The following interview is a conversation we had with Fady Hawatmeh, Founder and CEO of Clockwork, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Nearly $3M Raised to Make Financial Modeling and Cash Flow Forecasting Easy
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Brett
So before we begin talking about what you’re building, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, absolutely. So I was born in Jordan, born in Aman Jordan, raised in St. Louis. And I’m a finance guy. Went and worked for Boeing in Fpna and strategy for the early half of my career, but I’ve been an entrepreneur since a kid. I started my first company literally when I was eleven years old. Grew up in my dad’s restaurants that he owned. He owned a couple of them in St. Louis and so always been around the entrepreneur side. After working at Boeing, started my own outsourced CFO consulting firm, which is essentially where Clockwork got its genesis.
Brett
I think you’re our first guest ever, come on. From Jordan. Jordan is one of my favorite countries. I went there a couple of years ago and did like a six day road trip just driving around and it was a blast. Do you ever go back?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, I go back pretty often. My dad’s entire family is still there and so I absolutely love going back there. It’s one of those few places that I go back and I get to kind of recenter myself and recenter and get back to really kind of refreshed vacation type.
Brett
How old were you when you moved?
Fady Hawatmeh
I was a kid, so pretty young, so three years old when we moved, but always kept going back pretty regularly.
Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. I saw on your LinkedIn you’re a recovering CFO. What’s the recovery process been like for you?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, it’s never easy recovering from anything and I think being the CFO of a company, I was the CFO of VC backed company out of Chicago and it was by far the most difficult position I’ve ever had in any company. Having been the CEO of my own, I would say being the CFO was more difficult because you’re just being pushed and pulled in so many different directions. And when you have to manage all of that plus what you think is right, it’s an extremely challenging position. And once you go through that experience, I don’t think you ever come out of it the same. And that’s kind of why I’ve monikered it being a recovering CFO.
Brett
Nice. Well, it’s definitely eye catching and memorable. So I like the branding play there and the marketing.
Fady Hawatmeh
Thank you.
Brett
Now let’s go through just a couple of questions I like to ask to better understand what makes you tick. So first one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, I’m going to go with Jeff Bezos. And I know people are completely polarized on him, but the thing that I love about Jeff Bezos is he had an investment banking background, started Amazon selling books, but it was his kind of forward thinking innovation, where initially everyone was like, what the heck are you doing selling books online? Like no one’s going to care about that. But he saw so much bigger and he didn’t let all of the noise getting started really affect him and then just kept on moving up and bigger and bigger and still stayed humble. I’m sure there’s a lot of arguments in recent years, but he stayed humble at the beginning, right? He stayed humble, really sticking to his proper vision of what he wanted and what he saw and was relentless in that pursuit. And I admire that a lot and really try and capture that with Clockwork.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, such a good call out and he’s definitely become controversial, which some of the controversy I don’t really fully understand just from my own personal perspective. But funny, all the people who criticize him are also the people who are powered by Amazon every day. I don’t know anyone who hates them enough to not take advantage of the convenience of everything that Amazon has built. Which is always kind of funny, I think.
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, I mean there was one of the famous athletes, I think it was one of the guys that won the Super Bowl or basketball or he goes, I had my beliefs before everyone had their opinions. And I absolutely love that where only when you get out there and you start doing something really powerful and really strong, then everyone has an opinion about it. But at the beginning it’s always kind of the battle in between the ears.
Brett
Nice. The battle between the ears, I love that. What about books? Are there any specific books that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be a business book or personal books as well?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, my number one favorite book, and I read a ton. I love reading. I think reading is by far one of the most underutilized pieces for any Founder especially. But there’s a book called Winning by Tim Grover. Tim Grover was Michael Jordan’s personal trainer when Michael Jordan was coming up. And Michael Jordan is the absolute goat. There is no argument about it. I think Michael Jordan is the greatest that ever did it on the basketball court. And Tim Grover offers a very unique perspective where michael Jordan was one of the first people to actually hire a personal trainer in basketball. Everyone else had the team’s trainers, and that’s what they got used to. But Michael Jordan knew he was on a different path and he needed someone that was dedicated solely for him, and that was Tim Grover. And so what Tim Grover does a phenomenal job of in the book is capturing the mindset of what it takes to be great and of the kind of once in a lifetime people like Steve Jobs, like Kobe Bryant, like Michael Jordan, like Jeff Bezos.
Fady Hawatmeh
And having that mindset is completely different than anything else you could ever do.
