Episode 24: Chirag Shah of Wavecrest Growth Partners on How to Increase Enterprise Value with
Organic Growth Levers

Episode Transcript

Shiv: All right. All right, Chirag, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Chirag: That's great. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Shiv: Yeah, excited to have you on. Obviously Wavecrest has been a big partner of ours over the years, so would love to have you share some of that background and what Wavecrest does with the audience. And let's go from there.

Chirag: Yeah. Yeah. So happy to provide an overview on Wavecrest. Wavecrest is a B2B tech-focused growth equity firm based in Boston. We've been around for eight years now, focused on the smaller end of growth equity. So platform businesses are ranging from five to 25 million in revenue, so early enough where the founder is typically still involved. We have a flexible investing model where we invest both as a minority and a majority. Investing both in North America and the UK and EMEA. Currently have $600 million under management across two funds and currently investing out of our second fund, which was raised in 22. It's a little under $300 million. And as I mentioned, typically founder-run bootstrap but capital efficient B2B software. We tend to invest in vertical markets across all different verticals.

And, again, in North America and UK and EMEA. When we do invest outside the US, typically businesses have a proven product market fit in North America. Generally 20% to 25% of the revenue is already established in North America and we can help them grow from there.

Shiv: And so, often - you mentioned founder-led and I guess founder-led businesses look quite different than institutionally-led businesses, right? So just help us understand what separates those businesses out for you in particular and how that changes your approach versus, let's say, buying a company from another private equity investor.

Chirag: Yeah, so they're typically founder-led. I think the founders are - typically have a significant skin in the game. They have - earlier enough where they have already proven a product. They have a proven product and the market has demand for that product, but they want to continue to accelerate that growth and want to be part of it. But they need capital to do it. And I think that's where growth equity can be very - that's the benefit of growth equity where it can come in and help the founder put some primary equity or investment on the balance sheet, investing in growth and product development, go to market, something that they may not have been able to do on their own. And they want to continue to be part of it. They feel confident in the long-term opportunity of the product and the company that they have, and they need equity to do it.

Shiv: Right, right, right. And oftentimes after the acquisition, these founders are sticking around, right? So when you're identifying founders, are there particular skill sets that you're looking for or signals to figure out which type of founders to back? Obviously the business being a healthy business and having product market fit and good profit margins or growth rates are important, but just in the founders themselves, are there some characteristics that you look for?

Chirag: Yeah, I think the founders that we typically back are ones that are obviously have a strength in one area. Typically can be on the product area and they're looking for support across some of the other functional areas, but have enough expertise and experience in some of these other functional areas. One, that are collaborative  - we want to come in and someone that thinks - someone that can, we can help and they're collaborative and want to be a - wants a thought partner.

We have a very collaborative approach. And so a founder that knows that there may be some challenges that they may not be able to face and want a thought partner to come in.

Shiv: And then on the flip side, from the founder's perspective, what are the ways in which Wavecrest adds value to these companies after investment?

Chirag: So that's, I think, one of our unique approaches to how we work with our founders. And we hope to find a partner that appreciates our investment in the operating side. We want to come in and be thought partners. And so we don't just provide capital. We also want to bring knowledge, operating experience, best practices that we have seen across our experience across multiple companies. We want to share them with our founders.

Wavecrest has always had an operational value-add approach from the beginning. From the beginning, they built the operating - we have our operating - the Wavecrest operating platform, and we continue to enhance on that platform. And we believe that's a key differentiator for us. The platform has several pillars that we bring to our companies. One of them is our Wavecrest growth levers. And we may talk more about this later, but these are frameworks that we've established over time. We have 22 of these frameworks specifically for capital-efficient B2B software companies that address topics that they're all facing, all B2B software companies are facing, from implementing price increases to defining your white space and greenfield and your ICP customers, how to build customer success organizations, how to think about ROI-based selling, pricing and packaging, optimizing your sales comp plans - you can imagine founders who are at five to six million, typically the primary seller, maybe have one or two sellers, and now they need to double, triple their selling organization. They haven't thought about sales comp plans, and we can help them do that. 

