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. There’s a credibility gap when you go with a forecast or a presumption. Because whatever you write down on paper, whether it’s a budget for next year or a forecast or talking to a client prospect. You know that what you’re writing down is going to be wrong, right? You know that that number is not going to be the number. And you can instantaneously close that credibility gap and basically overcome the objections of doubters by aligning the numbers exactly to what they want to see. And so that’s the thing. And now we can actually do it with Python as well. So now we can plug into main platform ERP systems and everything through Python. And it’s not just Excel. So, we recently did a case with a global analytics firm used ActiveGraf with one of the largest and fastest growing fast food companies in the United States. They built a predictive model on the microbial load to get away as far as we can from finance and consulting and all that kind of stuff. The microbial load is essentially the levels of harmful bacteria in certain raw materials and they built a model for certain raw materials that they used over 7 stages to get to the final consumer when they eat the sandwiches or the food or the salads. And they built this predictive model in Python within two hours, ActiveGraf was integrated on top of it. And within a day, the dashboard that brought the model alive was built within one day, whereas it would have taken Power BI authoring over a week to do. And Power BI can’t automatically recalculate. So the fast food company was very impressed with that and used it in their food safety board to demonstrate various scenarios. If we get it from this supplier, if we have this refrigeration, that kind of station, washing, cost contamination, and so on, are we still safe with our food? It’s got a lot of permutations.
That’s very interesting. As you are developing this software, ActiveGraf, what is the future that you see? So what is this going to enable? And maybe is there going to be an AI application to it as well that will also enhance it? What is your vision?
Yes, absolutely. So some of my friends were calling me concerned, God, with this predictive AI and everything, doesn’t that take away your value proposition? And the irony is it boosts our value proposition because just think about large language models. You have to write a prompt or say a prompt for it to react. Now, if you’ve already got your model, before you say what you want, you could have clicked and dragged that thing on your screen if you can control it from a graph, from an active graph. And so AI is gonna be a big boost for us because more and more people will have driver-based models generated by AI that they can easily integrate active graphs on top of and get much more use out of them and get the use out of it that’s much more democratized just by clicking and dragging. So if I say, when I write prompts into Copilot, for instance, or ChatGPT, that takes me a while to type it in. If I wanted to say, hey, change the level of oil this year to this level, next year to that level, and so on and so on. Before you say it, you could just click and drag it. So that part of AI and the AI revolution is a very big benefit to ActiveGraf. What we’re also planning with ActiveGraf is where you have your driver-based model, whether it’s Excel or Python or anything like that, and you’ll be able to drag it onto ActiveGraf and it will build the live board for you. So that’s the next version we’re working on. So you don’t even have to ever tag the data and then have it come over. It will find the data frames that you need, the drivers that are there, and it’ll put it onto a starting dashboard yourself and then you can adjust it and fine-tune it as you want. So that’s going to be a kind of AI application of how our development path is going, and AI is a concept I answered before. It’s going to help us a lot by allowing anybody to generate a driver-based model and then quickly layer on our graphs.
So maybe it’s a bit of a tangent, but I’m really curious about this concept of AI generating a driver-based model. So does it mean that, let’s say if I’m an investment banker and I just give some prompts to my ChatGPT or whichever AI, Gemini or some other Copilot and tell them that, hey, I’ve got this company, it’s 10 million revenue, this is the EBITDA margin and these are the main markets and I want it to grow at the rate of inflation plus 2%, but I’m just making it. And these are the competitors and this is the macro outlook that it will be able to create a financial model for me?
Yeah, we’re not there yet, but there are already things that allow you to do descriptive analytics like that. Forecast analytics, I haven’t yet seen anything do anything more complex, but certainly Python models and so on, you can already generate through prompts. It’ll be a couple of years before it gets to the level of as smoothly as you described it. That’s still a couple of years away. But that is the direction where models themselves and especially descriptive analytics already know.
So that's one of the key things is when I'm talking about analytics in the context of ActiveGraf, I'm talking about predictive and prescriptive analytics. Share on X
Whereas, all of the traditional tools are really good, like Power BI, the stuff that’s been around 15, 20 years, Power BI, Tableau, Click, all of that stuff, looks at models looking back and says, what can you learn from the past? We’re not in that space. They can’t do what we do. We don’t want to do what they do. We are looking at forecasts in the future and AI is already at the stage where you can give it prompts and give it data and some of them even create the dashboards on the descriptive piece. I’ve yet to see anything that can do kind of very, very robust forecast, but we’ll get there.
That’s really great. So, what are the industries that can most benefit from what you offer, this ActiveGraf or some of your value analytics tool?
