In our most recent deal, we used our equity value creation platform with the CEO of a healthcare technology company to triple the company's growth rate over ‘22 and ‘23. Accelerating a company's growth rate is the most powerful way to create equity value because it creates multiple expansion. Selling a company at a higher multiple than the purchase multiple creates more equity value than using debt or cutting costs.
Listen to our case study interview with Biscom's CEO, Dave Lucey
So how did we accelerate the company's growth and create multiple expansion?
Step 1: Define the Market Using the Customer's Job-to-be-Done.
Parker Gale, a private equity fund, asked us to use our method and platform to understand the market and growth opportunity for buying a 30 year old fax services company called Biscom. The critical starting point in our method is defining the market not by the product ("fax services") but by the customer's underlying job-to-be-done. In this example, the true market is for healthcare companies who need to securely send, receive and take action with private health information. (You can learn more about our definition of markets here.)
Step 2: Identify the Job Steps and Customer Needs
Once we defined the market using the customers JTBD, we identified the 17 steps in the job. Job steps tell the story of what a customer has to do to successfully get their job done. They follow a pattern of planning steps, execution steps, assessing steps, revising steps, and concluding steps. Each step has customer needs. A customer need is an action a customer has to take with a variable to get the job step done. (You can learn more about our definition of customer needs here.) We identify over 100 customer needs in the target customer's JTBD.
Step 3: Identify Unmet Needs, Size the Market Opportunity & Create the Growth Strategy
Once we identified all the customer's needs, we identify which needs are unmet by measure the effort it takes customer's to satisfy their needs with the current competitive solutions. And, unlike traditional methods that use product price and the number of buyer to calculate market size, we using the customer's willingness to pay to get the job done better to size the market opportunity. (You can learn more about our market sizing method here.)
With the unmet needs and the customer's willingness to pay, we now can create the optimal growth strategy in the market. The growth strategy is the foundation of the investment thesis because it shows that we can accelerate the company's growth, expand the valuation multiple, and create equity value with less risk. (You can learn more about our growth strategies here.)
After the acquisition, we worked with the operating team to align product, marketing, and sales activities with the target segment and unmet customer needs in the growth thesis. Just two years later, the fund was able to successfully exit for a fantastic return after Biscom tripled its growth rate.
In this interview, Dave Lucey, the Biscom CEO with whom we partnered, explains how Biscom used Jobs-to-be-Done to grow.
Some of the highlights:
- Lucey saw an opportunity in "solving more expensive problems for customers" rather than just providing fax services. thrv's Jobs-to-be-Done method confirmed that thesis and the market potential of Biscom.
- Biscom provided value in post-communication capabilities like context and workflows i.e. other steps in the job-to-be-done that weren't previously part of their marketing messages and sales tactics. This helped drive value-based pricing over a "race to the bottom."
- With improved messaging and consultative selling based on a deep understanding of their key customers, their needs, and how Biscom satisfied them well, Dave and his executive leadership team refocused the sales operation on generating new sales from existing customers.
- Focusing on upsells, cross-sells and conversions of existing customers led to tripling Biscom's growth rate.
- Empirical customer evidence and common language helped align product development, sales, and the board around strategic priorities.
- The discipline and consistency in applying the jobs-to-be-done framework and focusing on the high opportunity customer needs accelerated transformation and organizational alignment. A "sense of urgency" was not enough to operate faster. They needed to set the right foundation, and Jobs-to-be-Done was a key pillar in the foundation.
Here's the full transcript:
Jared Ranere 0:00
Hello welcome back to how would you beat where we discuss how you can use jobs to be done innovation methods to beat your competition. Remember to subscribe and like this podcast. I'm Jared Ranere, and in this podcast we welcome a special guest, Dave Lucey. Dave is the former CEO of bill.com, which he joined in 2022, leading the company to the successful exit, just two years after joining biz comp is a provider of facts, services, that's F-A-X, not f-a-c-t-s, we're talking about fax machines. Here. We are, I heard that people weren't buying too many fax machines. So David, tell me why you want to join this company? What was the opportunity here?