So these frameworks help them do that, but we also have other pillars of the operating platform that we bring. We have operating advisors, we have functional experts. We have a focus on talent and helping them identify, source, and develop their talent. So these - this platform, we have five pillars to that platform. That's something that we think is unique to Wavecrest to help support our companies and the founders to drive - to drive growth and scale.

Shiv: Yeah, I'd love to dive in deeper here because I think this is great value for the audience. And we ourselves have been plugged into some of your companies and have helped on the marketing side. But across the board, when you look at your companies, you mentioned those 23 levers that you have as part of the Wavecrest operating platform in order to scale these businesses. How do you identify which ones are most applicable? And you touched on some things like price increases and white space analysis and things like that. But, how do you identify which ones would be most applicable to a business and can create the most value? And why don't we go through the framework of like the bigger buckets, whether it's sales and marketing or expanding existing accounts or other things that you look at there.

Chirag: Yeah, so we do it early on in the process, really in diligence, where we're working with the management teams of the portfolio companies to identify where the opportunities are. I think the one thing that we do is we're not prescriptive. We're not going to take these frameworks and say we have to implement all the frameworks. Many times, companies teach us some of the best practices and have already processes and best practices in place across the different functions. And so we work with them early on, in diligence but also in the first 30 days to develop where we think the opportunities are. Usually, it’s dependent on our investment thesis and where we think the opportunities are. 75 to 80% of the thesis is always go to market. How do you improve our go to market, improve sales effectiveness, marketing effectiveness? How do we drive more retention, gross net retention through customer success? And so that's typically what drives most of the opportunity within our companies. When you're helping to scale companies, the founders may be really good at sales and marketing, but it's a different approach when you're having to scale and double and triple your sales organizations. And so that's where we really come in and can support our companies. 

For just a couple of examples around - let's say, price increases always is one where founders and earlier stage companies have set - have not put a lot of effort many times in pricing and really just testing the market and what they can get early on. We really help them optimize pricing. We help them optimize pricing and packaging. Sometimes they can package the offerings in a different way that they can get - increase their ACV or the average contract value with each customer. We help them think about price increases. Price increases I think sometimes mean just flat two, three CPI or some standard increase across the board. We really help them think about optimizing price increases, customizing it by customer, understanding the health of each customer. And many times you can get more price increases from a customer that's been with you. And maybe you get less, but overall we feel like we can help them think about different strategies to optimize those price increases and drive overall retention and net retention.

Shiv: Are there particular metrics or data points that you're looking at during diligence or post-close in the first 100 days that are helping you identify some of these levers? Because obviously pricing is an important lever and a lot of PE firms that we work with or talk to are looking at that as a lever. Sales efficiency has metrics, but I'm just trying to understand like how you evaluate that and how are you prioritizing one idea over another?

Chirag: Yeah, I think we are looking at all the key SaaS metrics early on. I think it's really important to understand the sales efficiency metrics. We're looking at lifetime value. We're looking at customer acquisition costs. We really try to understand, on the marketing side, the efficiency of the marketing dollars that are spent. So understanding marketing ROI by channel and the cost per lead, the cost per booking. On the customer success side, obviously, net retention and gross retention, how that's been trending over time. We do analysis by cohort analysis around retention, understanding the different sub-sectors of customers, when they were brought onto the platform and how does - any differences in retention there. So we're looking at all the different metrics and based on where we see those opportunities and where we think there are deficiencies, we try to benchmark them against what we have seen, those metrics against what we have seen across our experiences. We benchmark that against our own companies and see where they stand. And that's how we began to initially prioritize where the opportunities are.

Shiv: Can you give an example of that where you've looked at a company's numbers and based on your benchmark data or internal metrics, you've figured out, okay, like there's clearly an opportunity here and based on this, this is a lever that we kind of should be focusing on.

