Intuit has been making financial software for the better part of the last three decades. Reports surfaced back in 2012 that Intuit’s CEO Brad Smith was dissatisfied with the direction of the company and its product line ups. Smith encouraged his team to submit ideas for new software that could keep Intuit on top of the financial software mountain. Unlike other CEO’s, Smith took an unconventional approach to this challenge.
“We followed the leaders of the product companies that we admired. Each one of us followed a CEO and watched how they made their decisions, how they engaged their teams, how much times they spent in products, and we changed the way we lead inside the company,” said Smith at Intuit’s annual briefing for investors.
Take for example QuickBooks Online. One of the biggest headaches for end users used to be simply getting the QuickBooks installation to finish without errors on your personal PC. By delivering QuickBooks Online using the Software as a Service medium, Intuit has been able to give end users a quick and easy way to begin doing their books themselves without the assistance of an accounting firm and that’s just the tip of the iceberg concerning Intuit’s SaaS plays.
Tying all of this together, CEO Brad Smith sees a sunny outlook concerning Intuit’s cloud endeavors. Smith said, “We have greater visibility into this accelerating cloud adoption, increasing our footprint and customer adoption outside the U.S. The predictability of our revenue is such that 73% of our revenue will be recurring, cloud-based services by fiscal ’17. And while we do have a transition year in this current 12-month period because of the change to our accounting practices … we’re going to be existing in ’16 and ’17 with mid-teens growth, and ultimately a company that is on track to get to $6 billion, with $5 in [earnings per share], with margins that are better than they would have been at our current pace and course that we’ve been on.”
Although Intuit was never financial trouble and the foundations of the company are quite strong, Smith went on to say that, “The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”