Bloom where you're planted.
Hard work will never let you down.
Growth and retention are not separate.
These are all monikers Paul Finley lives by, especially in a day and age where the industry changes at such a rapid pace.
"Take the opportunity, be the best at what you have at that time, work hard, good things will follow you. Hard work will never let you down. People may let you down, companies may let you down, but the work you put in will pay off eventually," Finley says.
That's why, over the course of his career, Finley has played a central role in translating company strategy into action.
Today, Finley serves as chief operating officer of Intelligent Audit, responsible for overseeing the company's day-to-day operations; ensuring the company’s strategy is executed efficiently; leading teams and processes that turn innovation into consistent, high-quality outcomes for customers; and working closely with leaders across implementation, customer success, operations, finance, and technology to ensure teams are aligned, resourced, and executing against shared goals.
He monitors operational performance, identifies bottlenecks or risks, and drives continuous improvement initiatives that strengthen service delivery, scalability, and customer experience.
He helps define operational priorities, establishes performance metrics, and ensures accountability across teams while maintaining flexibility as customer needs and market conditions evolve.
In addition to internal operations, he's deeply involved in customer-facing execution, ensuring Intelligent Audit delivers on its commitments and that customers see measurable value from the platform.
Before joining Intelligent Audit, Finley was a customer, leading supply chain and logistics operations within enterprise organizations for more than a decade. In that role, he was responsible for managing complex transportation networks, controlling costs, meeting service-level expectations, and implementing large-scale supply chain technologies.
Now, with over 25 years of experience spanning logistics, operations, management, and supply chain software design and implementation, he's led and supported the deployment of ERP, WMS, and TMS platforms.
Within the past 12 months, Finley made a significant impact while serving as chief commercial officer, prior to transitioning into his current role, where he was responsible for driving sustained revenue growth while ensuring long-term customer retention across Intelligent Audit’s enterprise client base. Finley led a large, cross-functional organization spanning customer relations, sales, business development, marketing, implementation, and professional services, aligning teams around a shared commercial strategy focused on customer value and scalable growth.
Under his leadership, the organization generated millions of dollars in revenue, while maintaining strong customer retention by prioritizing partnership, execution, and delivery over transactional sales.
Over the next 12 months, Finley’s primary focus is to strengthen Intelligent Audit’s operational foundation to support scalable growth, customer excellence, and long-term resilience.
Finley is a recipient of this year’s Pros to Know award, in the Leaders in Excellence category. He sat down with Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Co-Founder of the Women in Supply Chain Forum™, to talk about driving sustained revenue growth while ensuring long-term customer retention and the importance of mentoring the next generation.
CLICK HERE to learn more about all of this year's Pros to Know award winners.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Hello, my name is Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and I am here with Paul Finley, Chief Operating Officer at Intelligent Audit. Paul is a recipient of this year's Pros to Know Award in the Leaders in Excellence category.
Let's talk about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey, and how you got to this current stage in your career.
Paul Finley: I've been in the industry for a while now, to tell my age, but coming out of college, I actually took a job with Hormel Foods. I spent 4 years with them here in Atlanta. In fact, I was actually chasing a girl to Atlanta, but the job actually lined up really well with my skill sets at the time, probably the hardest job I've ever had, coming right out of the gate, but also the best opportunity and the best experience to set me up for what I actually have done later in my career. While at Hormel Foods, I was a part of manufacturing and leading manufacturing, a part of supply chain and distribution, and leading groups within that.
From there, it actually set me up to take a job with Manhattan Associates. When I first went to Manhattan Associates, I was with their supply chain compliance group. I had a pretty relevant experience shipping to large retailers, which gave me the skill sets I needed to go to Manhattan and performed that role, and then while at Manhattan, I was able to move into their consulting group and start implementing warehouse management systems and transportation management systems, which led me to the next opportunity.
I actually went to work for a company called Anderson Press. They were a user of Manhattan Associates at the time, and if you know anything about Manhattan Associates, if you can find one to come in internally to an operation, they're usually worth their weight in gold.