Chirag: Yeah, I think that there is a couple examples, I think, where we've done some significant - especially on the go to market side, some go to market transformations led by understanding these metrics at first. A good example would be a company named BigTime, a professional services automation software company specifically for companies with services organizations. They help them streamline resource management, project management, invoicing, financial management. This was a successful recap for us just recently, and we helped them redefine their go to market strategy. I think a lot of it was led by sales being more their metrics, the key SaaS metrics, but also was led by the opportunity. They can be more efficient, but how do we help them be more efficient as they grow and scale? So as we add on sales resources, as we build a BDR program, as we invest more in demand gen, how do we do that in a very efficient way?

And so this is a perfect example. We helped them improve their demand gen engine. We built an outbound sales motion for them through going up-market. So how do they go from the mid-market companies that they serve and go up-market? We looked at the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and how much were we cross-selling and up-selling their products within the existing customer base? How do we drive average contract value, we thought was low based on the opportunity that we saw across the product base? We tripled their average ACV over time. We did this through optimizing price, cross-selling, up-selling, resetting the packaging as I mentioned earlier, introducing new products that we can cross-sell.

But it really started with, where do we think the opportunities are through some of these metrics? And then where do we think the market opportunity is? And the question was, how do we scale? How can we scale the company but also be efficient?

Shiv: Yeah, going up-market is one of those levers that I think a lot of companies want to do because there's opportunity there in that segment of the market and retention rates are better, there's more room for expansion and all that, but companies often struggle to break through there. So how do you see that going up-market and what are some best practices that you've found in trying to find larger customers for your portfolio companies?

Chirag: Yeah, there are a couple of things there. I think it is hard to go up-market. I think if you've been successful in one segment of the market, it's not the same motion. It's not the same set of customers. It's not the same wants and needs. And so as you're going to go up-market, I think first you have to understand whether the product fits the needs and wants. It's easy to say that you want to go up-market. But does the product fit? Can it scale?

You're taking on larger customers, which typically means more users - can the company scale? So first, really understanding whether the product can scale to a larger enterprise customer. I think second is looking at your go to market motion. The go to market motion is very different. Your positioning, your messaging - ROI becomes more and more important to these customers. And so, understanding that, what is that end ROI back to the customer? And really being able to position yourselves and message that ROI to the customer is important. 

And I think what's most important is the skill set is very different. Going up-market typically means you need a different sales skill set. And sometimes it's not the same person. Small to mid-market companies can be more of an inside salesperson. Now you need a large - you know, go after larger customers, a more account executive, hunter model and that can be very different. So understanding the skill set of your organization and what skills you need and then how do you hire that, ramp them and onboard them - or onboard them so you can ramp faster.

Shiv: Yeah, so talk a little bit more about that. Just restructuring a sales org to achieve an objective like that, whether it's to go up-market or target a different segment. Like what does your process look like there in terms of the steps in place for the sales team to actually go into that market? And then the people you're putting in place, the overall objectives of the sales team and metrics that they're held accountable to - how do you organize that? And if you have an example that we can touch on, I think that would be helpful as well.

Chirag: Yeah, I would. I think the first thing you need to - as I mentioned before - is understanding your target customers. So going up-market is very different. So the first thing that we really understand is who are we going after? What types of customers? What is that ideal customer profile? And really, what are the characteristics of that ideal customer profile? Within that customer profile, it's understanding who is going to have the higher propensity to buy our products. So let's prioritize them within that. And what's the drivers to prioritize? So really understanding that ICP is your first step. 

And then it's that selling motion in your sales process. I think the sales process is very different, typically longer sales cycles and your upfront top of the funnel - identifying leads can take longer and more effort versus your smaller and medium targets. And so really going after those enterprises means really understanding the customer, but then taking the right sales motion, the right marketing lead generation approach. Is it going to be inbound versus outbound? How does ABM play? I think it's more and more important. ABM becomes more and more important in going up-market. So it's understanding how you're going market and how you're targeting that top of the funnel lead generation. 

