25 Years In: What Building Venturity Has Taught Us About Growth

Twenty-five years ago, Venturity didn’t set out to reinvent accounting. The story started with a few clients who needed their books cleaned and handed back to them.

But six months later, the phone would ring again: those same books needed attention again.

Eventually, clients started asking: Can you just keep doing this?

And the answer to that question became Venturity.

Around the same time, technology made remote accounting possible. So, the idea was to build a team that served multiple companies in an office environment where accountants could work together, learn from one another, and gain exposure to different industries.

The concept was simple. Building it wasn’t.

None of us knew how long it would take, how much we’d learn along the way, or just how far that original idea would take us.

Twenty-five years later, the heart of the idea is still there. But what grew from it is more than we could’ve imagined.

Growth Takes Longer Than You Think

By 2006 and 2007, Venturity was growing quickly. As the company took off, we knew there was demand for our services. What we hadn’t figured out yet was how to keep up with growth at a pace the business could support.

We began hiring ahead of that growth. Then, the financial crisis hit in 2008. Clients cut costs. Some went out of business. Prospects stopped making decisions.

We had gotten too far out over our skis.

But that challenging period became part of The Venturity Way:

Growth shouldn’t happen for growth’s sake. It has to be supported by the people, leadership, and capital behind the business.

You need enough of the right people to serve clients, leaders who can handle greater complexity, and healthy profits to reinvest into your company.

Those three pieces also come with choices and tradeoffs. You can:

• bring in experienced leaders from outside,
• raise outside capital, or
• grow more slowly, but intentionally and consistently.

For example, leadership from outside could expand your capabilities. But you still have to integrate those people without losing the culture that made the company work in the first place.

Outside capital, on the other hand, can give you resources but it can also bring priorities that aren’t completely aligned with your own.

When it comes to growth and the elements that support it, you’re not just deciding how big you want the company to become. You’re making choices about what kind of company you want to be.

This same mindset has helped Venturity grow for 13 consecutive years and remain profitable for 23 out of our 25 years.

As we learned to be more intentional about our growth, we began recognizing the same challenge in the businesses we served. As our clients grew, their financial needs became more complex. Getting the accounting done was still essential, but increasingly, they needed more from us than that.

From Outsourced Accounting to a Strategic Resource

When Venturity started, outsourcing your accounting department was still a pretty foreign idea.

Most business owners thought about accounting as a person they hired, gave a desk, and trusted to get the job done. We proposed something different. We saw the finance function as a process and a resource that could give companies access to more insights than one or two people could typically provide in-house.

And over time, we realized our real value went much further.

Because our accountants work across multiple businesses, they see more. They can recognize patterns, bring different perspectives to a problem, and understand how the financials connect to what’s happening operationally.

Our conversations with clients began to change. And so did the way we review their finances.

Financial Summits had been part of the Venturity model from the beginning. But over time, they evolved from primarily reviewing the numbers into a more collaborative discussion about what those results mean for the business.

The numbers might tell us that margins moved or cash tightened. The more important conversation is why. We uncover what happened in the business, whether it’s temporary or a larger trend, and if anything needs to change.

During Summits, we move into forecasting, budgeting, and CFO advisory. All of this was built around the core principle that accounting shouldn’t exist for accounting’s sake. The information is there to help our clients answer questions and solve business problems.

Sometimes, we have the answers. Other times, our role is bringing the right person to the table. Either way, the finance function should be part of the conversation.

We may not directly make the decisions to hire, expand, invest, or acquire another company. But we can provide the context that leaders need to make those decisions with greater confidence.

Building Something Bigger

For a business to grow sustainably, you must increase the capabilities behind it.

Venturity had to do that internally, as well. In the beginning, much of the accounting knowledge and decision-making sat with small groups of people. But the company could only grow so far if the same people continued doing it all.

So we built teams, developed leaders, strengthened processes, and gradually pushed more knowledge and decision-making deeper into the organization.

One of the biggest shifts came in 2017, when we adopted open-book management. Instead of keeping conversations about growth, profitability, and performance largely at the leadership level, we began giving our team visibility into how the business actually worked.

Why? Because people are more likely to support what they help create. When team members understand what drives profitability, they can contribute to the business in a much more meaningful way.

Employee ownership became a natural extension of that. Giving people a stake in the company reinforces something that we learned from open-book management: sustainable growth works better when more people share responsibility for the outcome and benefit from its success.

Over the years, we’ve watched our clients encounter similar challenges as they grow.

The finance function that got you this far may not be the one that gets you to the next stage. A single person who once handled everything may suddenly be dealing with more transactions, more reporting requirements, more systems, and more questions from leadership.

Rather than adding a list of full-time hires, for many businesses it means upping the level of accounting and financial expertise that its growth now requires.

That’s ultimately what we’ve built inside Venturity and what we aim to provide for our clients: the capability to keep pace with the complexity of growth.

What Comes Next

If the first 25 years of growing Venturity taught us anything, it’s not to pretend we can predict what the next 25 will look like.

What we can see is where accounting is heading. Technology has been changing the profession since the abacus. AI and automation will take on more of the day-to-day work, but businesses still need the same things from their finance function: reliable information, sound judgement, context, and people they trust.

For Venturity, that’s a step closer in the direction we’ve already been heading: using strong accounting as the foundation to help clients make better decisions and give them a competitive advantage to spot opportunities sooner.

Twenty-five years in, our role is more important than ever. Even as the tools continue to change, this next chapter is about helping more businesses turn better financial information into confident growth.