Anees Pretorius calls himself a "recovering accountant."
Pretorius felt like a product of the stodgy accounting industry and subject to family members who thought all he did was prepare tax returns. So he started Bean Professional Services Inc. in Cleveland to help reveal the "cool" side of accounting.
Branded simply as "Bean," the startup is emerging as a managed marketplace that matches accountants with project work worldwide as well as a workflow management platform accountants can use to do business.
In 2010, Pretorius started his career as an auditor at Big 4 accounting firm Deloitte in Capetown, South Africa, where he grew up and earned his accounting degrees.
He transferred to Deloitte's offices in San Francisco a few years later, met a woman from Cleveland while vacationing in San Diego, and landed at E&Y — another Big 4 firm — in Cleveland.
After three Cleveland winters, Pretorius and his family moved back to San Francisco in 2016 where he worked for Siegfried Group LLP, which employs financial professionals who work on projects for entrepreneurial clients nationwide.
Pretorius, who now splits his time between Cleveland and San Francisco, talked with Cleveland Business Journal about why and how he started Bean. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What caused you to leave Siegfried Group to form Bean?
In San Francisco, I had the opportunity to build up the market for financial professionals at a boutique consulting firm. I was working with a ton of really cool, fun tech startups and got to see the way that tech stripped out inefficiencies and overhead while enabling efficiencies in traditionally tech-lagging industries, such as accounting.
When Covid hit, I felt as though there was this seismic shift in our thinking about how we work. It formed a catalyst for me. If I'm being brutally honest, I'd shied away from being an accountant because of the stigma that was attached to the profession. I want to take back the whole notion of being a boring bean counter and make it cool.
What role did joining TechStars LA's accelerator program in the spring of 2022 play in your aha moment?
It was a pivotal experience. The accelerator accelerates your success, but it also can accelerate your failure. It forces you to dig deep, not only about what you are building but how you are building it.
It's the equivalent of being drafted out of high school or college into professional sports. You are set up with nutritionists and dieticians and coaches — the structure is there to help you be the best athlete you can be. But it's still up to you to live up to your potential and take advantage of the entire ecosystem. It's the same with an accelerator.
We were at TechStars for about three months. The biggest takeaway for us was being forced to get crystal clear about our value proposition and how we tell our story. We are still a very young company but early data suggests that people are curious and intrigued about what we are doing and how we deliver value.
How do you deliver value?
We're building a market network for specialized accounting services. "Market network" is a new concept that combines elements of both a marketplace (transactions among buyers and sellers) and a network (platform for identity-building and communication) that is enabled with software. [Editor's note: Learn about market networks from NFX, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused on pre-seed and seed-stage startups.]
We're looking to enhance the value of the ecosystem that our accountants — who we call "Beans" — use to transact and communicate with clients. We also intend to enhance the transparency of the network for our clients so they can see how projects are building up and what costs are doing. We are accountants building this market network for other accountants versus software or finance people stitching together tools that aren't designed for accountants.
We've got a lean team of six people, and we're looking to accelerate our growth in 2023. By the end of the year, we expect to have rolled out our new platform. Then, we'll start engaging with corporations en masse. We understand that our industry is dominated by large legacy players. So, our biggest challenge and opportunity — and the thing we're most excited about — is shifting the paradigm, giving accountants the opportunity to say, "I must try this," and then wowing them so we attract some of the brightest, most incredible accountants in the country.
