How Crisp scaled its finance team through hypergrowth and built its highest performers with MAVI

Crisp had roughly doubled in size every year for three straight years. Through around ten acquisitions in that stretch, a once-small business had become a multinational, multi-entity company with international operations and a volume and complexity of transactional work that had outstripped what the existing team was built to handle. When Zach Spicer joined as Corporate Controller, the finance function was a small group – a Controller, an Accounting Manager, and a Senior Accountant – stretched to its breaking point.

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At the time, the monthly close was taking about 30 days, which meant the books weren’t reaching lenders until the final day of the month. Zach’s early mandate was to cut that down, mature the processes, and give the team the senior support it needed fast.

Zach’s first instinct was the traditional playbook: hire full-time and onshore. He’d worked with global teams before, including experienced people at large Fortune 500 companies, but had a familiar reservation about outsourced accounting: that contractors would think inside a narrow box and stop at the edge of their assigned task. What changed his mind about MAVI was the caliber of the talent and the speed of the process.

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“The MAVI Talent surpasses that team by leaps and bounds. Equal to or less experience than some of the people I had before, but 3x the impressiveness with what they do.”

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Two things sold him at the outset: cost and care. The economics let him build a team quickly against a fixed budget. The service made it effortless; he sent a note the afternoon a team member resigned, and MAVI was on a call kicking off the search two hours later. A MAVI representative sat in on every candidate interview to facilitate and answer questions, and MAVI handled candidate confirmations and communications end to end.

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“It’s like a white-glove service from start to finish. I gave you a scheduler link and [MAVI] handled the rest. All the candidate confirmations, all the communication pieces [were] taken off my plate.”

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The vetting showed in the shortlist. Rather than ten resumes to sift through, Crisp received two targeted, well-summarized profiles per role, chosen against not just the technical requirements (NetSuite, ASC 606) but the cultural ones Zach was deliberately rebuilding: a team that treats the close as a shared objective. Most hires were placed within two to three weeks of the initial call.

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“You’re not giving us ten resumes. It’s typically two to three, very targeted: this candidate checks all the boxes you talked about, and has that culture aspect. A quick, well-thought-out, high-quality sourced candidate.”

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The low-risk trial period was another differentiator Zach hadn’t seen from other providers. It gave both sides room to confirm the fit, and signaled that MAVI stood behind its matches rather than making placements hard to unwind. When a team member gave two weeks’ notice over a holiday weekend, a replacement was ready to start their trial the following Monday morning.

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Zach also pointed to how MAVI handled the harder moments. During a restructuring that required a role to be cut, MAVI’s team worked through the conversation with care, checking whether there were other avenues, confirming it wasn’t a performance issue, and making sure the person landed well. “Those types of things show a level of care that larger organizations don’t necessarily show.”

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Crisp now has one Senior Accountant, one FP&A Specialist, one Revenue Accountant, one AP Specialist, and two AR Specialists from MAVI in their team.

The MAVI Talent took real weight off the senior team. When a wave of acquisitions required migrating customers onto Crisp’s contracting entity – painstaking accounts receivable work – the MAVI AR Specialist absorbed it, which freed Crisp’s accounting manager to build a formal close process and write full SOPs for two newly acquired entities that had only ever had a rough close.

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A MAVI Senior Accountant took over coordination with an outside accountant in Norway and led the consolidation of roughly three ERP systems into NetSuite across local teams in Europe, managing the formatting, importing, and deadlines that had previously demanded Zach’s direct attention. That shift let him move from preparing the numbers to reviewing them, catching issues, and taking a bird’s-eye view of the organization.

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“It allowed me to take the Controller brain and do Controller-level work, to think about where we want to take the company over the next several years, instead of being laser-focused on preparing the numbers.”

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What distinguished the talent was ownership. Instead of stopping at the edge of an assigned task, MAVI Talent flagged problems, proposed fixes, and volunteered for work during the close, to the point that Zach jokes he has multiple people competing to take things off each other’s plates. They’ve become a first line of defense on payables questions, mentors to onshore staff, and a genuine network effect on a fast-moving team.

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“Sometimes I’m in back-to-back meetings and I hear Slack pinging. I look up and it’s already solved [by our MAVI Talent] without me even having to be involved.”

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That standard showed up in Crisp’s formal review cycle. In their first performance reviews after six to eight months on the job, MAVI Talent earned the highest ratings on Zach’s entire team, above managers, directors, and onshore resources, and were named among his “can’t-lose” people.

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The AI story is where the engagement goes furthest. As an AI-first company, Crisp treats automation as a first-stop solution, and the MAVI Talent has built some of its most impressive work without even being prompted. One MAVI contractor built an accounts-receivable dashboard, now used across the organization, working directly with engineering to ship it. For Zach, AI is a force multiplier that keeps a human in the loop, and it lets him deploy veteran accountants on judgment instead of data entry.

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“The MAVI people have built some of our most impressive AI work. We have an AR dashboard that is now used by multiple people across the organization, built almost entirely by [our] MAVI Talent.”

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The clearest measure of how Crisp sees the talent: this year the company is flying its MAVI Talent to an all-hands onsite in Boston, a step it hadn’t previously taken for outside contractors.

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“I truly see them as part of the team, much more than any other outside resource I’ve had. It would feel like leaving the heart and soul of the team behind.”