David Lucey 0:47
Hey, Jared, good, good to be with you again. You know, I had a similar kind of funny reaction when the recruiter called and I'm like, 30 years in my healthcare technology, career, and I've been pretty much focused the entire time of eliminating faxes, but, you know, got a real good education that we were talking about the fax protocol, and not the fax machine. And there was a whole market of digital fax companies that were, you know, very successful in getting rid of the manual work and the manual paper and digitizing those transactions. And just so happened to be using a very proven very reliable communications protocol in order to do that. So you know, got educated on the, on the business and on the market and was up for the challenge to jump in and help transform a 30 year old software company. That was one of the, you know, original pioneers in the in the digital fax industry.
Jared Ranere 1:58
Yeah, that's fantastic. And I remember your skepticism. So, you know, thrv was working with Parker Gale, Devin Matthews, and CiCi Zheng and the team there, Paul Stansik. And we help them with diligence on this acquisition of bid this biscom what they did, and we the same reaction to Devin, we're like a fax company that, I don't know that that makes sense, Devin. And so we heard him out. And then we went in to identify what was the true market here, right? We, nobody believed there was an opportunity for fax services as a market. But if you take the view of people aren't buying a product, they're hiring a product to get a job done, and their struggle with that job causes the purchase, then you can think about, okay, what is the goal people are trying to achieve with facts, services? And why is that goal hard to achieve? What are people willing to pay to get that done very well. And we saw some opportunities there. And I remember, when you were talking to the recruiter of biscom, we met and we gave you your view of the market and the our gross thesis. So I'm curious what your reaction to that was, how that shaped the way you viewed it, and how it, you know, what it did to help you think about how to approach Biscom And your role as CEO there?
David Lucey 3:25
Yeah, I mean, there was really two major decisions that I needed to get comfortable with. You know, one was partnering with Parker Gale. You know, Devin was pretty convincing that from a market equity firm perspective, that a very different approach, and had worked with private equity before and was pretty skeptical of, well, how, you know, how different couldn't be. And, you know, one of those kind of pieces of evidence of, you know, being different was getting to see all the work put into the due diligence, all the empirical evidence gather, and just how extensive that was, and a lot of the work that you did with them was, you know, really compelling. Particularly the interactions with customers of bill.com as well as customers of competitors, right, that those real you know, from the streets, kind of interactions and facts of how essential this was, how important it was to running their business. You know, that was a lot of the input I was looking for, to get convinced, you know, not only a partner partnering with Parker Gale, but also, you know, would I be set up to be successful in you know, what I was being asked to do, which was, you know, transform a bootstrap founder Lead 30 year old software business that had, you know, been pretty successful and getting to a certain point, you know, over 2500 customers, over a billion digital transactions on an annual basis, you know, 70%, concentrated within the healthcare with some pretty notable enterprise logos, but had stagnated from a, you know, it's stagnated from a growth perspective. So, you know, addressing all the underlying components that, you know, require driving growth. You know, part of the calculus was really looking at, well, how much runway do we have? At what point does the tide shift and the technology, acceptance of interoperability and new standards, become de facto, to really address the exchange of unstructured data, unstructured documents, and, you know, we had that measured in decades. So it was pretty comfortable that we had plenty of time plenty of runway to do the amount of transformative work that was going to really be required to, you know, reinvigorate the growth rate.
Jared Ranere 6:16
Yeah. And, you know, I remember, as you think about, well, there's a technology shift going underway here. And how far along is bill.com on that curve? Right. So I remember, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about, well, what are companies trying to do with Biscom? What are those big logos trying to do? And why are they choosing Biscom? Over anybody else. And what we found was, there was some some value in some of the post communication, technology that is calm had, right. So if you imagine, you work at a hospital, and you receive a fax, well, you have to have some kind of fax service just to get that transmission. But then there's a whole lot of work that happens after you receive it. And when we spoke to customers, they heard it, they spoke a lot about like, the easy part is getting the facts, and then everything you have to do after that is the hard part. And that was one of the things that customers liked so much about bill.com. And so we thought, Oh, gee, there's a lot of value here. There's, you know, there's, there's serving unmet needs in a way that isn't often talked about in that market.