Brett
Nice. I read his first book. It was called relentless. I read that years ago and it was awesome. I didn’t realize that he has a new book. So thank you. That’ll keep me occupied this weekend. Yeah.
Fady Hawatmeh
There you go. Awesome.
Brett
Cool. Well, let’s change gears here a bit and let’s talk about Clockwork. So take me back to day one or day zero, or in the days leading up to actually launching the company. What was happening? What is that origin story? Yeah.
Fady Hawatmeh
After my career at Boeing, I went into oil and gas consulting, and then I launched my own outsourced CFO consulting firm. I was living the pain that Clockwork solves every single day. And I never really sought out to think, oh, one day I’m going to just run a tech company or I’m going to start a tech company. The opportunity with my outsource CFO consulting firm literally came up out of demand. I was the token finance guy among a bunch of entrepreneurs, and they kept asking me for free models, how can I hire this person? Should we fire these people? Should we lay off? How much money should we raise? When should we raise the money? All these different scenarios. And I was living in Excel and I was building on all these models that answered, what if, what if? And I was like, okay, there has to be a better way for this.
Fady Hawatmeh
There has to be a better, smarter way. So I initially turned that free advice into a consulting firm and started charging all the entrepreneurs and all the friends that, hey, if I’m going to do this right. And I tried to find a solution that could automate a bunch of the manual tasks that should be automated. They’re paying me for my CFO finance mind, and I’m stuck spending the majority of my hours and my time for them in Excel building these models. And I tried every single tool in the market. It’s always funny looking at my competitors. People are always asking, how do you compare to them? It’s like, Well, I know so much because I was a paying user for the majority of them. And you can tell they weren’t built by CFO. You can tell the people that built those software tools were not finance minded.
Fady Hawatmeh
And I really looked at it and I said, I have to change this. I have to change this industry. I have to change this market, because as a consultant, I can maybe consult for hundreds, maybe thousands of companies if I kept scaling my firm. But as a software, I can affect millions, and I can change the way that people really go about running a business. And that’s really the true mission of Clockwork. It’s making financial planning and analysis accessible for every business. And that was from day one back in 2015 when I first built the V, one of Clockwork all the way up until now, where our product is extremely robust and we have a lot of companies that we’re doing some pretty phenomenal things with.
Brett
That’s one thing from these interviews that I’ve walked away with is when it’s a Founder who’s personally experienced the problem and the pain that comes from using the legacy or current solutions. They’re really much more of a missionary when it comes, as opposed to a mercenary who’s just sitting there looking for a problem to solve, which is what I think a lot of kind of Silicone Valley does these days with a lot of founders where they’re just looking for a way to build a business. But sounds like for you, this is something that was very personal, and it was a personal pain that you had yourself.
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, I mean, 100%. It’s been very personal for me since a kid. Right. I grew up in a small business family. I know the troubles of running your own company because I literally saw it firsthand. I lived it ever since a kid. So it’s the culmination of my entire personal and professional experience rolled up in one. And the biggest importance is living the pain versus being a symptom of the pain. And our market right now, forecasting financial modeling fpna is extremely hot. There’s so much investment going into this. There’s so many new entrants coming into the space, but they’re all here because they think it’s an opportunistic time. Right. They’re throwing their hat in the ring and seeing if they can get a piece of this flavor of the month. That seems to be the flavor of the years. And it keeps getting bigger. It keeps getting more significant.
Fady Hawatmeh
And Clockwork and myself, we’re definitely one of the ones that are in this, because we know the pain, we know the market, we know the customer, and we’re here to stay. Right. It’s not a let me get in there and try and exit in a couple of years. This is a company that I want to IPO and make an absolutely massive company with that’s.
Brett
One thing that I think founders in hot markets have to deal with is just the competitors making a lot of noise. And I’ve seen that in other markets where you’ll all just see in TechCrunch every other day, some other company raises fu money from Tiger, and they’re talking about the market opportunity. So how do you just as the entrepreneur and Founder behind the company, how do you keep your mind focused and not have those types of things distract you when it feels like this market really is heating up and there could be some players coming in that are going to have money to really throw around?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, one of my advisors, I have a phenomenal team of advisors, and I’ll kind of clean it up. She said f the noise. And that was one of the biggest things that stuck with me, where it really is f the noise, because it’s nothing but noise. And there’s always going to be money. There’s always going to be more well funded companies. There’s always going to be more staffed up teams that have hundreds of people doing what you have maybe one or two people doing. But what they can’t replicate is the focus of what we know. And I know small businesses. I know companies that are between one and 25 million in revenue. I know what they are going through. And you can’t replicate my experience, and you can’t replicate my team’s experience. So when you take what I know, that’s something I don’t care if you raise $100 million, you cannot repeat that.
