https://youtu.be/9KhyJgt2mic
Laszlo Balassy, CEO of ActiveGraf, is driven by a mission to help businesses become scenario smart, enabling faster, smarter decisions through real-time analytics and democratized data visualization.
We discuss the ActiveGraf Framework, a tool designed to align strategic objectives, identify key drivers, and enable dynamic, interactive models to accelerate decision-making and reduce sales cycles. Laszlo shares impactful use cases, such as shortening a global software firm’s sales cycle by 50% and enhancing food safety analytics for a fast food chain. He also highlights ActiveGraf’s future, including the integration of AI to simplify predictive and prescriptive analytics, making these tools more accessible to businesses of all sizes. He emphasizes the transformative potential of democratized analytics to help organizations optimize operations, demonstrate value, and achieve sustainable growth.
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Become Scenario Smart with Laszlo Balassy
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Laszlo Balassy, the CEO of ActiveGraf, a software company on a quest to democratize analytics, accelerate decisions, and reduce expense. So ActiveGraf allows visually modify Excel-based data models in PowerPoint without involving teams of analysts and analytics, I guess. Laszlo, welcome to the show.
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here, and especially given our past of having known each other in our previous lives, it's especially a pleasure to be here with you today.
Yes, but you're not here because we have connections from previously, you're here because you have a great business and you have an exciting story to tell to our listeners. So let's start. I like to start this show these days. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?
Yeah, so my “Why” is to leverage the power of analytics for the betterment of humanity. It sounds very grandiose, but in effect, it's not. It really started with simple ideas of if we could calculate things live in a situation, we could make much better and faster decisions. Today, my business is mostly, our business at ActiveGraf is really mostly shortening sales cycles for people that are making technical sales and things like that and using analytics to do that client work. But one example of using analytics for the betterment of humanity and making better decisions is a use case we made called the HR use case.
Back when I was at Citi, whenever there was a market downturn, they basically almost arbitrarily said, this half of the room, okay, you go home. And that's it. And why was that? The reason was that board members have a fiduciary responsibility. And when they're cutting costs, nobody could ever blame them. But in six months time, when the markets turned, they'd be trying to hire back the exact same people or very similar people, maybe not the exact same people. And I thought, God, there's gotta be a better way. And we developed this use case called the HR during a recession use case. And the clear thing is that if you look at keeping people who seem to be excess staff, it actually comes out as a calculation to be better to keep them even for 9 months, 12 months, 18 months than it is to get rid of them, pay severance and all of that. And I feel that if more people had access to analytics and calculations like this, the world would just be a better place.
We'd make better and faster decisions. So that's the kind of my “Why” is really to democratize that and make it easy for anybody to use even more sophisticated calculations.Share on X
Yeah, that's cool. So you had this experience, I think you explained in our pre-interview that when you're an investment banker, you would have loved to actually be able to demonstrate the sensitivity analysis, what the scenario analysis that you were talking about, and the team had to go back to the office to develop it in real-time, and you wanted to create that. So, let's talk about your framework, because you essentially created the framework around this, and we might call it the ActiveGraf framework. So what does it look like? How do you create that real-time simulation of scenarios and how do you help people do that themselves?
So, what we do is, first, we try to align ourselves with what are the strategic objectives? That's the very first point. And that's very many people have talked about that in terms of growth advisors, such as yourself and others that having a clear vision is very important. And that's kind of the same thing in the ActiveGraf framework, where you say, what is your desired strategy? What are you trying to get to? So what is that clear vision of the future? And that's really step one. And then step two of the ActiveGraf framework is to say, let's look at what are the first principles type of drivers that result in going from where we are today to the vision. So if we interpolate between where we are today in the vision, what are the things that are going to drive that? And once you have that, you have the basis for a framework and you can build a model around it. And it doesn't have to be a financial model. It can be any kind of model.
We have some very exciting examples that maybe we can talk about later. And you have those drivers and those drivers become essentially what mathematicians and analysts call the explanatory variables. And then what you do is you simulate then the downstream impacts, not just how you get to your vision, but with ActiveGraf and the ease of doing sensitivity analysis and changing those drivers to see what the outcome would be, you really get a sense of the business proposition, the value of the product that you're considering buying, whatever it is, because the ease of sensitivity analysis by just clicking and dragging graphs right within the meeting gives you a much better view, not only of your KPIs and what you're trying to get to, but any derivative impacts and downstream impacts that you can have. For instance, specific PNL, HR, capital allocation things, those can be calculated as a derivative also of any of the initial impacts that you're looking at.
That's very interesting. So would you share one or two use cases of maybe an actual client that you helped and what they could accomplish with this approach?
Absolutely. So we help a global software firm shorten their time to value proposition by over 50 percent. And that was one of our favorite use cases and what put us on the road to this kind of sales enablement and sales cycle reduction path that we're on now. Essentially, large software firms and this is a very large global software firm that has a lot of banking software and their banking services and software that they propose has parameters for its calculation of value that are pages and pages of Excel and their problem, their pain point, was, look, we have to ask a detailed survey of our prospective clients just to be able to get into the room.
How do we solve that problem? And with ActiveGraf, it's easy and they did where you can take approximations of what you believe to be those parameters of all of those parameters that drive their value proposition as a salesperson. You can take all those parameters and give approximations to it and right within the meeting, instead of having to have first a discovery meeting where everybody goes through and ticks the box, and yes, this is the level. You can just have your value proposition meeting and fine-tune those parameters just by clicking and dragging charts as you're talking. And you know something magical happens when you're doing that. And I've witnessed this directly that when you involve your target audiences, your prospects thoughts in your own presentation, and they see your presentation come alive in your value prop, that's magic. Because now you're working together at the same aim, getting to the same goal. Even the most reluctant prospect, when you ask them what their perspective is on a certain assumption.
Let's say interest rates or let's say we just did a use case with the comparison of EVs to gas-powered cars. You say, well, what's the average premium of electric cars over equivalent model gas cars and let's dial that in together. Once you ask somebody their opinion on something and they see it reflected in influencing your presentation, it becomes a totally different dynamic. And getting back to the global software firm, they were able to use ActiveGraf to fine-tune those presentations and by the end, in one meeting rather than three meetings, and instead of six weeks, under one week, to get by the end of that meeting already a very clearly, very detailed articulated value prop for, I think it's 7 cost-level benefits and 7 revenue-level benefits were articulated precisely in the software stack that they were proposing in the services around it. So that's one cool example.
Basically, the way I imagine it, you had all these charts presented or projected on PowerPoint, and then they went in with their mouse and they said, okay, if interest rates go up, then maybe our profit is gonna go down. Or if there's a premium of the EV electric vehicle price, let's say drops by 10%, what it's gonna do with the total sales.
Exactly.
That's fascinating. They basically could run the scenario that they believed in, and they could simulate it, and they could look at it. This is how we see the world. Can they also use that to inject the impact of your service, the service of the ActiveGraf software?
Yes. Interestingly, we have ROI calculators for the use of ActiveGraf for specific situations as well. So we use, it's a little bit of a recursive thing. We're using ActiveGraf to demonstrate the value of ActiveGraf. And there's a credibility gap. You know this very well. You have a very robust framework for your growth strategies and so on.