The third piece of sales process. As I mentioned, that sales process can be very different, longer sales cycles. What is the process to engage to go from one part of the sale - from one part of the pipeline to the next phase of the pipeline? What are those gates? Having those clearly defined becomes more and more important with enterprise accounts. And then it's the skill set of the sales organization. So it's really identifying the right salespeople that can drive the enterprise. Again, it's very different than selling to the lower market. And then I think what's more important is the training and onboarding becomes more important as you go to enterprise accounts. Having a very robust training program, onboarding them, knowing very early on whether someone's going to be successful and having them ramp quicker becomes important when you're trying to go up-market.

Shiv: Yeah, sales training definitely we've seen, even just having a sales playbook and sales suitcase that the reps can easily find and reference during their sales process makes a world of a difference. You mentioned something interesting about the ICPs and exactly who we're going after. So talk a little bit more about that, about those initial stages, of identifying the ICP in order to go up-market or go after a different segment, and how much work are you doing into things like TAM and segmentation?

Chirag: Yeah, it does start with TAM, so we have to know the market opportunity. And typically, we've invested in companies where we've done that work upfront, where we have tried to understand the broader market opportunity segment, that market opportunity, and really understand where our investment and our company that we've invested in, where it can really target. So that work is done.

I think where the success comes in is really having robust - I think many companies stop there and then they just target based on, we want this segment and we're going to go after everyone in that segment. I think what becomes really valuable is prioritizing the customers within that segment or the target customers within that segment and prioritizing your customers that have that higher propensity to buy because there is a specific need, whether they're in a specific vertical, they have a specific process. They have something that they have a higher need for our product and prioritizing those and having your BDR team, having your account executives focus on those higher propensity buyer or higher priority targets. And that's where I think companies miss. They feel like they want to go after the entire market and they'll take any opportunity that comes through. I think it's really important to be able to say what really fits our ICP and just focus your time and effort on those that will produce higher win rates.

Shiv: Yeah, we've definitely seen this on our end as well is even though companies have a good idea of their TAM, I think there's a few next steps within that TAM of like identifying who's the ICP, who are the segments that have higher LTVs with you or better NPS scores or just better retention rates in general. And then finally, tailoring your go to market approach to land that type of customer more than the other ones that - unless they have lower LTVs or higher customer acquisition costs. So maybe connect those pieces together. How much are you looking at the go to market motion beyond just the sales side, in terms of which leads are coming in, the quality of those leads, the conversion rates of those leads as well?

Chirag: Yes, it really does start there. So when we start with the ICP, we take our existing customers that we've had success with and ones that we have lost and try to assess why we won, why we lost, what's the characteristics of the ones that we have won to define what that ICP is. And so that becomes critical in how you go to market and how you assess the leads that are coming in. So once you have - if you feel comfortable with the characteristics of your ICP -  so, what are those dynamics? What are the ones that are going to, as you mentioned, may have higher retention? What are the ones that we've won where they may be in a certain vertical? Where are the ones that have certain processes where we've had more success in? Understanding those characteristics. And then as leads come in, it's scoring those leads against that same score that we have for your ICP. So it's not only - and then marrying that with intent. So what intent have they given us in terms of buying? But then also, does that intent align with where we can be successful, where we can have a higher win rate? So every lead that comes in, ideally you are not only scoring intent, but you're scoring how they align to that ICP. And those are the ones that you focus on. 

I'd like to say that it's priority one, two, three, and four, taking all of your customers that you have, ranking them as a priority one or a scale of one to 10. And the ones that score 10 or between seven and 10 are the ones that you focus your time on. And the ones that are scoring lower than that, may even have a higher intent, be showing higher intent, but you don't focus on those because they just don't have the propensity to buy and your win rates are gonna be lower. Focus on the ones where you can really have success in winning.

Shiv: Yeah, and I'm curious as when you analyze the companies that you're investing in, how often do you see their marketing spend or go to market spend overall focused on the wrong set of customers or disproportionate amount of budget on the wrong set of customers because they haven't actually done this deep dive analysis of their own customer base?

