Every Man Jack’s CFO wants every manual click gone

Steve Fox has tripled Every Man Jack’s transaction volume without adding to his five-person finance team. At SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, he told CFO Magazine how NetSuite became the base for an agent-led finance function.

• A six-month NetSuite rollout and the efficiency gains that followed
• Nix the Clicks, the plan to hand every manual transaction to AI agents
• Store-level data, the TikTok shopper and the next generation of CFOs

Among the thousands of attendees at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, Steve Fox stands out. Perfectly groomed beard, blue shirt open under a jacket, and just enough grey to hint at the years behind him. Not your typical CFO look, but fitting for the finance chief of a men’s grooming brand.

Fox joined Every Man Jack in 2021 as part of a new leadership team brought in after a private equity investment. The brand had loyal customers, a strong product and the drive to take it to the next level. What it lacked was awareness.

Founder Ritch Viola, a semi-pro triathlete who began his career at Clorox before leading sales and marketing at Method, launched it in 2007 for men who put in the work. Sandalwood and cedarwood scents, premium ingredients, an accessible price.

“I saw my role being to come in and build out the infrastructure of the company,” Fox says. That meant bringing discipline to a founder-led business and keeping operating costs in check to free up money for marketing. His team numbered five.

Triple the volume, same team

It still does. Transaction volume has more than tripled since 2021 without a single extra hire, and Fox calls technology “the capstone” of that leverage.

The breakthrough was replacing the incumbent ERP. “We were creating the business process around the ERP as opposed to the ERP supporting the business process,” he says. “I always felt very handcuffed.”

Every Man Jack implemented NetSuite in six months, moving 57 EDI trading partners across and bringing in accounts payable automation through Ramp.

Since then it has halved its financial close time, saved an estimated 4,500-plus hours a year in manual entry and cut around US$350,000 in annual costs.

Train, Transform & Track

Thirty days after go-live, Fox and his IT manager were at last year’s SuiteWorld when NetSuite showcased its AI Connector Service, which uses MCP to link AI assistants such as Claude to NetSuite data. “He was in the Uber on the way to the airport setting this thing up for us,” Fox says.

Moments like that are why Fox rates SuiteWorld above most conferences. The sessions are built on practitioners sharing their stories, and that gets people talking. “Networking to me is one of the best ways that you can do something,” he says. Ask another CFO how they solved a problem and, in his experience, 99 per cent of the time they’re happy to help.

That setup became the starting point for Every Man Jack’s AI strategy: train, transform and track.

Train is about people. “Everything starts with change management,” Fox says, and the team gets the training and support to make the shift.

Transform is the ambition. Under an initiative called Nix the Clicks by ’26, Every Man Jack aims to eliminate manual transactions altogether. Finance is split into order to cash, procure to pay and the monthly close, each with its own command centre. Staff log in to check on their agents, review exceptions the AI couldn’t resolve or that breach a threshold, such as a $100,000 customer suddenly ordering $300,000, and act on them on the spot. “This is really their cockpit,” Fox says.

Track is governance. An AI oversight committee, with a representative from every department, carries ideas up to leadership and guidance back down.

“The thing I love about this is it really is only limited by your creativity and curiosity,” Fox says. Pulling together disparate data lets the team “create almost a 360-degree view of your business that we were never able to do before.”

He wants his people doing higher-value work. “Their time is so much better spent on building relationships and analysing data, making business decisions, not processing transactions.”

Order management, no JSON required

Order management is furthest along. A switch to an EDI partner that isn’t a “black box” let Every Man Jack connect it via MCP. When a transaction fails, staff no longer need to read JSON. Claude diagnoses the problem and tells them how to fix it, which Fox says saves huge amounts of time and has transformed onboarding and training.

“People are still the important part of this equation,” he says. He compares the shift to the arrival of Excel. “I still remember when Excel came out, and it was a game changer.” AI is Excel on steroids, in his view, but still a tool his team has to learn to use well.

Changing consumers, sharper data

Men used to buy whatever their father used and stick with it for life, Fox says. Today’s TikTok shopper buys what they saw yesterday.

Brand awareness is “like an amoeba. It changes shape every week.” Trendy competitors fill the shelves and then disappear. “We don’t want to be that,” Fox says. “We want to be the workhorse.”

Every Man Jack is investing in tools that track consumer sentiment, share of voice, emerging trends and competitor pricing, so it can fix what customers dislike and double down on what they love.

Fox applies the same thinking to the numbers. Shipments once told him his revenue. Now he can combine them with consumption data and drill down to a single store, including the weather that day and how much shelf space competitors held. “I don’t have to take a representative sample, like auditors do,” he says. “Now I can look at everything.”

That visibility matters with input and freight costs rising. “It’s really hard being a CFO right now,” Fox says. Every Man Jack has absorbed much of the increase but can’t keep doing so forever, and is wary of how much it passes on to shoppers.

The next CFO will be better equipped

Will reliance on AI erode the critical thinking, and the talent pipeline, that future CFOs need? Fox acknowledges the risk but points to the industrial and computing revolutions, when people found creative ways through.

“I would assume that the next generation coming up is going to be way smarter than me and way better equipped than me to deal with the world they have to live with.”

CFO Magazine A/NZ was a guest of NetSuite at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas.