How CSS rebuilt its finance function on accrual and unlocked enterprise value with MAVI

When CEO Shahriar “Shah” Shams-Ansari acquired Contractor Supplement Solutions (CSS), he inherited a finance team along with the business. The team had been effective at running everything on a cash basis, but after the buyout, CSS needed to report on an accrual basis to meet the demands of a private equity-backed company. The existing setup didn’t scale to that. The company had a part-time finance person tracking the books, but the work was closer to bookkeeping than to the accrual-based reporting required.

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Shah evaluated the alternatives before landing on MAVI. He looked at offshore services where finance is one of many functions, but he knew that finance was specialized enough to warrant deeper vetting than a generalist provider could offer. He looked at more traditional talent placement services and saw a familiar risk: an opaque, back-end matching process where a bad first placement could cost four or five weeks with little visibility. He also considered vertical-specific outsourced options built for contractor back-office work, and had the same concern.

What stood out about MAVI was transparency and control. Shah could interview candidates himself, compare their strengths and weaknesses directly, and get a real sense of the market before committing.

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“What I really liked about [MAVI’s] process was the fact that I was able to interview the candidates myself.  I was able to do a couple of those interviews and basically compare the strengths and weaknesses, and also get a good sense of what the market was before I moved forward with what I think was ultimately a very strong candidate.”

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The multi-geography network mattered too. Rather than a single offshore office in one country, MAVI let him interview across regions – useful when he hadn’t yet settled on the right time zone or location for the role.

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The cost savings were also a driving caliber. CSS gets high-caliber, US-quality talent at a fraction of what an equivalent hire in Orlando would cost. He also valued how little administrative weight the model carried. MAVI operates as a single vendor rather than a placement service that hands off HR, compliance, and contracting for the client to sort out.

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“It wasn't so much a placement service where you'd find me a great candidate and then they'd work with me directly, and I'd have to sort out the HR and the compliance myself.  It's really pretty turnkey. [That] slotted in really well for our size and scale as a business, and just how many demands there are on my time as the CEO.”

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The process moved at the speed a small business needs. Interviews were set up within a couple of days, the candidate was finalized shortly after, and the whole thing ran start to finish in under a week. CSS was matched with a part-time Senior Accountant who became the core of its finance function. She quickly grew into responsibilities well beyond the original scope of her role – running payroll and payments, and effectively anchoring the entire finance function. “She’s taken over responsibilities I never initially envisioned when we brought her on board. She really is our entire finance function,” remarked Shah.

The operational result of working with MAVI is a finance function that now closes on a consistent schedule: CSS delivers its books within seven business days of month-end, on an accrual basis – the reporting cadence a private-equity-backed company needs at the board level. And that’s all driven by high level of quality of their MAVI Talent.

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“By far and away, it was the quality of the candidate, more so than anything else. The [cost savings, risk-free trial, flexible terms, etc.] are really just levers in that.”

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The MAVI Talent has gone above and beyond her work, fully owning the finance function and taking initiative to improve processes herself. For instance, Shah had mentioned in passing about an analysis CSS would need to run months down the line. When he went to give concrete instructions weeks later, the MAVI Talent had already built it. “She pulled it up, and it was a spreadsheet with everything ready to go. The two or three things she needed to ask me weren’t populated, so she asked me live. We filled it out together, and it spat out an answer that made perfect sense. That level of ownership and buy-in is a huge differentiator.”

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Her ownership holds up under real pressure. Through a series of natural disasters – including a major earthquake – that caused internet interruptions and forced her to manage serious personal disruptions, the MAVI Talent kept the work on schedule. “She’s found an unbelievable way to stay on top of her work. Despite every worst-case contingency I can think of, we’ve never fallen behind.”

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The MAVI Talent has also become a genuine strategic partner as CSS invests in AI and automation, serving as a sounding board on how to design and streamline processes like invoicing.

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The quality of the MAVI Talent has deeply impacted the value of the company itself. Clean, accrual-based books delivered on a reliable schedule change what CSS can do – from board-level reporting to the investments in IT and automation the business is now making with a real-time picture of its performance.

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“[Working with MAVI] has added value to the company itself, enabling us to do board-level reporting, changing the buyer universe for a company like this… It’s [allowed] us to make a lot of significant investments in things like IT and automation because now we actually have a real sense of how our business is doing. And that unlock is, hopefully, going to create tens of millions of dollars of enterprise value for our company over time.”