Cfo Thought Leader

The way Ken Stillwell tells it, his career as a CFO can be divided into two distinct worlds: the world before ARR and the world after ARR. ARR, of course, is the acronymic identifier for the widely used SaaS metric known as annual recurring revenue. Stillwell prefers to put his own twist on the acronym by declaring its actual meaning to be annual recurring relationships—as in client relationships. Says Stillwell: “Whatever metric you use to measure recurring relationships is really misunderstood in the marketplace until you start to track it.” What happens next has led many a finance leader to shout, “Where have you been all my life!” Or so Stillwell might have us believe in light of his evident passion for the metric and the singular emphasis that he places on it when asked about the career chapter that he has opened as CFO of Pegasystems, a firm specializing in customer engagement solutions. “Once CFOs track it and begin reporting it, its value becomes so obvious—not just the value of the metric, but also t