Jeffrey Fiorentino and the job between the job titles

The neat version of Jeffrey Fiorentino’s career fits into three titles: chief financial officer, sales leader, chief executive. Read them slowly, though, and a more interesting story appears. The same person who had to keep the numbers straight also had to persuade customers to buy, then help run the organization responsible for delivering the promise. At Kipu, the departments in an organization chart became successive parts of his working life.

That sequence gives his founder story its shape. There is the commercial enthusiasm, the accounting education and the expanding responsibility for a software business. A contract can be a celebration at one desk and a new obligation at the next. Fiorentino’s career crossed both. The signatures were only the beginning of the conversation.

A ledger, a sales desk, a CEO’s office

Before Kipu, Fiorentino worked at Grant Thornton LLP. He had an undergraduate business degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Miami and a master’s degree in accounting. The combination puts two familiar business questions side by side: what could be built, and would the numbers support it? His later responsibilities would give him opportunities to deal with both.

Kipu was founded in 2012. Fiorentino was a co-founder and its CFO, later taking on leadership of sales. He became CEO in 2016. Those are distinct jobs, with different audiences and different ways of being held accountable. Moving between them meant that his career could be measured in the kinds of questions arriving at his desk as well as in changes to the nameplate.

Consider the work each title implies. Finance has to make commitments visible. Sales has to understand what a prospective customer finds valuable. A chief executive has to bring the organization’s resources and commitments into some workable relationship. Reading his progression this way helps explain why the earlier titles deserve as much attention as the last one.

His own description of his interests was pleasantly unembarrassed: “I’ve always loved technology and I also love sales.” Accounting belonged in the mix, too. A founder biography can make those interests sound like separate credentials. Inside a software company, they frequently meet in the same decision. What should the company promise, what will it take to deliver, and who is going to pay for the work?

A contract is the beginning of the work

During Fiorentino’s time as CEO, Kipu’s product story included an acquisition. In September 2017, the company announced that it had acquired PingMD, a messaging application. The announcement described voice, text and video communication, with information logged inside Kipu’s existing system. Access was offered free to existing users through the end of that year.

The business significance lies in the connection between products. Adding a capability brings questions about how it will fit into someone’s working day. Will information travel between the two systems? Will people have to enter it again? Will the additional application introduce another place to look? Those are practical questions for any software buyer, and integration makes them part of the seller’s obligation.

The 2017 announcement quoted Fiorentino emphasizing speed, security and ease of use. It is a compact description of what a customer wants from a communication tool. Delivering all three requires more than an attractive demonstration. The people buying software have colleagues to train, routines to maintain and a fair amount of existing work that refuses to pause while something new arrives.

His years in finance and sales provide a useful angle on that tension. A sale creates expectations that appear later as engineering, training and support work. Each department sees a different part of the agreement. A customer, quite reasonably, experiences the company as a single organization. The internal handoffs are the vendor’s problem to solve.

The number on the other end of the telephone

In December 2020, Kipu reported that customers waited an average of 17 seconds to reach a support team member. The figure belonged to that announcement and that period. It was a small, unusually tangible measure of service: a person asks for help, and another person answers.

The company described a support department staffed around the clock by full-time employees based in the United States. New recruits went through Kipu Bootcamp, learning the product and the environment in which customers used it. Support also included customization, visits and weekly education webinars. These are operating commitments, repeated across people and schedules.

Fiorentino described the purpose in terms of partnership. The word partner is easily printed on a brochure. A training program and a staffed telephone line give it something to stand on. A customer with a question is unlikely to be impressed by a department’s intentions if nobody is available to help.

That is one reason support belongs in a founder’s story. It shows where the sale continues after the salesperson leaves. The company has to remember what the customer bought, understand how the product works and respond when the two do not line up neatly. There is no ceremonial ribbon to cut when that happens. There is simply another question to answer.

“The role of our Customer Support team is to become a partner to the client.”

Jeffrey Fiorentino / December 2020

Making the numbers usable

Another part of Kipu’s work during Fiorentino’s tenure concerned business intelligence. The company announced KipuBI in October 2020. Its description emphasized dashboards, filters and exports, making information available for people trying to understand the performance of their organizations.

Michael Delgado, Kipu’s chief information officer, described development beginning in 2018. The release discussed reporting on marketing, referral activity, occupancy, billing and reimbursement, among other measures. It also described exporting information into familiar formats, including CSV, PDF and Excel. The intention was to reduce the work required to assemble information from separate spreadsheets and databases.

There is an accounting-shaped question underneath a reporting product: can someone use the numbers to decide what to do next? A screen full of figures can be accurate and still leave its reader doing the difficult part alone. Presentation, organization and access matter because a report eventually has to meet a person with a decision to make.

This was team work. Delgado and the data specialists belong in the account alongside the CEO. A founder’s biography becomes less useful when it assigns every product decision to one person. Here, the interesting connection is between Fiorentino’s responsibilities and the organization’s output: a company led by a former CFO and sales leader was building tools to make business information easier to inspect.

A different kind of return

In February 2021, Kipu put a value on another part of its activity. The company reported $2,525,000 in technology grants during 2020 and more than $18 million through its Community Give Back program to date. These were company-reported technology-grant values. They should be understood on those terms.

Fiorentino called the work “the best part of my job.” The program brought the question of access into the commercial story: organizations with limited resources could receive technology through a grant. For a software company, that also makes the product itself part of what it contributes.

There are several measures of a founder’s work on this page already: a sequence of responsibilities, a support wait and a product launch. The grant program adds another. It concerns who gets to use what the company has built. The figure is useful because it describes a stated program with a period and a value attached, rather than leaving generosity as a flattering adjective.

His public role also included explaining the business to an audience. In February 2021, Kipu announced a free, two-day online expo, scheduled for March 10 and 11. The program listed 13 presenters. Fiorentino was scheduled to give the opening day’s keynote, with Daniel Gemp of Dreamscape Marketing listed for the second day.

The agenda extended into ethical marketing, business intelligence, collections and a live question session with Kipu executives. That range puts another part of the CEO’s role in view: bringing different kinds of expertise into the conversation. A software company’s audience has questions that cross departmental boundaries. The event’s program gave several of those subjects their own speakers, rather than asking one executive to speak for every specialty.

The company turns another page

On June 14, 2021, Kipu announced a strategic investment from TCV and named Paul Joiner its new CEO, with Rick Pharr joining as COO. The announcement described a platform serving more than 80,000 users at more than 1,900 facilities globally. Those figures mark a company snapshot at the leadership transition.

Joiner arrived from Availity, where he had been COO. Pharr came from WebPT. Their appointments brought another set of operating experiences into the business. A company’s early chapter and its later management can be understood together without blurring the people or dates involved.

For Fiorentino, the documented sequence remains distinctive: accounting firm, co-founder, CFO, sales responsibility, CEO. Each step added a different relationship to the business. The earlier work stays relevant because customers eventually experience the combined result of all those functions.

His company biography also made room for deep-sea sportfishing and time with family. It is a welcome detail in a career otherwise crowded with organizational responsibilities. There is a person outside the titles, with interests that do not need a dashboard.

The career itself is most revealing when those titles are put back into motion. Books have to balance. Buyers have to be convinced. Software has to work, and someone has to answer when it does not. Across Fiorentino’s Kipu years, the job kept expanding into the space between those obligations. That is where much of the company-building happened.