Chirag: Yeah, I think at our stage companies, we see that a lot. I think we see that a lot, but we also - companies are just starting to fuel the go to market side and put more behind marketing and sales. This really is an opportunity for us to shape that with them. But that's an area we spent a lot of time on is really understanding it, let's just start with the top of the funnel, is understanding your marketing dollars and where they're being spent. Is it inbound? Is it outbound? Is it paid, social? Where are these leads coming in?

And ideally, you are measuring your effectiveness by source, by marketing source. So what is your cost per lead? What's the - eventually, your bookings per lead and what the sources are that they're coming from. That's ideally where you then shift your dollars to the sources that are working and move away from sources that are not working. That - putting that in place can be challenging, especially for an early stage company that maybe has not done that in the past. You need tools and resources to be able to do that. You need to be able to understand and track the effectiveness of where leads are coming from and the effectiveness of those leads. So that's a big part of where we spend a lot of time with our marketing organizations.

Shiv: Yeah, well, we totally agree. And what we find is that a company, especially in the early stages, a company will just kind of take whatever revenue comes their way in the end. You can grow to 10, 20, even $50 million with that kind of an approach. And the founder or the owners of the business don't say no to bad revenue because that's the revenue that's coming in. And I think as you start to professionalize the business and look at some of these data points, you uncover wasted customer acquisition cost on bad fit customers, or you find that certain customers that come in maybe stay for only six months or a year and then churn right away. And even though you're spending a ton of money at the top of the funnel on those customers. 

So I think just getting more data-focused, you can actually find a ton of efficiency and an additional opportunity within your existing budget and actually scale up the business without necessarily spending more. And we've seen this be true even for larger businesses that are 100 million plus because that same discipline every time you go through kind of another growth cycle, the same principles hold because you're now targeting more customers and more segments and you have more product lines. And so that work kind of needs to be done over and over again.

Chirag: Yeah, totally agree. And if you can set the foundation early on, I think that's what we try to do, set that foundation early on with companies that are in the five to 10. If you can set the discipline around doing that, it helps as you grow. But as you said, as they grow, you need to continue to do that. And as you scale, sometimes you can lose focus on certain things that may have worked in the past and just expect it to work. But if you're not tracking it, and as you mentioned, in a data-driven way, trending it over time, understanding what's working on a monthly basis and, again, trending that over time. I think that's when you - and always looking for ways to shift dollars and shift investments for what is working, from what's not working to what is working. It's a constant - it's not something that's done once a year. It's something that you need to look at.

Shiv: Exactly. Yeah, it has to definitely be done more than once. So completely agree on that. How much work are you doing on - you mentioned messaging, but just product marketing work and core positioning and story and messaging work for companies. Because as you're kind of updating your ICP, you now need to update what you're going to say to them. And that needs to be reflected on the website and sales enablement materials and sales scripts and talk tracks and everything else. So.

Chirag: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's - we're doing that. We have - a couple of our companies have gone through that towards the end of last year and are in the process of doing that this year. Very important is understanding the messaging that you have, you know, what's the - how are you positioning your products? How are you positioning your product with different segments? And then everything else has to follow that. Your sales collateral, your marketing messaging, your campaigns.

One area that we spent a lot of time on around messaging and positioning is ROI, that ROI back to the end customer. If you can quantify that, whether it's - ideally you're quantifying it, but even if you can't, doing it in a very qualitative way, but demonstrating the ROI that's back to the software companies and customers are seeing and delivering that and everything that you position, you message, you market, has to be part of that. And that's something we've spent a lot of time on over the last year is really trying to understand your ROI and then how that is ingrained in everything that you do in sales and marketing.

Shiv: And how are you measuring that? I think ROI is obviously self-explanatory, but I think one of the other levers for the Wavecrest operating platform that you've mentioned is just KPI tracking and having the right dashboards and the right metrics at board meetings and things like that. So triangulating the right ROI across different metrics can be tricky sometimes. So what are some of the key numbers that you guys are looking at at that level to figure out if the adjustments that you're making are actually working?