David Lucey 7:29
Yeah, that's right. And that was a, that was a main component of the overall value creation plan. You know, we knew there was a lot of familiarity, a lot of stability with the transmission part of the business. But at the same time, the willingness to pay is that there was a bit of a race to the bottom on the usage base and the simple simplicity of just the transmission. So in order to add more value and drive value based pricing, we knew we're going to need to complement the foundation of transmission with pre and post capability is that get more into specific workflows more into specific use cases into more specific steps of the knowledge workers kind of post receiving this information, right, setting context of why did someone just send this to me? Understanding what are they looking for me to do? And do I have all the information in order to do that step? How much time do I have to do it? You know, who else do I need to interact with, in order to get to a successful resolution of whatever that is? Right? There was just so much a crush of inbound information with zero context, and very little access to the data inside the images that were being transmitted. You know, we saw we saw a great opportunity, you know, really to invest in that part of the business.
Unknown Speaker 9:01
Yeah, that in the good news.
David Lucey 9:06
Yeah. And the good news was, we had a lot of existing capabilities that complimented that already constructed, but we're not really leveraging that from a from a sales perspective. So historically, had been very much inbound very much order taking, and really didn't have a strength in educating existing customers about what the other capabilities were, and how they complemented. What we were known for, which was simple transmission.
Jared Ranere 9:47
Yeah, and I remember you when underwent some major messaging improvements and sales tactic improvements. Can you talk about how you you viewed those and what the key changes were? Are to those processes?
David Lucey 10:03
Yeah, absolutely. You know, when when we first engaged with, you know, your team got started prior to my arrival by, you know, a few weeks. And, you know, my first impression was your work was going to be really useful from a product management, product development, prioritization of r&d, helping determine the, you know, the roadmap. But what I really was pleasantly surprised by is, there was additional value in the research and the information that you're a gathering to help immediately that didn't require additional software development. You know, things like sales enablement, and messaging and battle cards. So there was just a tremendous amount of low hanging fruit. To complement what we're doing in terms of go to market as we kind of reconstructed the team and brought in a bunch of new folks that needed to be educated on, you know, what was in the bag, what did we have, for capabilities in order to sell, and how to message that and how to make connections with existing customers. So that really hadn't been tapped. From an outbound perspective, we had, you know, again, these these 2500 customers, unless they historically had a problem, there wasn't a lot of interaction with them. So, you know, we were very much planning to reach out to them, but we needed, you know, some really compelling and really standardized message to complement the new team that we were building. So it was very much an added very much was an added bonus of I thought, initially, hey, this is going to be the input to Product Development and Engineering and kind of classic, you know, top of the funnel from an r&d perspective. But it really was the fuel and the Jumpstart to, you know, be the the ammunition for the sales team to build confidence and and, you know, be able to use information that was straight from existing customers, and their testimony of, you know, what would be valuable to them from a jobs to be done perspective?
Jared Ranere 12:19
Yeah, I remember, you had a couple of product names and you went through like a major product naming revamping, there are a couple of product names where people will kind of go like, what's that, but then when you talk to them about like, Well, do you have this need? And is this thing hard for you to do? I've actually received a fax and, and you describe what the needs were there we go like, Oh, yeah, that's incredibly hard. And then then we do do something about that. Yeah. Yeah, we actually have a whole suite of products to help you with that part of the job. Yeah. So so how did you think about that? That renaming aspect? And what did you do there?
David Lucey 12:53
Yeah, I think, you know, generally from, you know, sales and customer interaction perspective. If you're explaining you're losing, right, so if you have a if you have a naming convention, or branding, and you instantly have to then explain to rationalize what does that mean, or what does that actually do for me, then you're already going backwards. So you know, your team just helped make the connection from, you know, how users and how buyers were contemplating this and how they think about their workflow and their particular steps. And it really just helped make some connections and some, some pretty simple installations to how we should be referring to things just to make a light bulb go off, go out, go off faster. And, frankly, to build confidence and build credibility that we should earn the right to help solve that problem, in addition to what we were already doing for them. Yeah.
Jared Ranere 14:02
Yeah. And as I understand it, you were able to increase the growth rate over your two years there. And that was a key aspect to the successful exit. Is that right?