Well, first, it’s more of a discipline. It’s sales. Anybody who’s in technical value sales. So, something that is a presentation to prospects of any kind of products or services that have a value proposition that is a bit more complex. In other words, it’s not I have widgets, they have widgets, I’m giving it to you for 10% less. If it’s anything more than that, our methodology is better because the maintenance costs are lower and we do the following, anything that has two or three more complex, well, that doesn’t even have to be that complex variables. That is really where we’re honing in. There are specific industries where that’s relevant. So it could be software sales and technology is definitely one. Technical automotive parts, that kind of thing, sales, warehouse and other automation. Those are the areas in which value selling is an important discipline because the value propositions to articulate the ROI is a best practice, but is not as straightforward as in the case I told you about with the global software company. So that’s really where we feel that’s where the most traction is. We also have two other areas. I mentioned the predictive Python model that we layered very quickly and was very useful to the fast food company. That’s another ideal customer profile for us, which is analytics professionals that are delivering predictive models can do so in ActiveGraf 8-9 times faster and actually use the model to discuss with their client rather than static views, which is what you get in Tableau or Power BI or other visualization tools. And so that’s another ICP. And the third one is where we started actually, which is the investment banking. We are looking more at small and medium sized firms because they have a bias for action much more so than the large firms. And there are much more early adopters, the smaller and medium-sized firms and the large firms are. And so, we’re looking at that segment of any kind of consultants and advisors that present in order to get work in terms of their value proposition, but also in delivering their work product. Imagine if you could do an M&A transaction, for instance, and you’re on the buy side of an M&A transaction, you’re trying to figure out what the cost synergies are optimally for you to be able to pay the price that they’re asking. With ActiveGraf, it’s a very, very simple proposition. So those are the kind of three ideal customer profiles that we’re dealing with, but by far the main one is the sales enablement and just drastically cutting sales cycles.
Yeah, you help them demonstrate the impact of that product to their business, and they can say yes much easier. That makes sense. So, I’d like to switch gears here a little bit and I’d like to ask you what it’s like to be an entrepreneur because you’ve worked for Citibank for a long time and you had the top management positions there and banking and investment banking and capital markets and now you’re running your own company. So what do you think is the most important question that an entrepreneur has to ask themselves?
The most important one is, are you really in love with the idea and the value proposition of your idea? If you’re not really in love with it, there’s no way you can go through all the pain, the heartache, the trials, the iterations, the victories and the lows. So that kind of volatility of emotional experience, shifting hats from being salesperson to being financial controller. You have to wear a million hats when you’re starting a startup. So if you're not really in love with the idea, and I don't mean in love in an emotional way, but you really believe strongly that the value of what you're doing is real and you've seen feedback from people that you trust that it really has… Share on X Without that, it takes an extreme amount of luck to make it if you don’t have that conviction. I think that’s the key thing.
That’s great. I would say, I mean, you say it’s not necessarily emotional love. I would argue that possibly there is a strong emotional element to it as well, because it really is the emotion that helps you get through those laws when you are really emotionally committed to it and you believe it instinctively that it’s worse, even when, logically, it doesn’t make sense. But if you feel in your fibers that it is going to have to work because it really solves a problem, I think that’s huge. It’s huge for an entrepreneur to feel that. That’s awesome. So very good, very interesting. So, Laszlo, if people would like to learn more about ActiveGraf, would like to connect with you to ask their own questions, where should they go and how can they get in touch?
They can ping me on LinkedIn, follow us on LinkedIn or go to our website, activegraf.com, and they can learn more there. And you didn’t ask one question that I thought you were gonna ask, which I think is really exciting is, what excites you most?
Okay.
Do you have a second?
Yeah, fire away.
So I would say, one, I already talked about the excitement of the shortening a sales cycle by being interactive in real time. The other thing is that near and dear to my heart, and I was involved in many, many organizations that helped us in the past, and now we’re doing analytics on childcare and child services. One of the states in the United States has entrusted us to do their analytics related to that. One of the exciting applications of ActiveGraf is if we change this about the compensation package, for instance, of childcare workers, how many more children will get adequate childcare? Because they’ll stay in their positions and things like that. It’s a very, very exciting kind of social element to really democratizing analytics. And as I said, my “Why” is leveraging analytics for the betterment of mankind. I think that’s really exciting stuff where you can use quant to do a very human thing and solve a human problem. But anyway, I just thought I’d get-
Yeah, it’s all the problems we solve, and it’s all about getting results for people faster and easier and ActiveGraf is really at the forefront of this idea, so I love it. So Laszlo Balaszy, the CEO of ActiveGraf, a software company that’s revolutionizing how you simulate scenarios with your product and for your sales and can be applied in different areas. Thanks for coming and sharing your product and your experience and your personal quest about this. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then tune in Monday and Friday. We come out with new episodes of the Management Blueprint, and please follow us on YouTube and on Apple Podcast and give us a review, an honest review. That’d be great. That helps us to push the podcast out. So thanks for coming.
Thank you very much for the opportunity. Great to see you again.
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