George Azih calls himself a “Product CEO.”
He didn’t set out to build a fast-growing startup like many serial founders and CEOs do. He was an accountant, and he’d found himself in charge of technical accounting and accounting research at a Fortune 500 company in Georgia. While in the role, he realized there was a very big product gap in the world of accounting.
While there are many lease management software options, none of them addressed the very big pain points associated with lease accounting. Azih was building elaborate spreadsheets to help his company keep up with the intricacies of leases, but he knew those spreadsheets were going to get infinitely more complicated since new accounting regulations were coming down the pike.
He started looking for accounting software that could help streamline the process and be easier for his entire team to use. But there simply wasn’t a product on the market that could help.
Finding Opportunities
Azih decided to start LeaseQuery in March 2010, but the first line of code wasn’t written until September of 2011. In between, Azih worked to become the expert on all things lease accounting. Quite literally, it became his obsession.
“I cannot tell you how many times I dreamt of lease accounting. That was how deep I was into it,” he told Hypepotamus.
He knew the problem was big, but he actually didn’t realize just how big it was until new customers started seeking LeaseQuery out.
The company’s first check for $500 came from Alpharetta, Georgia-based restaurant chain Fresh To Order. Initially, Azih thought his target customers were going to be those types of hospitality and restaurant brands, since they are dealing with leases at multiple locations. But it took some time for him to realize that his target customer wasn’t just limited to the hospitality and restaurant industry. The reality is that companies lease a lot more than buildings. They lease vehicles, equipment, planes, ATMs, and even slot machines. Just focusing on restaurants was leaving a lot of opportunities on the table.
“I focused on a few trees, and it gave me a very wrong impression of the forest,” he added.
Finding target customers is one part of the founder journey. In order to succeed, a CEO must also find the right people early on to help build up the vision.
Azih said one of the most consequential moves he made early on was putting together an advisory board and bringing on legal, software, sales, tax and experts.
More than a decade later, those same people are still involved with the company.
That is rare in the tech world, where employees commonly jump from one fast-growing startup to another. But Azih said he focused on building the company culture in a way that would resonate with employees for the long-term.
When the company was 30 people, he brought ten leaders and “early stars” together to come up with the company’s core values.
“Your people are the most important, hands down. Because they’re the ones that will stick with you through thick and thin,” he added. “Happy employees give you happy customers. They will go above and beyond to make sure your customers and your mission are fulfilled.”
Building Product as a “Product CEO”
Operating now for over a decade, LeaseQuery has graduated from being a startup to a true growth-stage company. The natural next question is: Where is LeaseQuery heading next?
Growth-stage ventures are often eyeing an IPO or might be looking to sell to a strategic competitor. But Azih said he is hyper-focused on building the product.
“My goal is to build the best company that we possibly can. And when you do that, you have options. We’re focused on how we get acquirable customers and how we delight them,” said Azih.
On top of customer delight, Azih said the platform is growing by addressing other customer pain points. That led Azih and LeaseQuery to acquire Stackshine this summer to help businesses keep tabs of all the different SaaS subscriptions they have.
That evolution is all about building products that makes “accountants’ lives easier using software,” he added. “We’re going from a single product company and moving into a platform enterprise.”