David Lucey 14:13
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot that went into that, you know, people process but a lot of it really was, you know, the, the messaging. And we drove that we basically tripled the growth rate. So had a had its first kind of double digit growth year in over a decade. And we predominantly did that with existing customers. So combination of upsells cross sells and conversions. You know, we had a pretty diverse installed base, so a combination of on premise clients, hybrid clients and cloud clients. And, you know, You really needed to be extremely compelling in order to get a new logo to switch, just because of all the perceived risk around switching versus, you know, the benefit of solving, you know, kind of latent pain. So, you know, while we really invested in the cloud product and tried to get that up to standard from a parody feature parity perspective, with the on premise product, we just doubled down on the existing customer base, and kind of those three main plays of upsells, cross sells and conversions. And, you know, ended up, you know, driving, you know, a pretty significant amount of growth, that definitely was a major contributing factor to, you know, the successful exit.
Jared Ranere 15:49
That's great. And did we're able to ride that, was that a phase one? Or were you able to ride that upsell, cross sell conversion for two years to reach your growth targets?
David Lucey 16:01
So yeah, we pretty much wrote it for for the entire time. You know, there was some crossover on the messaging and some of the product development and new logos as well. You know, particularly with other competitors exiting the on premise market there, there still is a demand for kind of folks to have full control over the installation and operation of the service. So it was basically those two sets of plays there, there were a set of new logo plays, that were really were aimed at a particular set of competitors that were exiting the on premise market, and then this upsell, cross sell conversion of the top 250 customers within the 2500. And again, the the research that your team did, really was the, you know, underlying ammunition from a, you know, messaging and sales tactics perspective. You know, that really was the complement to the, you know, the new team that we built.
Jared Ranere 17:06
Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, one of the things that you said earlier was that the, the sales team was were kind of order takers. And you had to transition them to, you know, generating new sales. So, you know, what I think one of the hardest things to do as a salesperson, is to sell beyond your category. Right? So if somebody comes to you, and they're saying, hey, let's take a CRM, for example, I'm shopping for a CRM, I already know, I need a new CRM for whatever reason, we've decided, why do we didn't have them before. And I know it's, it's critical to the business, or the one we're using is failing us in various ways. And we want to get a new one. And I've got four contenders in the product category, tell me how yours is different from the others. Like that's, a lot of people know how to do that, I think, I think going to somebody and saying, you know, our category for x, but let me tell you about why is much harder, right? They they don't, they aren't aware that there's a product category that can solve the set of problems that you're trying to sell into. So how did your team deal with that? Like, what did you do tactically to prepare the sales team to do better at generating new sales out of new solutions that your customers weren't necessarily shopping for?
David Lucey 18:30
Yeah, a lot of it was getting everybody on the same page in terms of where we wanted to play, and what the pathway was to elevated within these organizations solving more complicated and more valuable problems, and connecting it to the stories that we gathered from existing customers, right. So I think that best salespeople are capable of telling very compelling stories. And ultimately, the the things that put them over the edge is making peer connections of hey, I just, I just dealt with a customer that's just like you and let me tell you about, you know, the problems they had and how we help them solve them. Does that sound familiar? Is that kind of resonating with you? So, you know, shifting it from or just or the rudimentary transmission capabilities into more specific use cases, specific workflows, into more of the data handling into more of the intelligence kind of post transmission, you know, just required more of a consultative sale and more, you know, solution, solution selling, which our team was very capable of in terms of the people that we're bringing into the organization and hiring. But they need to be educated on okay, what exactly do We do and, you know, how do I go hunt for that pain? And how do I, you know, how do I best explain our capabilities and connect it to their pain? in a compelling way, I think, you know, the big thing to really guard against is, you know, sales folks going around saying, Hey, I have a hammer, you have a nail, right? So just constantly talking about features and functions, and, you know, hoping the customer will make the connection of Oh, yeah, this is how this would be useful to me. And in many cases, you get customers just looking for a litany of, hey, I think I know, I need these functions and features do you have these functions and features. And I think the most capable sales folks can kind of pivot that conversation into, you know, one, that's much more about business situation, one that's much more about business outcomes. And then follow up with, let me explain how we actually solve this and how we've done this for other customers for decades. And really, what that was missing was real empirical, empirical evidence, actual quotes and facts from, from customers that, you know, people could put names and faces to the, to the anecdotes, to, you know, help help put, you know, particular deals over the over the finish line.
