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The way Ken Stillwell tells it, his career as a CFO can be divided into two distinct worlds: the world before ARR and the world after ARR.

ARR, of course, is the acronymic identifier for the widely used SaaS metric known as annual recurring revenue. Stillwell prefers to put his own twist on the acronym by declaring its actual meaning to be annual recurring relationships\u2014as in client relationships.

Says Stillwell: \u201cWhatever metric you use to measure recurring relationships is really misunderstood in the marketplace until you start to track it.\u201d What happens next has led many a finance leader to shout, \u201cWhere have you been all my life!\u201d

Or so Stillwell might have us believe in light of his evident passion for the metric and the singular emphasis that he places on it when asked about the career chapter that he has opened as CFO of Pegasystems, a firm specializing in customer engagement solutions.

\u201cOnce CFOs track it and begin reporting it, its value becomes so obvious\u2014not just the value of the metric, but also that of the relationship with the customer and of the different mind-set and shift that occurs when you are an \u2018as a service\u2019 company and of making customer success a key part of keeping that relationship,\u201d says Stillwell, who began his finance career in Price Waterhouse\u2019s audit advisory services practice, which he soon exited to become part of an early PW mergers and acquisitions group where he would become involved in various deal-making activities outside the US. It was this experience that Stillwell says helped to propel him into a number of consecutive CFO roles, including his latest CFO tour of duty at Pegasystems.

\u201cThe one thing that\u2019s different about Pega from my earlier experiences as a CFO is that Pega is one of those rare examples where a company is growing both at an accelerated pace\u2014by this, I mean that it\u2019s growing faster than the market growth rate\u2014and also at significant scale,\u201d explains Stillwell, who adds that Pegasystems is quickly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue. \u201cIn my previous experience, the companies were typically slower-growing and focused more on operational excellence and how to maximize shareholder value when growing in the single digits. Pega is an interesting mix of both growth and scale.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney

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