I ran finance for a hybrid hardware and software business growing +40% year-over-year: $7M to $174M in revenue in four years.

Then, 2021

Motorola Solutions bought Openpath for cloud access control and Ava Security for cloud video, and put them together as Avigilon Alta. The aim was a cloud video and access business that could take on the market leader. Most of what we sold was hardware, at a margin in the low 40s, in one of the worst supply-chain markets in memory. Video was expected to grow to a multiple of access. At the time, access was the larger business.

What I owned

Finance for Alta. When Ava's CFO chose not to stay inside a public company, I took on his scope: the staff accountants, a demand plan built for the first time, the finance side of packaging and pricing, and a renewals model. I became the finance partner to Ava's leadership in front of Motorola's senior executives, and led finance for Ava's move to SAP, which went live in July 2023. Every other week I brought packaging and pricing recommendations to the portfolio's senior executive committee.

The calls, in order

1. Earn the margin, 2021 to 2025. Finance partnered with product to take out the costs we could manage, and with sales to bring rigor to the forecast. We moved from forecasting once or twice a year to nine times, agreed on units together, and built a sound demand plan. Better forecasts let us order larger quantities with confidence and negotiate harder with vendors. Redesigned products used cheaper components, and we priced against the market leader. Part of the gain came from leaving a terrible supply market, and I say so. Hardware margin went from the low 40s to 65%.
2. Price the way the partner sells, 2023 to 2025. Our largest opportunity was an integrator spun off to sell video and access in the cloud. It had been selling the market leader and wanted to make us its premier vendor. Its problem was our pricing: fixed plus variable, set per project, which it neither controlled nor could explain to its own customers. I built the first business case anyone had built on a partner's own economics, from its data and from time on its sites. We moved it to a per-unit cost, with the integrator setting its own price to the customer, and volume tiers where reaching the next tier lowers the price on every unit. It gets one invoice on the first of the month, as a PDF and a CSV, billed on a snapshot with no proration. I accepted a few days of possible revenue leakage for a bill anyone could audit. I led it for 18 months alongside the day job, across two ERPs, with IT, renewals, legal and product. The sponsors who approved it moved on, as did people across finance, sales and our partners' teams, and I kept the work moving. It went live, did what the partner asked for, and was built to repeat. It hasn't spread past this partner yet.
3. Keep renewals routine. An expensive install with a small, fairly priced recurring fee makes a subscription sticky. We added deliberate stickiness and built an efficient renewal motion on contract terms and data. Annual churn stayed under 3%.

How people's work changed

From the second quarter of 2024 through the third quarter of 2025, I ran six consecutive quarterly business reviews for my own finance team: 60 to 90 minutes in front of senior vice presidents, run on a roadmap, with my staff presenting, a dry run before and an after-action review after. Peers in finance warned me it was too exposed. My answer was to let them come. The business stopped seeing finance as the group that printed the numbers. The team stopped seeing itself as a patch for data the company had not engineered, and started speaking up as people who think. One analyst came from an on-premise business, became our recurring-revenue expert and a trusted partner to sales, product, IT and renewals, and was promoted twice.

Where it landed

Over four years, revenue grew from $7M to $174M and ARR from $7M to $62M. Hardware margin went from the low 40s to 65%, and annual churn held under 3%. Ava ran on SAP from July 2023. The partner pricing and the single monthly invoice are still live, ready for the next integrator.

What I would do differently

I would have told the story of the team's results more, and sooner. Changing how a large company sells takes more than getting the design right, and the people who decide need to hear the wins as often as the delays.