Jared Ranere 21:30
Yeah, it's, it's encouraging to hear you say that one of the things I we talk about a lot here at thrv is all the great sales frameworks talk about how you should tap in and empathize with your customers, unmet needs, their struggles, you know, in the Challenger sales book, there's a great quote, which says, you need to know your customers needs better than they do themselves. But the frameworks don't give you a good guess, on what those needs are. And so we always talk about how you know, the jobs to be done work is the content for those frameworks. So if you want to do a challenger sale, and you want to say like, Look, today, you're solving your need this way, let me challenge the way you do it today with a new way of doing it, which is our solution? Well, you need a good guess on what that need is, and how your product actually satisfies it better than the competition. And so it's encouraging to hear you say that, like, that's what we were missing a biscom, to where were those quotes. And I remember spending a lot of time with customers. And then, of course, with Paul, on the Parker, Gale team, kind of taking all this research we had done and pulling out the nuggets that the sales team could use to have that resonant conversation where it sounded like the sales team knew the customer needs really well, and were experts in their space and what they were trying to do. And that required, I remember a different way of thinking about who your customers were. Because if you do that, for an IT director across a broad set of company types that want to use fax services, then you come up with one very specific story, or very general story is a better way to put it, right. It's kind of a milquetoast story about sending data. But if you do it for healthcare companies, and specifically hospitals and other types of care providers, and you focus on, you know, the people who work with those companies that are actually dealing with the facts is not the IT directors who were just implementing infrastructure and technology, it's a totally different story that you're going to tell that's more likely to resonate with people who have a lot of poll in the organization. Yeah,
David Lucey 23:40
that was that was a major shift, right, going from selling telecom connectivity infrastructure to an IT director to healthcare solutions, that solve really expensive, really important problems. So when you try to elevate, the buying committee gets broader, and you need to bring in, you know, folks from functional areas and from the business side, and, you know, that was a lot of the relationship building that required. And again, we were looking for inroads to earn the right to have those conversations in order to expand the capabilities and it really required it to be data driven, and it to be empirical. Because as we started to see certain successes, the next step really was alright, how do you scale it? So how do you find a pattern? And then how do you start to kind of package that? Those steps from a playbook perspective so that you can add more salespeople and you can get kind of repeatable in the execution? You know, early on it really was just, you were you were writing experience or the capability is of particular individual polls, which was great. And that was a great start. But ultimately, to really drive the scale to get to triple, you know, tripling the growth, it had to be data driven and had to be driven by empirical evidence, you know, to achieve the levels that we did. And really the foundation of that was speaking a common language, right. So getting back to, you know, jobs to be done. And for it to not be siloed. And for kind of the entire enterprise to grow and learn at the same pace. It was really helpful just that to have a, you know, a common language to be able to talk about our customers talk about our solutions, and not be siloed. Around Well, I'm an expert in this one particular part of the solution for these one particular segment within customers, right, we're just constantly trying to break that down. And, you know, the work that you and your team did was a, you know, an accelerant there to be able to Alright, we're not speaking that way anymore. We're speaking, you know, in a jobs to be done. mentality. Yeah,
Jared Ranere 26:05
that makes a ton of sense. You know, we do see a lot that the best salespeople have been in the market long enough that they know how to speak the customer's language. And they, they kind of pick it up, they kind of organically build a playbook for themselves, that it's not scaled across the organization. And when you ramp new sellers on, it's very focused on product training, and less so on customer training, right? Like, what do you need to know about this customer in order to make this sale over and over again. And, you know, I think I think that common language plays a big role in accelerating that on ramp. The other thing you said, which I think is, is incredibly important, and, and like a fundamental tenant of Jobs-to-be-Done, that you kind of move on from quickly when you're doing it. But it's so important is that you said solving more expensive problems. And I think that's really critical, right? There are a lot of companies out there with potentially older technologies, or you're feeling even if it's a relatively new technology, you're feeling downward price pressure in some way. Because you have competitors who are getting feature parity, and you feel like you're playing feature catch up the whole time. And so, you know, the tendency there is to create more features. Because then you can do that feature comparison to be like, Look, you should pay more for us because you get more features. But really, the key is, as you said, is finding that more expensive problem. So the question isn't, what would you pay for more features? The question is, what would you pay to solve this other problem you have, that we're not solving today, or you don't believe we solve today, even if we can with our technology set. And when you take that mindset, suddenly you're you're literally your little market size expands by multiples, because you're no longer saying the downward price of your current product, you're looking at the willingness to pay for very important problems that you can solve with the same technology base and an expansion on the same product. So that the fact that you pick that up and leaned into that, I think that's so important. And it's, it's sad, it's almost feels like a throw away. But it's really critical to the whole thing working. Yeah,
