we have already implemented.

We have a dedicated team that supports suppliers on behalf of each customer. Because many customers share the same suppliers, we act as the main point of contact for all of them, which reduces the number of touchpoints a supplier must make to resolve payment issues or update contact or financial information. At the same time, we’re flexible. Some of our customers have invested deeply in their supplier relationships, and they still prefer to be involved in communications. In those cases, we don’t have to be the single point of contact. Suppliers can contact us or their customer’s AP team—whichever suits them.

For suppliers with hundreds of customers in our network—which is common in verticals such as automotive, construction, and technology—we even offer consolidated payments. For example, we combine all their incoming payments into one deposit and supply a data-rich file for easy reconciliation, right down to the customer and invoice level. This data is delivered either through our payment portal or by email.

Creating a Satisfying Experience

At Nvoicepay, we’re always looking at new methods for supporting customers and suppliers alike. It’s our goal to offer better payment products, faster payments, and more real-time data. Our most valuable report cards take supplier opinions into account, and we are proud to consistently receive satisfaction ratings above 98% from the suppliers who interact with us.

Buyers have immense power over suppliers, and sometimes they press that advantage hard. As a payment automation provider, we advocate for and support our customers—the buyers. However, we have found that supplier advocacy results in measurable success for all parties involved.

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Josh Cyphers is the President of Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company. For the past 20 years, Josh has managed successful growth for a variety of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Prior to Nvoicepay, Josh held leadership roles at Microsoft, Nike, Fiserv, and several growth-stage technology companies. Josh is a lapsed CPA, and has a BS in Economics from Eastern Oregon University.

payments

A Better Payments Readiness Model for the New World

Difficult economic times are ahead. We don’t know how difficult they’ll be, or how long they’ll last, but finance teams around the globe are bracing for them. Cash management and cost-cutting will be essential. Fraud protection—which is always a concern—will be even more important as criminals seek to capitalize on fear and confusion. If that wasn’t enough, companies have to support remote AP teams simultaneously.

By late March, a significant portion of AP staff had already begun working from home. This posed some challenges. There’s a long-held belief that anything related to the handling of company funds needs to happen inside the building. This widely accepted rule is supported by physical reality since many companies aren’t automated enough to support alternatives.

So paper invoices and expensive checks continue to send through the mail, and reference documents fill the cabinets. Even companies with cloud-based ERP systems may find them cumbersome to use when attempting to VPN in from home. AP still fields many supplier calls about payment errors or missing funds. For that, they rely on enterprise telephony systems, which are difficult to replicate in their own homes. Finally, there’s a lot of collaboration and teamwork that happens with accounts receivable, finance, and other functions, and a lot of that centers around moving paper.

Unsurprisingly, in a poll of 131 accounts payable professionals Nvoicepay conducted during a recent webcast on business continuity, 39 percent said the pandemic significantly impacted their operations. Nine percent said there was no impact because they still had to go into the office.

A second poll also found four key challenges accounts payable teams are working through as they implement remote payment operations:

The challenge is overwhelming. Based on our experience in the market, our product team has developed a four-part hierarchy called the “Supplier Payments Readiness Model” to help customers think through all the dimensions of their remote payment organization efforts.

1. Obtaining essential tools

In our poll, 26 percent of respondents reported that equipping their teams to work from home is a top focus, indicating teams are still struggling with this. People will need computers. There’s a spike in demand right now, so ideally, you have some already in your inventory. If not, work on building that stock for future preparedness.

Your team will need internet access and a home office setup, preferably a secure one. They’re going to need telephones and phone routing because those trying to contact your AP team will likely call your central office phone number.

They also need collaboration tools. With employees working remotely, you may run into productivity issues if you try to have everyone work via email.

Don’t forget to address inevitable morale issues proactively. Working remotely can be lonely and stressful if you’re used to be in the office with your colleagues all the time. And, with kids schooling from home, parents are being asked to play the role of educator along with their professional role. It’s a very challenging time. Think about establishing a regular team call, as well as frequent individual check-ins.

2. Establishing a remote workforce

Once you have remote capabilities set up, you’ll need to figure out your new workflow. The typical AP process has a lot of moving parts, some automated and some manual. Sketch out your whole process. Identify what you can currently do remotely, what can quickly become remote, and when you need people to come into the office. Designate those assignments, so you don’t have too many people showing up at once.

Start to look for technologies that can fill the gaps between manual processes, such as AP workflow systems, invoice ingestion systems, and payments automation. You may also want to make a case for a cloud-based ERP if your organization doesn’t have it, as well as e-invoicing to eliminate paper invoices. You want your team focused on cash management, not paper driving.

3. Providing visibility and control

As you redesign your workflows, re-evaluate your internal controls. Most established under the notion that people would be in the office, with locked filing cabinets and limited access to certain information. In a remote environment, you will probably need to put new controls in place.

Companies tend to hire more people in accounts receivable during a downturn, so there may be an uptick in inbound calls from suppliers trying to accelerate payment at the same time you’re attempting to conserve cash. Conversations between you and your suppliers need to happen so you can renegotiate terms and set them up for electronic payments. It’s best if you also work with internal business partners—such as treasury and procurement—to make sure that only prioritized payments are going out.

Maintaining internal controls will be very challenging unless you move to cloud-based technologies that give your team remote, role-based controls, visibility, and approval capabilities.

4. Mitigate payment fraud and risk

The convergence of three very challenging situations—generalized fear and chaos; hastily assembled remote work processes, and a tough economic environment—is creating a perfect storm for fraudsters to exploit. According to the 2019 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report, 80 percent of organizations surveyed said they experienced actual or attempted payment fraud in 2018. Eight percent of the respondents from that same survey said they had payment fraud losses of 0.5 to 1.5 percent of annual revenues.

This is already concerning since sophisticated cyberattacks on ACH and wire payments have been on the uptick. You want to shift vendors to electronic payments, but you also have to put new controls in place. Banks don’t provide the same positive pay or positive payee services on ACH and wire payments, and they don’t assume liability for fraud. The inability to recover those payments increases your risk. Paying your suppliers by virtual card will help you offset costs with rebates, and provide you with a more secure way to pay.

It’s anyone’s guess how long we are going to be in lockdown mode. With money tight, it’s tempting to look at these as stopgap business continuity measures that you don’t want to overinvest in. I would argue that investing in AP automation is long overdue. Even if everyone goes back to the office in a few months, do you want your employees to return to printing checks and shuffling paper? And what about the next crisis?

Forward-thinking companies have been adopting payment automation technologies precisely because they provide AP with cost savings, superior visibility and control, and fraud protection—everything that’s called for at this moment in time. They also allow you to maintain your operational workflow—even in a remote environment—without skipping a beat. It’s not just the right thing to do right now. It’s the right thing to do, period.

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Josh Cyphers is the Vice President of Product & Strategy for Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR Company. For the past 20 years, Josh has managed successful growth for a variety of companies, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies.