Table of Contents
Private equity sponsors today face increasing pressure to create equity value beyond traditional cost-cutting and leverage strategies. Market conditions demand sustainable growth approaches that can withstand economic volatility while generating superior returns for limited partners. The conventional playbook of operational improvements and financial engineering has reached its limits in many sectors.
At thrv, we use our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method to drive multiple expansion through customer-focused product innovation. Our approach targets underserved customer segments to accelerate growth and increase valuation multiples by satisfying customer needs faster and more accurately than competitors. We've developed this method through years of working with portfolio companies to accelerate growth and create superior equity returns.
Traditional multiple expansion strategies focus primarily on financial metrics and operational efficiency. While these approaches create value, they often miss the largest opportunity: accelerating revenue growth by satisfying customer needs. Companies that grow revenue faster and sustain that growth command higher valuation multiples because they demonstrate market leadership and competitive advantage.
The limitation of cost-focused strategies becomes apparent when companies reach operational efficiency plateaus. At that point, the only path to continued value creation lies in revenue acceleration and market expansion. This requires understanding what customers actually need to accomplish and how current solutions fall short.
We begin our multiple expansion strategy by redefining our portfolio companies' markets using customer Jobs to be Done rather than product categories. This foundational shift reveals growth opportunities that remain hidden when markets are defined by changing products or technologies.
For example, customers aren't buying navigation apps—they're hiring products to get to destinations on time. This job-based market definition reveals the true market size based on customer willingness to pay to get their job done, not the price of current products in the market. When we calculate market size using customer willingness to pay rather than product pricing, we often find significantly larger addressable markets.
Our platform includes a quantitative survey tool that identifies the range of customers' willingness to pay to get their job done. We plot this data on what we call the Need Curve, which shows the number of customers and their willingness to pay. The area under this curve represents the Securable Market—the revenue potential our portfolio companies can capture by helping customers get their job done faster and more accurately.
We use Customer Effort Scores to identify customers who struggle the most to get their job done. These scores measure the percentage of customers who report difficulty satisfying specific steps in their Job to be Done, based on three criteria: effort required, speed of execution, and accuracy of execution.
Our AI-powered platform accelerates this analysis, generating insights in hours rather than weeks. This speed advantage gives our portfolio companies a critical competitive edge when identifying and acting on market opportunities. While competitors spend months on traditional market research, our portfolio companies can identify and begin targeting underserved segments immediately.
When customers struggle with high effort scores, they represent segments with higher willingness to pay for solutions that get their job done better. This creates premium pricing opportunities and drives revenue acceleration that directly impacts valuation multiples. The customers who struggle the most are precisely the ones most likely to purchase new solutions and pay premium prices for better job execution.
We align our portfolio companies' product roadmaps with unmet customer needs rather than feature requests or competitive parity. Our approach implements product features that satisfy customer needs faster and more accurately than existing solutions.
Every customer Job to be Done contains 10 to 20 steps and 50 to 100 specific needs. We identify which needs are unmet by measuring how slowly or inaccurately current solutions satisfy them. Our portfolio companies then build features targeting these specific unmet needs, creating customer value that translates directly to revenue growth.
Our product development process starts with customer need validation before any significant capital investment. We use JTBD Customer Advisory Boards (JCABs) to test product concepts with target customers, ensuring that new features will create measurable customer value. This approach reduces product development risk and improves return on investment from new feature development.
When our portfolio companies satisfy unmet customer needs, they capture market share from competitors who leave customers struggling. We expand addressable markets by redefining them through customer Jobs to be Done rather than product categories.
This market redefinition often reveals opportunities that traditional analysis misses. Products change rapidly, but customer jobs remain stable over time. By focusing on stable customer goals rather than changing product features, our portfolio companies build sustainable competitive advantages that persist across product evolution cycles.
Speed and accuracy improvements in job execution enable premium positioning. Customers willingly pay more for solutions that reduce their effort and get their job done better than alternatives. Our method quantifies these improvements, allowing our portfolio companies to price their solutions based on the value they create rather than competitive feature parity.
The revenue acceleration we generate compounds over time. As our portfolio companies satisfy more customer needs better than competitors, they expand their market share within target segments while also identifying adjacent segments with similar unmet needs. This creates multiple vectors for sustained revenue growth.
We help our portfolio companies move from feature parity to market leadership by focusing on job steps rather than feature comparison. While competitors add features, our portfolio companies target specific customer struggles that create sustainable competitive advantages.
Our JTBD competitive analysis identifies where competitors satisfy customer needs slowly or inaccurately. This reveals weaknesses that our portfolio companies can exploit through targeted product development, creating differentiation that's difficult for competitors to replicate.
Traditional competitive analysis compares product features, but feature-to-feature comparison misses the most important factor: how well each solution helps customers get their job done. Our method analyzes the speed and accuracy with which competitors' products satisfy each customer need in the job. This reveals competitive vulnerabilities that aren't apparent from feature lists.
When our portfolio companies build solutions that satisfy unmet needs faster and more accurately, they often establish market leadership positions that competitors struggle to challenge. The competitive advantage comes from superior job execution rather than feature superiority, making it more sustainable and defensible.
Our method coordinates product, marketing, and sales teams around the same customer needs and growth strategy. This alignment reduces product development risk by ensuring every initiative targets validated customer struggles.
Traditional product development often lacks objective criteria for prioritizing features. Teams make decisions based on stakeholder opinions, competitive responses, or available technology rather than customer need validation. Our approach provides clear, measurable criteria for every product decision.
We measure product success through speed and accuracy improvements in job execution, not feature usage or satisfaction scores. This creates clear accountability for revenue growth and eliminates resources spent on features that don't create customer value.
Our proprietary software enables portfolio company teams to maintain alignment on growth strategy and customer focus. The platform includes agreement features that reveal team disagreements about strategy and provide customer research to resolve those disagreements objectively.
Our AI capabilities scale JTBD analysis across multiple portfolio companies simultaneously. While traditional methods require weeks of manual customer research, our platform generates customer need insights and competitive analysis in hours.
This speed advantage enables our portfolio companies to identify and act on market opportunities before competitors recognize them. Our AI translates customer needs into actionable product roadmaps, reducing the time from insight to implementation.
The AI components of our platform include algorithms that analyze customer survey data to identify unmet needs, segment customers based on their struggles, and prioritize product development opportunities. These algorithms process customer feedback and market data far faster than manual analysis while maintaining accuracy and insight quality.
Risk reduction comes through data-driven customer need validation before significant capital investment in product development. Our platform quantifies which features will create customer value and generate revenue growth, eliminating guesswork from product decisions.
Our JTBD OS (Operating System) uses AI to accelerate product development by focusing engineering resources on the most valuable customer-facing capabilities. By utilizing AI technologies and modern serverless architectures, we help portfolio companies reallocate engineering investment from infrastructure maintenance to customer need satisfaction.
Multiple expansion through customer need satisfaction creates value that persists through market cycles. Unlike cost-cutting approaches that reach natural limits, customer-focused growth strategies scale with market opportunities.
Our method creates sustainable competitive advantages because customer Jobs to be Done remain stable over time while products change. This stability enables long-term strategic planning and reduces investment risk. Limited partners can have confidence that growth strategies built on customer jobs will remain relevant across market evolution cycles.
We generate superior equity returns by focusing investment on validated customer needs rather than speculative product features. Our track record demonstrates consistent revenue acceleration and multiple expansion across portfolio companies using this approach.
The independent sponsor model we use enables limited partners to receive detailed JTBD investment and risk analysis before making investment decisions in specific portfolio companies. This helps limited partners focus their resources and capital on investments with higher probability of success.
Because customer Jobs to be Done are stable over time, they give limited partners better visibility into future growth potential. This enables LPs to keep capital deployed in growing companies without artificial fund time horizons that create unnecessary transaction costs.
When we implement our JTBD method with portfolio companies, we establish baseline metrics for equity value creation: return on investment from new product development, number of marketing qualified leads per month, and sales close rate.
Our Tiger Team works in parallel with existing company teams to develop optimal growth strategies for both current products and product roadmap development. We conduct quantitative and qualitative research to identify unmet customer needs and size the most attractive customer segments.
The growth strategies we develop target job steps and customer needs that aren't well served by current competition. This creates opportunities for our portfolio companies to capture market share by satisfying needs that competitors ignore or address inadequately.
We then coordinate marketing and sales optimization around the growth strategy. Marketing messages that demonstrate how solutions satisfy customer needs faster and more accurately generate more qualified leads at lower cost. Sales tactics focused on customer struggles and competitive weaknesses increase close rates and reduce time to close.
The traditional private equity playbook of operational improvements and leverage has limits. Our customer-focused approach creates growth opportunities that expand with market size and customer willingness to pay.
When our portfolio companies satisfy unmet customer needs better than competitors, they command premium pricing and capture increasing market share. This dual impact on revenue growth and profit margins drives the multiple expansion that creates superior equity returns.
The sustainable nature of job-based competitive advantages means that multiple expansion continues beyond the initial implementation period. As our portfolio companies establish leadership positions in satisfying customer needs, they can expand into adjacent market segments with similar jobs and leverage their capabilities across broader customer bases.
At thrv, we've proven that customer-focused product innovation generates sustainable competitive advantages and accelerates equity value creation. Our proprietary JTBD method and AI-powered platform enable portfolio companies to identify, prioritize, and satisfy customer needs faster than traditional approaches.
Partner with thrv to implement our proven method and unlock multiple expansion opportunities in your portfolio companies. Learn more about our approach at thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done.