Chirag: Yeah, I mean, the ROI here I'm talking about is that ROI back to the customer, right? So just an example of when we have a company, HICX, that's in the supply chain management space helping large enterprise companies manage and collaborate with their suppliers. So in this case, we're really understanding what is when you're implementing HICX and you're able to better integrate, better collaborate, understand the status of your position with each of your suppliers and you're able to onboard them. Many companies have thousands of suppliers, so you'll easily onboard them or offboard them. What is that ROI to our customer as they do that and what benefit are they getting? What are they saving by being able to effectively onboard their suppliers? What dollars are they saving or how is it driving revenue because they understand the inventory of their suppliers or how would we be able to offboard them?

How can you fix that? There's savings in that. There is revenue opportunity for their end customers. Let's measure that. And we try to measure that for every company that we can, to the extent that you can do that. And as you're seeing that, that's what we're tracking, is understanding that ROI back to that end customer, and then using that in our selling motion, and using that example of what we saved to drove revenue for our customers to other customers that we bring in.

Shiv: Got it, got it. So it's from the customer's perspective. So that totally makes sense. I guess on the side of actually the adjusted ICPs and the TAMs that you're going after, like figuring out if that's actually working in terms of areas where you're scaling spend, how are you measuring that at the board level?

Chirag: Yeah, so we're looking at all the key SaaS metrics. We are looking at, obviously, lifetime value. We're looking at gross and net retention. We're trying to segment that by segment, by cohort. We are looking at customer acquisition costs. And it's important to be able to do these kind of key metrics over time and be able to trend it to see how they're improving. So that's where we're - those are the board-level metrics that become important and where we start looking at and start taking action on, what we do to invest in sales or shift dollars from certain marketing campaigns to other mapping campaigns that might be working. We're using those types of SaaS metrics and key metrics around efficiency at the board level to drive decisions on where we're investing our dollars.

Shiv: And have you noticed or implemented a change in terms of your payback periods or your benchmarks for payback periods with the way things have gone in recent months or the last, let's say 18 months or so where there is an increased focus on efficiency and EBITDA and profitability?

Chirag: Yeah, we have. I think it depends on each company. I think, you know, 23 was a challenging year, so it's difficult to take that as the metrics there. But what we have put in place over the last 18 months and two years to some of our companies, and if you go back to the work that we did, you know, even in the past, when we drove efficiency, we drove, implemented new go to market strategies. We've seen that efficiency improve and we've seen it through our customer acquisition costs, the payback period of those investments, the lifetime value. We see that. I think the work that we've done in the last year with some of our companies, we're going to start seeing it in 2024 based on what we're seeing in improved pipeline and improved top of the funnel opportunities for our companies. We expect to see that through the second half of 24.

Shiv: And coming to the part of actually operationalizing all this, right, where you may identify opportunities and you may have a prioritized list of recommendations. And you mentioned earlier that it's more suggestive than actually top-down that a company has to do this. How much are you focusing on the people side of the businesses and getting the right folks in the right seats?

Chirag: So yeah, so talent, as I mentioned earlier, is one of our key pillars to our operating platform. We believe talent augmentation is an essential ingredient to grow B2B tech companies successfully and help them scale. Wavecrest exclusively targets 5 to 25 million ARR companies. And the talent needed in those companies is unique. It's a combination of hands-on, roll up your sleeves while also having managerial skills or being able to manage a team. It's not venture, it's not large companies. And so it's very unique. And so we spent a lot of time around helping our companies identify, recruit, source, recruit, and develop that talent. 

And one of the things that we did last year, and we spent a significant amount of time on this, is building a proprietary talent database across sales, marketing, customer success, product, any other functional executive talents. We have a network of over 25,000 and it continues to grow. That helps us quickly identify talent within that network for specific portfolio needs. And we can do that pretty quickly. And so that gives our companies a quick sense of what's out there and how can we upgrade in our talent that we have today by quickly leveraging the database that we've built.

In addition to that, we've built some tools within our Wavecrest growth levers. Some of the tools that we use to help our companies, once they do come on board, is help them assess them and develop that talent. The levers that - best practices around organizational design and how to make sure that a person can be successful in that organization. Executive assessment and upgrading, helping our companies know when to level up the people that they have, when to level up to help scale the business and knowing when the right time to do that is. So not having the right person in place can really have significant impact, impacts culture, can set you back six months. So we've heavily invested in this, in our talent plan.