I spent 12 years with Anderson Press. They were a pretty dynamic company. They were more like a holding company, where they would buy companies in distress, fix them up, get them running, and then sell them, and then do it again. So, while at Anderson Press, I got a lot of experience, with regards to standing up distribution centers, running distribution centers, doing integrations with all systems you can imagine, whether they were ERP systems to WMS systems, or purchase order management systems, or client relationship management systems.
Led those efforts and those initiatives throughout that 12-year career. Also took on supply chain and operations groups while I was there, so I was in charge of running the entire supply chain and doing the procurement of all the freight services that we had for all the companies we had underneath our portfolio.
And then from there, I actually led the IT department for quite a few years at Anderson Press as well. So, the amount of experience I gained there was pretty phenomenal. And then we were an early adopter at Anderson Press of Intelligent Audit. So, I had the luxury of meeting the owner and founder of Intelligent Audit back in the late 90s when I was at Manhattan Associates. His name's Yossi Levovich. And had really stayed close to what he was doing. I thought what he was doing in the industry back in those days was pretty innovative, and you didn't hear of anyone else doing what he was doing, so when I went on at Anderson Press, I became an early adopter of his technology, and certainly stayed close to him and the technology. And then as they started to grow, opportunities for me within Intelligent Audit started to present itself. And, that's when I came to Intelligent Audit in 2014. They had really expanded into multiple areas of transportation. They had extended the software to manage all regions, all transportation modes.
When I came on board, I came on board as the first client success manager, and just kind of took it from there, you know? So, when I came to Intelligent Audit, I think we had less than 20 people, and at this point, we're pushing 230. Seeing the growth that we have in Intelligent Audit's been pretty cool. And I've had the opportunity to do a lot of different jobs here at Intelligent Audit, moved from client success role into the COO role, from the COO to the CCO role, and then this year back to the COO role. It's been an honor, it's been a privilege, and it's been a wild ride for a growing company, but I've enjoyed every minute of it.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how you play a central role in translating company strategy into action. What does this entail, and why is doing this so important to the future of any company in supply chain?
Paul Finley: My role here is to really take the vision and then figure out a way to execute it. So, I guess you could say I'm the bridge between the vision and the execution. So, taking whatever that vision is, and whatever those high-level goals are and then being able to break that into measurable initiatives, and then taking the teams and making sure they're all aligned around the shared outputs, the shared expectations, and the shared KPIs is really what this role is about.
I'm also responsible for making sure all of our teams have a healthy cross-functional relationship. Making sure that whatever it is we're selling to our prospects, that we're delivering on that promise, and at the same time, we're creating a feedback loop between the customers, our product team, and the operations. That really falls under me and my operation.
Why it's so important? The industry's changing, and it's changing rapidly. Our customers now expect their data real time. They expect it to be normalized and clean, and they expect to have tools available to them to analyze and make proactive decisions with that data. Today, not a week from now, not 3 weeks from now, and certainly not 2 months from now, like it used to be, not so long ago. So being able to take that vision and execute on what we're trying to do in this industry right now and still be a leader in this space, that's why it's so important to be agile like we are right now. I will also say, we have the best CEO in the industry right now, Hannah Testani, she's the brightest person I think I've ever been around. Her energy and her passion for this space and for this company is something to behold, and it's an honor and pleasure working with her and beside her, and taking what's coming out of her head as far as the strategy and the vision for this company, and making sure we're putting that out and moving it forward.
It's extremely important to stay a leader in this space.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive: You most recently served as Chief Commercial Officer, which is the position you held prior to transitioning into your current role. And so, over the past 12 months, you were responsible for driving sustained revenue growth while ensuring long-term customer retention. What is your secret to success?
Paul Finley: I would say growth and retention are not separate. They actually kind of go together, they reinforce each other. The one thing that was reinforced for me moving into the commercial role was how important customer retention was in order to generate growth or to generate sales. Taking those customers that are referenceable and happy with your product and with your services, it becomes a lot easier to sell those products and services to other customers when you have a happy customer base. They are more than willing to talk about their experiences with Intelligent Audit. They love to talk about how they're using our tools and using our data to make their operations better. And if you have a customer base like that, selling this product becomes actually pretty easy.
