How Muck Rack Streamlined Strategic Finance with Pigment
Company Overview
Founded in 2009
$180M Series A in 2022
$140M+ annual revenue
400+ employees
Key Outcomes
Multiple spreadsheets to unified platform
Single system for merit planning across all departments
Manual to real-time reporting
Instant visibility into budget impacts and currency conversions
Version control issues to live collaboration
Multiple users can work simultaneously without file conflicts
Administrative focus to strategic
Finance team freed from manual data copying and reconciliation
Challenge: Scattered Processes Slowing Growth
Every finance department eventually reaches a point where manual spreadsheet-based processes can no longer support the business. For, Chris Gervasio, Senior Manager of Strategic Finance at Muck Rack, it wasn’t so much an a-ha moment as a combination of persistent challenges that had him looking for new solutions.
"We felt that there were oftentimes too many Google sheets everywhere," Gervasio explained. "There's issues with version control. Or, you are trying to share a Microsoft Excel model that only one person can be in at a time. It doesn't live update. There's issues with data links that take forever to refresh, and ultimately it just slows you down."
The problems were particularly acute during critical processes like merit and promotion planning. The team would distribute 7-8 spreadsheets to different managers and leaders, each making updates and adjustments independently. Reconciling these changes and determining final totals became a time-consuming nightmare.
"My reporting was just an absolute nightmare," Gervasio recalled. "I was trying to consolidate reports from many different systems and I spent half a day just taking all those reports, reformatting them, and then consolidating them."
With Muck Rack's remote workforce spanning multiple currencies, the complexity multiplied. After manually tracking compensation changes in local currencies and rolling everything up to USD budgets, Gervasio and the team decided it was time to look for a new solution.
Solution: A Platform Built for Growth and Collaboration
Drawing from previous experience with enterprise planning tools at companies like Full Story and Discover Financial Services, Gervasio knew what to look for in a solution. The team didn't want just another Excel add-on – they needed a true platform they could grow with.
"What drew me to Pigment was the flexibility and dimensionality changes," Gervasio noted. "Oftentimes you'll have creations of new segments and issues where you need departments to map to different departments because they've renamed, or something like that. The intentionality with how Pigment has built its scalability and ability to change and adjust those dimensions really drew me to Pigment."
But capabilities alone weren't enough. Gervasio was particularly impressed by Pigment's education approach, especially for business users who wouldn't be building models but needed to understand and use the platform effectively.
When Pigment became the clear vendor choice, Muck Rack needed an implementation partner to get the platform in place.
What set Bright Point's implementation approach apart was their commitment to education and knowledge transfer. Rather than delivering a black-box solution, the team focused on ensuring Muck Rack could maintain and evolve their models independently.
"What Bright Point was willing to do is really take an approach of making sure I can maintain this, keep this up, and understand how the model can be reconfigured," Gervasio explained. "I was sensitive to not wanting a fully baked model handed from an implementation team that isn't really understood or comprehended, or really even able to be maintained."
The implementation team took time to understand Muck Rack's specific planning processes rather than applying a generic template. This collaborative approach extended throughout the project, with regular check-ins and hands-on training sessions that built confidence and competency within the Muck Rack team.
“What we really appreciated was the amount of detail that we went through in terms of how our processes work. Taking the time to really understand not just ‘oh, you're another SaaS organization,’ but how do we really look at planning? How do we really take the time to understand what is required for us? And how we go about our planning here at Muck Rack.”
Results: Real-Time Planning and Enhanced Visibility
The transformation is most visible in Muck Rack's merit and promotion planning process. What once required managing multiple spreadsheets across departments now happens in a single, unified dashboard with real-time visibility into compensation changes across the organization.
The new Pigment-based process automatically handles currency conversions while maintaining local currency tracking for communication with international employees. Department leaders can make adjustments and see immediate impacts on budgets, with built-in controls to ensure they stay within allocated ranges.
"We can very much be tracking live both in USD at the target level, but also understanding that individual employees receive increases in their local currency," Gervasio explained. "This gives us a really great view to say visually where these increases are happening and how items are changing."
The benefits extend far beyond a single process. By eliminating the need for manual updates across multiple data sources, the team has dramatically reduced time spent on administrative tasks. The platform's real-time calculation capabilities mean no more waiting for complex models to refresh or worrying about data synchronization delays.
"It's cutting down on the need for manual updates with all of our different data sources," Gervasio noted. "The real-time change to be able to track where information is being updated and how it's flowing – that's the game changer for us."
With the foundation in place, Muck Rack is now focused on expanding automation and bringing more business partners directly into the platform to provide real-time visibility to department leaders so they can track their performance and budgets without waiting for finance team updates.
“What went well for us was Bright Point’s willingness to communicate and the hands-on approach that you took in terms of making sure that you don't just hand someone a model and say, ‘Okay, well, this is your Pigment model – good luck.’”