1107: When Finance Leads with a CEO Mindset | John Rettig, CFO, Bill

When John Rettig joined Bill back in 2014, the company had just $13 million in revenue and a modest employee base. What drew him in, he tells us, was the combination of people, culture, and a product that placed finance operations at the center of its design. It marked the first time in his career that he’d worked this closely with a finance-focused technology platform.

At the time, Rettig expected a 10x growth opportunity—comparable to the trajectory he’d experienced at a previous company. “It turns out, it’s 100x,” he tells us. Over the last decade, Bill has grown to 2,500 employees and serves 500,000 customers through a network of 7 million members. It now processes $300 billion in annual payment volume and generates $1.5 billion in revenue.

Much of that growth, Rettig explains, has come from addressing challenges faced by small and midsize businesses. Early on, the company focused on modernizing manual, paper-based financial processes. As a result, it now supports areas such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, corporate cards, and cash flow management.

For many of these businesses, Bill has become deeply integrated into their daily operations. “We become the center of their financial operations,” Rettig says of the company’s role with customers. His focus remains on scaling impact across what he calls the “Fortune 5 million”—millions of smaller businesses that operate without the deep finance infrastructure of larger enterprises, but still face the same need for speed, visibility, and control.