Planful, Redwood City, California: Grant Halloran, CEO

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Some CEOs are managers. Others are known for their ability to lead. A rare few may even reshape the long-term direction of their company. It takes a truly exceptional CEO, however, to perceive trends in the marketplace, identify how modern technologies can solve customer needs, and lead their organizations to innovations that change the future of their industry. This is what Grant Halloran is accomplishing as CEO of Planful.

Halloran was appointed CEO after Host Analytics was purchased by Vector Capital in early 2019. Halloran has continually and effectively applied his vision for the financial planning and analytics (FP&A) profession, transforming his company from good to great and enabling it to achieve profitability in a short period of time. Halloran personally conceived the name “Planful,” a word that refers to one of the primary characteristics of finance and accounting professionals, to represent the personality and mission of his company.

As a CEO, “culture” is at the forefront of his leadership style. Working hand-in-hand with Chief of Staff and Chief People Officer, Melissa Dreuth, Halloran has revamped Planful’s employee programs, earning Great Place to Work® honors in each of its international regions. Halloran also wrote a culture book for employees, “The Planful Way,” which puts the company’s values into practice and guides employees toward “behaviors of greatness.” 

Beginning with his pioneering concept of Continuous Planning—a rethinking of the corporate planning discipline to reflect the non-stop nature of business and the need for agility in planning—Halloran has stayed one step ahead of the market. In 2021, he correctly foresaw the ways in which the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) was evolving: CFOs were being increasingly asked to increase their participation in decisions outside of their own departments, including HR, operations, marketing, R&D and other key functions.

At the same time, Halloran applied a startup mentality to Planful and took note of the nascent impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) on legacy enterprise software. He understood not only the ways in which AI/ML could improve speed, insight, and accuracy in business processes, but also how critical it would be for these advanced technologies to be tailored to highly complex disciplines—particularly for finance, a field that simply cannot depend on off-the-shelf solutions.

Synthesizing these developments, in early 2021, Halloran challenged Planful’s product team toward rapid achievement, enabling them to invent Planful: Predict, the first and only AI/ML suite in the FP&A industry. Predict: Signals and Predict: Projections save FP&A professionals hundreds of hours of tedious work, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks. Just as important, however, they help CFOs and their teams to increase their command of the operational data that is so critical to modern business.

Halloran led his company to co-opt yet another aspect of financial planning in 2022, by acquiring Plannuh, a cloud solution renowned for excellence in marketing performance management. With Plannuh, Planful expands its deep financial intelligence to include all elements of the marketing function, replacing basic spreadsheets with advanced planning tools that span marketing goals, campaigns, budget, and performance metrics.

These major corporate advances have further established Planful as the leader in FP&A innovation. As Planful’s visionary, Halloran has unleashed the creativity of his organization to solve long-standing pain points for the Office of the CFO and powerfully influenced the effectiveness of FP&A professionals around the world.

The impact of Planful’s ideas have taken the company’s market successes this year to new heights. Corporate customers around the globe have implemented Planful: Predict, showing the company’s expansion into global regions. The company has consistently announced record-breaking growth quarter-over-quarter and continues to transform the FP&A industry as a profitable, innovative company under Halloran’s leadership.

1. Redefined Planful’s corporate mission and vision, building a foundation for a lasting and award-winning company culture 

   • Grant authored “The Planful Way” book, which firmly established the company’s values and gave employees a clear way to achieve greatness at the company.

   • Under Grant’s leadership, Planful earned a 98% employee satisfaction rating from Fortune Great Place to Work. This is attributed to Grant’s leadership in transforming Planful’s traditional HR function to be the “People Team.” This team thought outside of the traditional HR box and started looking at employees as holistic humans. Through the introduction of new perks, celebrations of life’s milestones, varying kinds of time off, in-person employee development and various investments into the employee’s mental and physical health.

2. Established new corporate values that move the company’s culture forward: 

   • Customers: We put our customers first and strive to always do what is right for them.

   • Teams: We put our team ahead of ourselves, being humble, supportive and collaborative.

   • Ownership: We take personal ownership for getting the job done every time, while acknowledging and getting better from our mistakes.

   • Excellence: We strive for the highest levels of performance and do not compromise.

   • Progress: We have a bias for action, create momentum, and value continuous progress over perfection.

3. Executed a comprehensive corporate transformation strategy, leading to profitability and a record-setting two years:

   • Subscription bookings growth up 65% year-over-year in 2021

   • Increased new customer acquisitions by 95% year-over-year

   • Acquiring Plannuh in 2022, giving Planful leadership in marketing performance management, a new vertical for the company 

   • As well as other achievements and awards for clients and its technology, as noted later on in the application.

4. Quickened the pace of bringing innovative Planful products to a global market, transforming FP&A. 

   • Its consumer-centric innovations return hundreds of hours to the FP&A worker each year that would otherwise be spent in tedious manual work. More importantly, those improvements increase accuracy and make numbers, and the projections built on them, highly defensible. 

   • Accelerated product innovation aimed at upgrading platform performance with the filing of two patents: High Scale Processing of Ingested General Ledger data with "Delta Detection" and "Fast Aggregation and Ingestion of Multidimensional Data." These patents will enable Planful to better serve customers with large, complex data sets without compromising speed as they scale

   • Introduced “Planful: Predict” in 2021, a suite of AI/ML-based intelligence tools for FP&A professionals that changed the course of business planning, which led to new heights in growth metrics: 

     • Following a record-breaking year in 2021, subscription bookings in Q2 of 2022 beat the previous best-ever quarter by more than 20%

     • Customer expansion bookings for H1 of 2022 surged 41% year-over-year, as customer continue to extract more value and expand their use casts

     • Channel business bookings for H1 increased 47% year-over-year

     • Partner network members expanded by 25%

   • Introduced Planful Now during the height of the pandemic, a collection of quick-start packages enabling customers to implement critical Planful use cases in weeks instead of months, accelerating time to value

5. Planful strives to put its customers first and do what’s right for them. Grant instructed the team to do exactly that and in turn, drove exceptional customer results:

   • Set three quarterly customer growth records year-over-year in 2022: 

     • Expanded customer bookings by 70%, total customer count by 30%, and subscription bookings by 30%

   • Achieved 61% increase in customer bookings year-over-year for H1 2021, with one new customer added per day

   • Defined “Customers” as the #1 Planful value 

   • Won Big Intelligence Group’s Customer Service Excellence award in 2021

   • Planful achieved a Support CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score of 92%, as well as a 96% customer referenceability rate for Planful implementat

6. Established a global reseller channel, expanding into international markets

   • In 2021, tripled the size of the partner channel, with over 400% channel subscriptions bookings growth year-over-year and new partnerships with Acumatica, Microsoft, and Trintech

     • Increased roster of EMEA resellers by 200%, expanded company presence in the APAC region, and drove 80% customer growth in the UK and Europe

   • In 2022, further expanded Planful’s global partnership ecosystem, adding CFO Alliance, PRYZM, Bridging Business Technology Solutions, and more 

7. Under Grant’s leadership, Planful was recognized by many of the industry’s top analyst and peer-review organizations:

   • Named to the Constellation ShortList™ for Cloud-Based Planning Platforms for ten consecutive years

   • Named an Experience Leader in Dresner Advisory Services' Wisdom of Crowds Study, an award based on customer feedback of enterprise performance management solutions, for the 7th consecutive year