Andrew Dickson is a long term thinker, Finance leader, and occasional world traveler on a journey from Ohio to Houston and now Boston across the Energy & startup world. At SevenRooms, he serves as the Senior Director of FP&A leading a small but mighty team working to bring better strategic planning practices to a growing hospitality software business.
Andrew grew up in Ohio, the youngest of three with two older (and influential) sisters. His spectator seat helped him learn how to avoid some potholes and fly under the family radar. He learned how to see the nuance in problems from his dad, a CPG marketer at companies like Procter & Gamble and Kroger. His mom was a nurse, caring and compassionate with multiple spreadsheet tabs worth of patience.
Andrew was always looking for “the answer” as an analytically minded youth so a career in numbers always made sense. In high school, after winning a coveted slot during a weekend competition for a full academic scholarship, he headed off to Ohio State as a pre-med major. Not bad, Andrew. Organic Chemistry helped him realize that Finance was his real calling instead though.
When he graduated from Ohio State, the economy was emerging from the great financial crisis and he sought out a big company where he could learn and grow. Shell recruited from the university and happened to have a great rotational program out of Houston. It checked all the boxes and Energy happens to be a fascinating industry.
At Shell, Andrew worked in FP&A before rotating to Import / Export Compliance. Next, he was chosen to go East for a year. Like, really East. At the age of 24 he applied to Shell’s STIA (short term international assignment) program and was chosen to go to Chennai, India. 8,500 miles from home, he learned about an entirely new culture & environment while adjusting to a new role. But it was one of the best years of his life. He got to travel all over Asia and stretch himself in ways he never had before.
While in Chennai he completed financial planning work for the Shell tax organization, developing KPIs to evaluate how efficiently & accurately they filed their tax returns across 90 different countries. After his year was up and he moved back to Houston, he had the opportunity to choose his next role in the exploration or “upstream” part of Shell’s business.
Shell has mature “downstream” business units but these “upstream” segments are the ones where teams are tasked with going out to find new natural resources & energy sources. Andrew was effectively a portfolio manager, analyzing their mix of exploration assets across maturities and probabilities of success. He was given the opportunity to think long term, a pretty rare chance so early in a Finance career. They were running 50 year plans to see how the business might look over the coming decades. Then they would roll it up into an operating plan.
While at Shell, he met his future wife who is from the Boston area. You know where this is headed. She was moving back to her hometown after a cancer research rotation in the Houston area at M.D. Anderson soon after they met. Andrew moved to Boston a few months after. He definitely made the right choice.
After another Energy role at National Grid that helped him bridge the transition, he wanted to try working in technology. HubSpot happened to be hiring for their growing FP&A team and Andrew landed a role doing revenue and P&L forecasting, bringing his multi-decade operational approach to their planning process. Andrew learned a ton about SaaS, a different industry & pace, working alongside HubSpot’s Investor Relations team and their CFO.
He learned everything he knows about SaaS from some awesome leaders & mentors about software economics and managing Wall Street expectations. The HubSpot team never missed a single quarter’s projection as a public company. He even got to lead a small team of his own, developing a unit economics analysis & annual planning process under Lauren O’Gorman, the leader of HubSpot’s FP&A team, and VP of FP&A at the time Pam Martinez.
After 3+ years in a Corporate FP&A role, Andrew got an opportunity to lead a team supporting the Sales organization. He helped support HubSpot’s Chief Sales Officer and their leadership team with everything from P&L expense forecasting, working on analyses with the Sales Ops team, and booking forecasting & commissions forecasting. When the software boom was slowing after COVID, he helped execute quota changes and learned a ton about GTM finance supporting a large scale sales organization.
Andrew leveraged all of that collective experience when he moved over to SevenRooms to lead the buildout of their financial planning & analysis function. SevenRooms is a hospitality and guest experience platform like OpenTable or Resy that helps restaurants manage tables, take reservations, do online ordering, etc.
He is working to institute best in class GTM practices and other financial controls so the team can go out and execute at a high level during their 2024 annual planning process and in the year to come.
Understanding Unit Economics
At HubSpot, Andrew learned a ton about how to measure the performance of a SaaS company by understanding its unit economics under the leadership of an industry leading FP&A team. He learned how to understand the collective inputs to help make better strategic planning decisions.
When breaking down unit economics, he stresses that you can’t just look at the LTV / CAC ratio. That’s often misunderstood in SaaS. In order to have a consistent analysis that captures the collective effort of what you’re putting in and the efficiency of the output you’re receiving back in one number, you need to go further.
On the input front, it takes a team effort to gather all of the necessary data. On the LTV side of the equation, you’ll need to understand the number of units sold, revenue per unit, and the effort it takes to service customers from the product & customer success departments.
From a cost perspective, it’s imperative to understand how easy it is to sell the product, efficiency of the sales department, and how costs like marketing expenses are deployed. Is there an account based marketing approach? Is it demand generation across various channels? Does PLG factor into the costs?
The main thing that Andrew believes is overlooked in a unit economic analysis is churn rate. If a startup can focus its activities on getting more customers to stick around for longer, everything gets a little bit easier. It sounds pretty straightforward, but measuring the allocation of your collective efforts gives you a clearer view into what is driving your success..or causing the problems.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Take Risks – “I would have told myself to take more early on, honestly. It’s easier to do early on when you have less personal responsibility. The risk I took was letting an organization tell me where to go, whether it was Texas or South India, and I was willing to do what I needed to do to speed up my career and learnings”
Make Yourself Useful – “Whether you’re new or have been at a company for 5 years, especially in smaller organizations, look to be a jack of all trades. When I joined HubSpot I knew nothing about SaaS, so to hit the ground running I learned all their FP&A system and became the subject matter expert so I could contribute to the team while I was climbing the learning curve everywhere else”
Be Human – “Over the last few years the world has been turned upside down. A lot of us have gone into remote settings where we’re not seeing everyone’s lives as much as we used to. Over Zoom, Slack, Doc, etc. you don’t see as much and it can feel robotic. It’s really important to remind ourselves that we’re coworkers and humans that need to be there for each other”
Andrew wants to keep working on opportunities where he can add value and build growing startups. Whether that is through FP&A, RevOps, or Operations he’s game as long as he can have an impact. Organizations like SevenRooms that are determined to grow efficiently is a place where he knows he can add a lot of value.
If you want to learn more about Andrew, you can find him running FP&A and fine tuning unit economics at SevenRooms, spending time with his wife in and around Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Andrew. Excited to see all the operational designs and long term planning you implement in the years ahead!