David Lucey 28:22
you know, the other area where we saw a real benefit from that work was trading clarity from a product development and r&d perspective, you know, historically, you know, being founded by two engineers, and they were super successful with this approach of, if we, if we build it correctly, you know, folks will recognize that and gravitate towards it. So, you know, it's very technology lead very technical lead, and, you know, being able to shift it from engineering lead to, you know, more of a collaboration, and frankly, a little bit more slanted to, you know, business and how does it how does it actually solve? How do we actually get paid for more expensive problem solving? Yeah, the work the work that you guys did just cut through all the debate and cut through all the politics and it's like, no, here's the actual evidence, here's the, here's the data that suggests this is what we should invest in. So, you know, as we built out a product management function that was on par with, you know, the long standing and very talented engineering team, having that source to make the really difficult decisions, because, you know, obviously resources always going to be limited and you've got to make bets, you know, bringing have having the data and having actual customer input into that process, you know, filtered through your framework, you know, that just created speed for us, right. We you know, had limited resources and limited time and, you know, needed to make Significant bets and you know, learn from those and being. I don't think the company historically had that true evidence in the past, it had great instincts, it had great kind of gut feel for what to do. But when you got into more complicated, more industry specific problems, you know, it was a little outside their comfort zone, and you guys, you know, kind of filled that gap quickly and, and created a lot of acceleration for us. Yeah,
Jared Ranere 30:29
yeah, it's interesting, you're talking, it's almost like you're talking about the siloed nature of customer information within the company, right, the salespeople are talking to customers every single day, they have a lot of information that engineers you know, I don't think I've ever met an engineer that works at a company that wants to build technology that doesn't get used, right. They're all like, who's using it, and when are we going to launch this thing, because I just created a breakthrough. And so if you can create the connection for the engineering team, with the customer information, that sales and marketing and product marketing have, they're gonna make come to the similar conclusions that everybody else is coming to, because they now have the information, it's when you put them in a closet and hide them from the customers, that they start being like, well, even I have no information about why the customer might use this thing, I'll just focus on breakthrough technology, I would love it if I knew what their customers are going to use this for, because I can help you solve the problems. If they cared just about a technology, they probably would work in a university or something. They they want their stuff to be used.
David Lucey 31:32
Yeah, and you know, the other, frankly, unintended kind of benefit was in the acquisition. So you know, as after we got our sea legs underneath us, after we kind of, you know, jumped started the growth engine. You know, last summer, we were out looking for, add on capabilities in organic growth to complement what we're doing. And we were using a lot of the research that you did to evaluate and baseline, you know, additional companies that that that might be a good fit. And through that process, we came across the eventual strategic investor, and came to realize that the things that we were gravitating towards, they were as well, and kind of all the messaging and all the value prop and kind of the journey that we were on. They were on as well. And it just it helped having the, you know, the evidence to just compel and make it more obvious, you know, why the two companies made perfect sense to put together?
Jared Ranere 32:41
That's interesting. So you realized that you viewed the market in a similar way? And you saw Yeah, holes in the market in the same way, and you understood how to plug them together? That's, that's
David Lucey 32:52
And it wasn't us just, you know, talking from the hip about that. It was, hey, here's the supporting evidence that supports our positions. And, you know, that was really helpful through the due diligence process, and, you know, gave them a lot of belief and conviction of why the two companies made sense together. Yeah,
Jared Ranere 33:18
it's interesting, because you're reminding me of a conversation we once had with Devin. So when we look at a job to be done, in this case, the job was about, you know, sending and receiving protected health information, right. It's it's fax services, kind of that's not that wasn't the big breakthrough, everybody. I mean, that's not the genius moment that people are trying to send information. But the AI remember, we broke the job down into its components steps, so we could understand what the customer has to go through to get this job done. And we identified where Blizzcon was strong and where there were opportunities in the market because people were struggling, but bill.com was less strong. And Devin, smart guy immediately looked at it and said, okay, so I need to find deal origination, I need to assign my deal origination people to those boxes on the screen. And we'll find the 30 companies that can fill those gaps for us. And I thought that that, to me, was the beginning of strategic alignment between the operating team and the board. And I'd love to hear how that played out over the following two years, you know, how did you maintain that alignment staying focused on the right opportunities in the market?
