It was brilliant to have them there. They shared ideas they'd been working on, listened to the FLAC's feedback, and engaged with the challenges these finance teams are navigating day to day.
For the finance leaders in that room - people who have spent years building on Xero, defending that decision, and pushing it further than most thought possible - having Xero's leadership present and listening carried real weight.
And then, just days later, Xero announced the launch of their new Ultra plan - designed specifically for the mid-market businesses that the FLAC represent.
We covered the full announcement in detail in this article.
The Stories: Scaling on Xero at a level nobody thought possible
After the formal sessions, the conversations continued into the afternoon and evening.
Finance leaders talking freely. Sharing what they've built, what broke, what they'd do differently, and why they kept going.
Here we wanted to share just a handful of those stories.
Andy: The $500 million business that never left Xero
Andy Colalillo's story might be the clearest argument yet that the ERP default is over.
RSGx has grown to approximately $500 million in turnover, across 13 entities, in just six years. By almost any conventional measure, that's the point where ERP conversations become inevitable - and usually, unstoppable.
Andy has had those conversations. Repeatedly.
"People kept saying that 'at that scale you need an ERP' - well we're here already and we're fine."
What made his story particularly powerful was that he hadn't just resisted the pressure - he had tried the alternative and come back.
"MS Dynamics was like going back in time."
His team had invested considerable time and money on an ERP implementation. They’d even hired a team member to lead the process. But the deeper they got, the greater Andy’s conviction that this wasn’t the answer they’d been looking for.
That ERP implementation has officially been stopped. They are sticking with Xero.
Khalid: "I will never go back (to ERP)"
The most direct position came from Khalid Ahmed of EncompaaS.
Khalid had already seen firsthand what a failed ERP implementation could do to a business - during his time at The Iconic, where the operational damage was significant enough to permanently shape how he thinks about finance infrastructure.
Now, in his role at EncompaaS, he's scaling happily on Xero. He confidently admits he " will never go back (to ERP)".
For Khalid, it isn't a compromise. It's the deliberate choice of someone who has seen the alternative up close.
Josh & David: Scaling with a lean finance team
One of the strongest themes of the day was operational leverage.
The question this group keeps asking isn't just "how do we scale systems?" It's "how do we scale without building huge finance teams?"
Josh Hawkey of Tracksuit - one of New Zealand's fastest-growing SaaS businesses and the 2025 Deloitte Fast 50 winner - has built a reputation for running an exceptionally lean finance function relative to the scale of the business. An early adopter of automation-first workflows, Josh's approach consistently challenges the assumption that growth requires headcount.
David Loeffler of Public Sector Group put the same idea in starker terms: six jurisdictions, three people in finance. Without significant ERP infrastructure.
Examples like these kept surfacing throughout the day - and they kept challenging the same embedded assumption: that scale automatically demands larger teams and heavier systems.
The finance leaders in this group are arguing the opposite.
Ernest: Unlimited budget to not buy an ERP
Ernest Chunge took a different approach entirely. Rather than allocating budget toward an ERP migration, he gave his team what he described as an effectively unlimited budget to scale on Xero instead.
The framing alone says something about where finance leadership is heading.
He also delivered what might have been the line of the evening:
"The stack is never finished."
We may have that framed on the wall.
What finance leaders actually want
What finance leaders actually want, it turns out, is simple: a system that works, a community that's honest, and proof that the path they've chosen is the right one.
The FLAC are that proof.
They are the people actually doing it - scaling complex, multi-entity businesses on Xero, collaborating on real challenges, and constantly finding new solutions to problems that used to send finance teams straight to the ERP conversation.
What they represent collectively is something important: proof that the old default is gone.
ERP is not dead. There are businesses where it remains the right answer, and there always will be.
But for a growing number of finance leaders - like the ones in that room - ERP is no longer the automatic answer. It's not even the first conversation.
Andy Colalillo's story says it best. Half a billion dollars. Thirteen entities. Six years of growth. And still on Xero.
The default has changed. The FLAC is what that looks like in practice.
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