While I was over the commercial portion of the business, I still retained client success underneath my umbrella during that role as well. And we made a concerted effort to make sure that what we were doing with our existing customer base fed into that client retention. So, a lot of initiatives we went through to make sure we were doing the right things. That includes making sure we had a standard playbook for how we manage customers, so that regardless of the personnel who was in charge of those customers, the experience that our customer saw was the same regardless. And then making sure we had the right things in place to identify risks early with a customer, their dissatisfaction, maybe there was a churn risk, maybe they were expansion opportunities, and we could take advantage of that. And then, certainly, how do we work renewals, and how are we proactive in that process to make sure that when the renewals came up, we were good, ready to go, the customer was ready to go, and it became more of a formality. Doing that reinforced the client retention portion, which fed directly into the sales portion.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Throughout your career, you've also led and supported the deployment of ERP, WMS, and TMS platforms. How have these technologies evolved over time, and what are you seeing as the top trends in these areas that are coming ahead?
Paul Finley: They've evolved a lot. Back in my day, when I was doing these, these were pretty clunky systems to be quite honest with you, and they were pretty siloed. A lot of times, you had heavy customization into each of those systems, and you had long implementations, and a lot of those systems were primarily transactional in nature. What you're seeing now, though, is completely different. A lot of these systems are now cloud-based. They are API-driven, you have faster deployment, they're way more configurable, and now what you have is that all these systems work together to create an ecosystem that gives customers and shippers availability to real-time analytics, availability to their data, and availability to make real-time decisions, whereas before, it wasn't so much. Now, way different.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The Leaders in Excellence category honors company leaders who've made outstanding contributions to the supply chain space. What advice do you have for others in the supply chain space?
Paul Finley: I would say, most certainly stay current with technology and stay current with the data trends. What we're seeing in the space right now with artificial intelligence is pretty amazing. And staying on top of that is quite challenging, but it's also fun at the same time. I've never seen anything like this in my career, and I've been doing this for a long time. I mean, literally, what you see today can be completely different just in two weeks.
I'm watching our vision that we set, or the goals that we set in the beginning of the quarter. We were only 2-3 weeks into the quarter, and they were completely upside down, just with the evolution of artificial intelligence and the new tool sets that's now available to us. So, we're shifting our goals and priorities even mid-quarter from what we thought they were just weeks ago, with the emergence of that new technology. And if you're not on of it, you're going to be on the outside looking in pretty quickly.
Along with that, obviously, be open to new ways of working. Shift from experience-based decisions to more data-informed decisions. I'd say the experience-based decisions certainly play a huge role in being successful, but now, because you have access to all of these tools that can give you basically real-time information to make data-informed decisions, adding those two together is pretty powerful stuff.
And then lastly, I would say mentor the next generation. The next generation coming out is certainly way smarter than I probably ever was, coming out, or at least I was during that phase, but at the same time, I think what we have right now is maybe a better communication skill set than what they have, and being able to mentor them into how to take the technology piece, the technology phases that they are used to, and mirror that with communication, and how to work best with teams, with customers, with other functional groups is pretty important.
Supply & Demand Chain Executive: And what is something that we haven't addressed yet, like a good takeaway for our audience that we haven't discussed yet?
Paul Finley: I would say, for me, yin this role right now, I'm unique in the fact that I have led distribution centers, I have led integrations with all these different systems, I have led IT infrastructure or IT teams, I've led client success teams, and I've led operations. You blend all that together, that's something you don't see a whole lot, but what I would say for me is that I've always just looked for an opportunity.
When I was growing up, my dad used to always say, hard work will never let you down. And at the time, it used to annoy me, but the older I get, the more I see what he was talking about. If you get into somewhere, and you do the best you can, you bloom where you're planted. That was another thing we used to talk about all the time. Take the opportunity, be the best at what you have at that time, work hard, good things will follow you, right? So, hard work, when you used to say, hard work will never let you down. People may let you down, companies may let you down, but the work you put in will pay off eventually. There are things that you're learning along the way that it may be hard now, it may be frustrating now, but that toolset that you're building in that hard work, in that discovery, in the things that you're trying to figure out along the way, will pay dividends somewhere else down the road when you're entering that next phase of your career or opportunities that may present themselves.
