Brixx = a GREAT foundation for young, fast-growing businesses
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We're an M&A Search / Buy & Build and Turnaround business. We work with Family Offices, Private Equity and Venture Capital to seek out and acquire businesses. In pretty much every case, there is a need to reconstruct the financial modelling in use in the venture altogether. Very often, the businesses are operating on systems and processes built by accountants, for accountants. To the broader management team, they are a mind-melt of spreadsheets and formulae, peppered with meaningless labels and descriptions in the day-to-day whirlwind of business operations. This leads to a number of issues when it comes to accurately forecasting anything from your pricing strategy, your "cost to serve" and your whole go-to-market strategy. Brixx wins in my mind as it combines ALL of these important elements into its model, but in a way which permits the non-finance members of the management team to focus on the key business drivers, whilst providing them a clear view of the impact of day-to-day decisions on the financial position (particularly profitability and actual cash position) of the business.Ive now introduced Brixx into a range of national and international ventures and the intuitive dashboards and simple-to-populate input fields have often taken the business on a highly productive journey. These include helping an international business understand its cost to serve - leading to an offshoring cost benefit realisation which reduced operating costs by £2M per annum. Another understood the risks inherent with it's over-leveraged balance sheet and adapted its pricing strategy to directly make inroads into debt reduction, saving the business from closure. Many others simply have been able to turn the often uninteligible language of finance into simple OKRs and KPIs that mean something to the operational leaders of their business with profound affects.
Pros
- Dashboards - simply excellent, highly visual
- Configurable overview - permits management to understand the financial impact of any decision
- Highly collaborative - multiple user access and administration permits multi-workstream sharing
- Highly reliable - in all of the iterations we have used, we've never had any downtime
Cons
- Continue to add more options for the dashboards
- Optimise dashboards for mobile view
- Integration with a broader range of accounting packages
Likelihood to Recommend
Brixx works exceptionally well in young, growing businesses where detailed finance expertise might not be available at the Board. It's structure also works well in fast-paced environments where there is the need to quickly determine the financial viability of a business venture, new product/service or programme.
I have no scenarios where it is less well suited. The only "push-back" Ive ever had has been from spreadsheet obsessed "old school" finance officers, but in most cases, once they are fully exposed to the Brixx platform, their level of scepticism decreases sharply - but there are always those out there wedded to MS Excel...