David Lucey 34:30
Yeah, you know, great collaboration really was driven by a Greek cadence. So, you know, board meetings once a quarter product strategy reviews, once a quarter commercial reviews, and financial reviews once a month, and all those in their different agendas and different kind of focus. They all had a common thread in terms of you know, what's most important Now, and have the supporting data in order to all be seeing the same things at the same time. So, you know, CiCi likes to say, you know, product strategy is company strategy and product management is all about just making really difficult decisions. And, you know, really helped me again, from an acceleration perspective, and from a clarity perspective, to say, Hey, look at the vast amount of customer interviews and customer data and, and, you know, helped us instead of, you know, me having to go talk to all them or, or, you know, it just was a real compliment there. And again, to your point around deal origination, your work your team's work, that was the exact starting point to say, All right, let's go canvass the market. And we, you know, last summer, probably talked to 5075 companies, and had had a matrix that went, you know, use case and job set specific, you know, to try to identify the ones that we're kind of most compelling. And it just happened, we came across the, you know, came across, acquire through that through that process. Right,
Jared Ranere 36:21
right. That's fantastic. So, okay, final question here, Dave. Imagine another CEO, is joining a company and somebody tells them about jobs to be done, what would your advice be to them on how to use it? Well, to take full advantage of it?
David Lucey 36:42
Yeah, I think first bit of advice would be don't underestimate the power, the simplicity, right, I think, you know, there were a couple of different frameworks that were a couple of different models throughout the business that we adopted, that I think you could, you know, be somewhat skeptical of, well, that's obvious. That's kind of you know, what waters wet, of course, we're going to be kind of thinking about jobs to be done. But I think the magic really is in the discipline and the consistency in the repeatability, of taking something that looks so simple, and getting it ingrained throughout the organization on a on a real consistent basis. So easy to say, frankly, hard to do hard to do in a really disciplined, really consistent, really scalable way. So that, you know, that would be the first bit of advice and the, you know, the recommendation or the, you know, evidence that from our successes, it can be really powerful to create consensus and create clarity, which ultimately can be translated into speed. And that's, that's everything we were looking for is we knew we had a tremendous amount of transformation work to do. You know, we were planning on on more time to do it. But the fact that we made such great progress in two years, that was enough, enough evidence, enough progress, you know, to be, you know, be compelling from a acquisition perspective. So, you know, I promised when, when you know, Devin and through the hiring process, that I'd come with a much higher clock speed, that might have been a little bit, again, you know, over my over my skis a little bit, because you need assistance, you need complement, you need, you know, augmentation from a, from a people from a process from a data perspective in order to treat a greater clock speed throughout the organization. And frankly, it comes down to road work it get it requires getting out of the office to get it requires getting in front of customers. But then, bringing all of that back and constructing it and organizing it away. You know, that can be repeatable, and scalable and accessible to a bunch of different functions throughout the throughout the organization.
Jared Ranere 39:20
As a very interesting note about speed. It sounds like you're saying you need more than just a sense of urgency, you need a system and a process where you can align people with targets that are very clear, very easy to remember. And then that consensus dries concerted effort rather than disparate effort, yeah,
David Lucey 39:43
you just can't will it to happen, right? You can't just say, you know, we're gonna come in tomorrow we're gonna go faster. You need all the apparatus and you need all the all the capabilities. You know, to be able to do that. Yeah. It probably goes you know, saying goes something to like have you got to go slow to go fast. Right. So and that that was a lot of the wisdom of of Parker gale of hey, we need to make fundamental foundational investments in enablement across the board in order to achieve the levels of speed. That was going to be necessary.
Jared Ranere 40:27
Yeah, that's fantastic. That's a great place to end, Dave. Well, I appreciate you joining congrats on all your success. I love hearing the story. I could listen to it for hours.
David Lucey 40:37
And awesome. Yeah, we love talking about this stuff. And yeah, we'd love to do it again. All
Jared Ranere 40:42
right, excellent. We will talk soon. Thanks, Dave.
David Lucey 40:46
All right. Take care