Fady Hawatmeh
And if I stay focused on doing what I need to do based on what I know and what I’ve lived for many years, no one can touch it. And so it really is staying focused and saying, f the noise.
Brett
And is that hard for you to do, or did that come naturally? I hear it sounds like, okay, yeah, just do that. But then the next day, the reality hits when you see the news, did you have to train your brain and train your mind to be able to truly say that and make it real?
Fady Hawatmeh
It’s an everyday thing. I mean, it really is an everyday challenge, right? And I always say, win the day. That’s one of my mantras with my team. I always tell my team, win the day. Because if you win the day, then you win the week. You win the week, you win the month, then you win the year. And so it really is a daily reminder for myself. I literally have a whiteboard behind me, and on the whiteboard, it says not F, but it says, F the noise. Right. It is a daily challenge that every single morning I wake up and I have to be very present on that day and not thinking of all the other stuff that are trying to knock me off my game. Because all that noise is literally there to knock you off your game. It does not exist to actually move their companies forward.
Fady Hawatmeh
They love to make all this noise. And like you said, raising ridiculous money from Tiger and all those kinds of stuff, it’s like great where are they going to be in five years? Are they going to still be around? Probably not. A lot of my competitors that started a couple of years ago, they sold out and sold to larger companies, and now I don’t worry about them anymore because they completely sold out and moved on. So really staying focused is an everyday battle, an everyday challenge.
Brett
That’s such useful information and insight, I think, for our listeners to have, because I think everyone is dealing with that. So really nice there. Now talk to me about the journey to finding Product Market Fit. And where do you stand there? Are you at complete product Market Fit right now? You still have a ways to go. How do you think about the state of product Market Fit today?
Fady Hawatmeh
We’re definitely very close to having market product fit. I personally don’t think you can say that you actually have market Product Fit until you have 10 million in arr. I think the first million arr is kind of like, okay, we have something potentially here. But I think when you’re at the 10 million arr mark 5 million arr, then you can confidently go around and say, we have something that’s repeatable, something that’s scalable, something that’s structured. For me, I spent four years building the product because of the pain that I lived, but it was not an easy process. When I first started Clockwork my V, one of Clockwork was me working with my clients and literally asking them in an Fpna software, would you like it to do your financial modeling?
Brett
Yes.
Fady Hawatmeh
Would you like it to do your cash flow forecasting?
Brett
Yes.
Fady Hawatmeh
Would you like it to do it automatically for you? Everyone gave me a resounding, absolutely. I don’t want to have to lift a finger to do it. I went back, found a bunch of developers, built it out, spent a bunch of money, spent six months doing it. Just a very simple V. One came back to those same people that gave me that exact same feedback and said, hey, great, here’s the product. What do you think they’re like? Well, I need to be able to customize this and customize this. I’m like, you told me that you wanted it automatic. And so I learned a very valuable lesson within my first year of Clockwork of trust your feedback, but also trust what you know and trust what you see and always push forward. Why are they giving you that piece of feedback? Why do they want your software to do X, Y or Z and ask them?
Fady Hawatmeh
Users are very open, especially with early stage companies. And I didn’t take enough advantage of that at the beginning. But I focused on building the most perfect product. And in all actuality, I spent too much money, too much time, and waited too long to launch Clockwork. I could have done it a lot sooner, a lot cheaper, but this is all part of the journey. Right. You always have to learn these lessons to make yourself that much better for the next day.
Brett
Yeah, it’s all a journey. Are there any numbers or metrics you can share that just talk about some of that growth and customer attraction that you’re seeing.
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, last year was our first full year in the market, and we five X revenue, five X RA. And it was awesome to see because the previous years, while I was still trying to have alpha testers and beta users and really get some sort of something that I thought would have been replicated with people that I didn’t know. Right. That was always the biggest accomplishment for me, is selling to someone that I didn’t know. And fortunately, as an outsource CFO in Chicago, I built up a pretty good network and it was very awesome to have people support me. But I also was always looking for the I want someone who has no idea who I am, who has no idea what Clockwork is to pay to use my software. And that happened a lot last year, and I was very fortunate that were able to find a very good user base and really identify who Clockwork is for.