Shiv: Yeah, I think the database of functional experts, I think that's a great one that I think a lot of other PE firms need to do. I think some firms have like, let's say a handful of operating partners or one or two operating partners, but beyond those people, they need a network of folks that they can pull into these companies because the operating partners themselves can't go as deep as a particular freelancer or consultant or an expert. So I think that's a great one. What about M &A? Obviously, that's part of value creation. How much of a focus is that beyond just optimizing the existing business growing through inorganic avenues?

Chirag: Yeah, I say we do M&A. However, we're not doing roll-ups. That's not part of our investment thesis, just to come in and say we're going to do a roll-up strategy. And so we do M&A, but we don't underwrite M&A to achieve the returns that we need. But we will do it, and we do consider it for each of our investments at the right time. And typically, we're doing M&A for two reasons. First is, we're looking at opportunities to add a smaller competitor that may be doing the same thing that we're doing, has similar products. They're going after similar target customers. Or maybe they're going after a different segment, but they have a similar product and going after a different segment. And it's a good way to come to take on their customers and then quickly add revenue to your business. 

The second is around acquisition to help accelerate your product roadmap and the offerings that you have. Sometimes it may be easier or quicker to buy than to build. And this really enables us to add more products quickly to our suite of - to the company's suite of products, that's adjacent to your core product. And that gives the opportunity to be able to cross-sell and upsell to your existing customer base, cross-sell and upsell to the acquisition’s existing customer base. 

And so that's a - For those two reasons, we're always looking at opportunistic opportunities across - for M&A. Now, the challenge can be integrating the new acquisition. That's always a challenge. Easy to say, let's add a customer or let's add a tuck-in or an add-on to our as part of any strategy, but how do we bring them in? And you have different cultures, you have different selling motions, a different product on each side that now both sides need to be trained on and learn. So integrating the two companies into the one model is something we spend a lot of time and support our companies. We've had tools and resources and also some outside functional experts, there's outside experts that can help us successfully integrate companies. And some of the things that companies need to think about is how do you transition to one platform? You now have two platforms. Do you keep two platforms? Do you want to transition companies to one platform? And that transition can be challenging. Really identifying your cross-sell and up-sell targets early on, who are you going to cross-sell and up-sell? Those are the types of things that we help our companies think through as the first part of integration and then help them through the process of integrating the two companies over time.

Shiv: Yeah, I think that's a great point, which is sometimes what you think is right in theory in terms of cross-sell and up-sell or integrating two businesses together, when you actually try to do it doesn't end up actually being the case. So I think front-loading a lot of that work and truly understanding what is the value of an acquisition goes a long way. And think being more meticulous about that is a better approach. And we've seen some firms try to merge companies together that shouldn't be merged together, or you kind of lose the secret sauce of the businesses that you're acquiring and then revenue kind of dips, right? Which is the opposite of the outcome that you want.

Chirag: Yeah, yeah, totally agree. It's hard to do, but I think with the tools and resources we try to bring, that repetitive frameworks helps our companies be more effective at it, but it's still a challenge integrating two companies.

Shiv: Yeah, well, I think that's a great place to stop. I think you've gone through a bunch of the key levers in the Wavecrest operating platform. So appreciate you doing this. If people want to learn more about Wavecrest or what you guys do and potentially partner with you guys, where would they go to learn more about you?

Chirag: Yes, obviously I'm on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me there. And of course our website, wavecrestgrowth.com. Reach out anytime and happy to connect.

Shiv: Awesome, yeah, and obviously you guys are valued partners of ours, so we can't speak highly enough of you. So if there is anybody listening that is looking to partner with somebody, Wavecrest is a great partner. So with that said, Chirag, thank you very much for doing this and appreciate you being on and sharing your wisdom.

Chirag: Yep, thanks for having me, Shiv.