• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 4 hours ago

Say this for Intuit—it takes better care of the people it is laying off than certain tech giants do. The 3,000 staffers being cut on July 31 will receive 16 weeks of base pay and two weeks extra for every year they have worked at the company, plus some health benefits. And the July 31 date provides a decent warning period, compared to firms that send an email saying, “You’re out. Leave now.”

Oddly, this layoff is happening as Intuit is pulling some pretty good numbers. 

The firm's total revenue rose to $8.6 billion in its third quarter, up 10% YoY. Consumer revenue grew by 8% to $5.3 billion. And these gains were based on growth in different product areas: Turbo Tax went up by 7% to $4.4 billion and Credit Karma by 15% to $631 million. 

Only Mailchimp, the email brand that also covers other channels, was left out of this happy picture. 

“Excluding Mailchimp, Global Business Solutions revenue grew 17 percent, and Online Ecosystem revenue grew 22 percent,” the company said. 

Perhaps more tellingly, CEO Sasan Goodarzi said, “We are optimizing our business and reducing investments in certain areas, including Mailchimp, and streamlining parts of our engineering and product organizations to better align resources with our 3 Big Bets,” in an email to staff. 

Are the big shots at Intuit wondering if they bought a turkey when they acquired the chimpanzee for $12 billion in 2021? That's not clear.

"We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers' success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure to become a faster, leaner, and more focused company,” Goodarzi noted.

The company also wants to: 

• Scale its AI-native platform to deliver easy, done-for-you experiences. 
• Accelerate its authority and right to win in the mid-market. 
• Reduce layers of management. 
• Focus roles on high impact work.
• Bring its teams closer together to accelerate impact.  
• Reduce overlap across TurboTax and Credit Karma. 
• Reallocate resources to its primary growth engines. 

Note that first item, regarding AI: It could signify that some of the 3,000  jobs are being lost to AI. How coincidental is it that Intuit has signed deals with Anthropic and OpenAI to use AI models within its platform? 

In fairness, the Mailchimp situation may be due to problems in the email market. And the unit may be in better shape than these comments suggest. 

Either way, there is one remedy: Mailchimp could go out on its own again. And the iconic brand might regain some of the startup verve that attracted Intuit.