Fady Hawatmeh
Right. We tested a bunch of different things and we identified who Clockwork was for, and that came with raising VC money. I bootstrapped Clockwork for four years, and that brought its own challenges, but it also brought its own opportunities. It taught me how to spread a dollar and make a dollar, really extend. And raising VC money adds a lot more pressure, but it also adds a lot more credibility where it made going out to market a lot more simple and something for us to build off on.
Brett
And can you talk to me about your views when it comes to market categories and just category creation in general? Do you think this is always going to be positioned as a disruptor to the legacy and existing Fpna category, or are you going to try to eventually create a totally new category that replaces this legacy category?
Fady Hawatmeh
No, this is kind of the third generation Fpna. That’s kind of how a lot of people are bucketing. It where first generation Fpna is excel second generation is all the legacy products like Adaptive Insights Plan, those larger Fpna platforms. And this third generation is where it makes it a lot more accessible for regular businesses, not companies that can afford a six figure bill every single year just to have this software. And so we’re really looking to reinvent this category. Making Fpna not intimidating, making Fpna more accessible, making Fpna easy to understand is really what we’re after. We’re not trying to add another acronym out there and to say that we’re the Uber of blah, blah blah. We are trying to make Fpna the easiest to understand thing where you don’t need to hire someone like I was overpaid Excel, managing Excel jockey all the time.
Fady Hawatmeh
Living in Excel when a software can help you out and then you can hire people and pay them a ton of money. But to add strategic finance value for growing businesses.
Brett
And in this journey, is there one specific thing you think you’ve really just gotten right and how you’ve been able to grow at the pace you’re growing and get that customer trust? Early on, what would you say you’ve gotten right?
Fady Hawatmeh
Being genuine, being genuine with all of our users, all of our prospects? When we get on calls, I love doing sales calls because I get to talk to people and hear their perspective and hear the struggles that they’re going with and legitimately help them fix their problems. I ask them, what’s keeping you up at night? And they’ll tell me, and if it’s something that Clockwork can solve, I immediately jump for joy and I solve it with them. And so it’s really being genuine and always being there with the best interests of my users, of my prospects, of my customers. It’s not let me pump my valuation. Let me just get you in a deal, even though I know this isn’t right for you, and in three months you’re going to churn anyways, but it’s going to make my month look good. I hate that. I hate that entire mentality.
Fady Hawatmeh
We do what’s best for our users, what’s best for our prospects, every step of the way, whether you sign up with us or not. If we can help you, we will help you. And that genuine nature of Clockwork is really special.
Brett
Amazing. Love that. Now, last question here for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. Three years from today, what does Clockwork look like?
Fady Hawatmeh
Clockwork is going to be the workday type platform for every company that makes less than $100 million in revenue. So Clockwork will house all of your financial projections, your payroll, your HR, anything that a company needs. That’s what Clockwork is going to house for them. So you don’t have to run 20 different systems and log into 20 different systems to get answers. Clockwork will be that piece that every company turns to as the first what if answer. If I need to hire someone, what system are you going to log into? Clockwork. If we need to fundraise it’s, Clockwork. And Clockwork will become a namesake in the industry where if you’re not using Clockwork, you are missing out. Your company has an increased chance of failure if you’re not using Clockwork. So I really think that our growth is definitely going to be anchored around the ease of use and the accessibility of the platform.
Fady Hawatmeh
And that’s going to allow us to really scale and get thousands and thousands of users on the platform pretty quickly.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. I’d love to keep you on and ask you another list of 50 questions, but we have to save some for the next interview with you in a couple of years. So thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us here. Before we wrap up, if people want to fall in with your journey, where should they go?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, I really appreciate it. Brett they can go to our LinkedIn, our YouTube, our Instagram, our Twitter. We’re on all the socials. Or email us at hello at Clockwork. AI.
Brett
Do you want to also do a shout out to your podcast that you have as well?
Fady Hawatmeh
Yeah, absolutely. So I love podcasting. My podcast is the real Slim Fady show. You can check it out on wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can also check it out on our website, Clockwork. AI.
Brett
Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Really appreciate it. This has been a blast and can’t wait to speak with you again in a few years when you’ve executed on this vision.
Fady Hawatmeh
Appreciate it. Really appreciate it. Brett all right, man.
Brett
Take care.
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