What factors cause clients to outgrow bookkeepers like QuickBooks and Pilot and hire a controller or a bookkeeper directly?

Outgrowing QuickBooks happens—at some complexity level, everybody moves to NetSuite. Pilot had to solve that problem of how we could support NetSuite.

As far as companies aging out of Pilot, I think it mostly happened for that reason. Like any company, you have churn, and you look at why your churn is happening. But there wasn't something systemic where once our company became so big we would have to leave Pilot. People would churn for all kinds of reasons.

I think one of the things that I came to appreciate was there are a lot of people who really would rather have a main street bookkeeper who they can call on the phone. Not everybody really wants the trade-offs that come with technology, like email support. There's some back and forth. "We need you to log into the system and tell us how to categorize these three transactions." Some customers react to that and they're like, "That's what I'm paying you for." So I think the thing I realized was not everybody wants a bookkeeping technology automation solution thing.

When you have that case I was talking about earlier where you have somebody who works for you and it's a third of their job—now, that's pretty complicated. That's more about selling the product to that person. It's very easy to sell to the startup founder who's currently doing their books and doesn't want to be doing their books anymore. That's one of your easier customers to win.