Welcome to another episode of The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our third series of conversations with industry leaders, which now releases twice a week.
Tech and Remote Workforce Management – Lilia Stoyanov from Transformify
Today's guest is Lilia Stoyanov, someone who truly wears many hats. 

She's a professor at Ziggurat Business School. She's an independent contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine. And most importantly, she's the CEO of Transformify - a vendor management and payroll management system.

Our conversation opens with a brief catch-up on Lilia's background.
Lilia Stoyanov's early career
Lilia started off in the shared service space, working for Coca Cola where she helped to build a shared service centre. Her role, as either CFO, or – as at Coca Cola – director of procure to pay, involved structuring shared service centres.

The big challenge was that Coca Cola, like so many large enterprises, had a variety of subsidiaries and a confusing tangle of legacy tech. Lilia's job was to decide how to bring all that together, and which PTP system or STP system to implement. 

This meant factoring in time, and of course cost. Which at the enterprise level could be huge.

It's not only the cost of the system. With those types of traditional procure to pay suites, you often need an army of consultants to implement it as well.

Then there's training people how to navigate new systems that are very complex. And they shouldn't be.

In the past, it seemed like suites needed to look complex in order to impress buyers with all their functionality.

Now it's the opposite.

Users are demanding simplicity and accessibility. Whether this is the influence of Gen Z entering the workforce, or just users losing patience with outmoded tech, the message is the same: Software needs to be user friendly.
Leaving enterprise to become an entrepreneur
This eye for simplicity and user-friendliness was an inspiration for Lilia.

The same could be said for her unique vantage point: Working inside growing companies that are breaching into the enterprise level gave Lilia insights into the process of building a business. 

It was only a matter of time before she wanted to do it for herself.

Having seen how enterprises function, she could see what the common problems are before she even began. And it's important to know the pitfalls, and also what the market is demanding. Otherwise, you can't bring a product to the market that everyone else needs and is ready to buy.

Lilia would absolutely recommend this to budding entrepreneurs.

 If you're considering such a journey, first of all, how do others do it? How are successful businesses structured? What's the hierarchy? How do you manage teams? How do you respond to change? How do we respond to fast paced growth?

And after that, you'll be ready to do it yourself.

How did Lilia's experiences in corporate influence Transformify?
There are two big problems that pretty much every procurement team...