Episode 33: Craig Dupper of Elan Growth Partners on
A Partner Equity Approach to Investing
On this episode
Shiv interviews Craig Dupper, Founder and Managing Partner at Elan Growth Partners.
In this episode, Craig shares his firm’s Partner Equity investing strategy, which includes a value growth and enhancement approach. Shiv and Craig discuss the key areas founders should address to take their business to the next level and where their company might be underinvesting.
Learn about the difference between the real and perceived value in a business, and how Elan helps its founders find their secret sauce to usher their company through the next transition.
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.
Key Takeaways
- Craig's background, how he started Elan, and their value growth and enhancement approach (2:47)
- The real vs perceived value in a business (9:20)
- Focusing on Founders and what Elan brings to the table when investing in a company (13:09)
- Figuring out what a Founder's secret sauce truly is to grow the business through the next transition (16:34)
- How can investors help companies adjust to major changes in the business post-investment? (22:17)
- Does Elan's approach change based on the type of company they're investing in? (27:17)
- Finance, marketing, and sales are the 3 key under-invested areas in founder-led businesses (30:56)
- Understanding the strategic side of data and finance: pipeline coverage, sales cycles, etc. (35:47)
- How investors can help founders professionalize their business and better see the gaps in their plans (39:05)
Resources
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Episode Transcript
Shiv: All right, Craig, welcome to the show. How's it going?
Craig: Great, great. It's cold here in Utah. We had a May snowstorm. It's still snowing right now. It's kind of crazy.
Shiv: Haha, so You guys are in Park City, right? Yeah, that's a great place. We're in Toronto. It's a little bit warmer than over there probably, but excited to have you here and share what you guys do at Elan. So why don't we start with that, give an introduction about yourself and the firm, and then we'll take it from there.
Craig: Sure, that sounds good. So I've been a principal in private equity now for, I guess it's 20, 22, 23 years at this point. Started my career in investment banking, which is a fairly typical path, I think, for principal investors. Spent most of my time in banking in New York for Goldman Sachs and their healthcare group. Left shortly after 9-11 and moved west where I joined another individual in a prior firm called Solis, S-O-L-I-S. And what we were doing there is kind of building the framework for Elan's partner equity focus. So we're at the lower end of the lower middle market. So typically, the business enterprise values when we invest are $20 to $60 million. That translates into EBITDA of two to seven, say. For software businesses, we're more focused on revenue, although there has been a shift there, and we can talk about that more.
But really, instead of focusing on financial engineering, which I think is one path, and asset aggregation in private equity where you get in this treadmill of fund cycles and you've got a velocity of capital that you have to keep moving, ours is really a value growth and enhancement thesis. And it starts even from the structure back. And I think it's important to understand, well, just to continue the evolution. So I was at Solis for 16 years. We invested in two iterations, two fund iterations I spun out about almost six years ago, or I guess right at six years ago with an individual there. We've added to the team. We're focused on finding typically founders or family owners. They think there's tremendous value in their business, but they are somewhat risk averse in their decision making and part of that is driven by all their assets being tied up in their business. They typically, the good entrepreneurs are reinvesting, they're wanting to improve their companies and most, not only do they under-lever so they don't avail themselves of available debt in the marketplace because they're concerned about that, which is a good concern to have. They typically don't take a lot of cash out of the business. So what we do is we offer the alternative for them to diversify their portfolio day one with a meaningful cash infusion for the amount that we buy and then roll a very substantial portion of their equity into the business where they can realize the benefits of the accelerated growth, the improvement in the business fundamentals that we help and coach them and bring resources to bear to speed up. And psychologically, it makes a big difference if you've had at least a meaningful cash infusion upfront that changes your risk calculus a little bit and makes you more willing to make some of the decisions that without a partner at your side might seem a little scary or risky.
Shiv: Yeah, and you opened a lot of threads there. So let's start with the first one, which I think is worth expanding upon, which is this concept of creating value through financial engineering or rolling up a lot of companies and going through more of this capital deployment cycle that you had mentioned versus this value growth and enhancement approach that you guys seem to take with your companies.
Craig: Sure, well it starts on the front end. So we want to find businesses that we believe have potential that can be unlocked with fairly rudimentary business decisions. It's funny, even in complex businesses, very often if you strip everything away, business fundamentals hold true regardless of industry. What we see very often with entrepreneurial-led businesses is there's under investment in key areas that if we focus on those areas, apply some dollars and human capital against them, we can unlock value. That's a different approach than I think a lot of folks that are out there and there's nothing wrong with the strategy, it's just different. It's where they say, well, we're gonna come into a very fragmented marketplace, we're going to buy one asset and we're going to bolt on another one, we're going to strip away what we view as inefficient operations or low margin operations and try to create this entity that then we're going to flip upstream to a bigger buyer, be it a strategic or a financial. And in that second scenario, I think you're always focused on, you know, I want to sell tomorrow, I want to be ready to sell tomorrow, this is a financial game, there's a velocity of capital argument that I've got to turn. I think for the operators and the employees in those businesses, they're often caught in a whirlwind, if you will. You could make the argument in some cases that the business doesn't necessarily become better. It just has become saleable to maybe a wider audience. So that's what I mean by financial engineering versus fundamental business building, which is really what we look at doing. And in our view, well, we have to have in our underwriting thesis on the front end, a lot of exit potential and identified ways that we will ultimately harvest the investment upfront. Our belief is that if you're continually making the business better, on all fronts, not only growing it, but making it a better institution, you're going to always have ample exit alternatives because the universe rewards well-run, well-operated businesses that are able to present visibility on forecasts, able to demonstrate repeatability on execution, and that have professionalized infrastructure.
Shiv: Totally. It's funny hearing you speak there. Like one of the things that I think about is like how much real value is actually being created in any entity. Like when a founder creates a business, there's before they start the business, there's nothing. And then at some point there's something. And oftentimes in these financial engineering scenarios and they do work. Like we've seen a lot of larger PE firms have a ton of success with roll-ups and things like that. But in a lot of cases, we've also seen a lot of value being destroyed or not really any net new value being created. But on a spreadsheet, it looks like a more attractive asset, when in the long run, the company's actually not as valuable or not creating as much value in the marketplace.
Craig: Well, it's always interesting. I mean, I think the landscape is littered with founders that sell their business to private equity who proceed to ruin it. And then often the same team can come back together and buy the asset back for cents on the dollar and regain some of the magic. So I think the line that we walk is, since we are dealing with founder-owned businesses typically, there are exogenous features of those businesses that do have a specialness. And so what we try to do is preserve the specialness while evolving the business. And it's not rocket science. Our playbook is pretty straightforward, fundamentals-based, where we introduce repeatability, accountability, visibility. Very often under-invested areas of the business tend to be in the finance department. So one of the first things we'll look at is, has the founder relied on a controller instead of a CFO that has some strategic perspective? Because we really believe that having clear data is very important for decision making and it's got to be reliable. We look at budgeting cycles. Do you have a budget? Well very often founders will mistake targets for a budget, say or a flat, we want to grow 25% this year, well how are you going to get there? That's what a budget tells you, right? So we introduce planning disciplines and then apply accountability to that because that needs to infuse the entire organization. You need to have each of those parts of the business that has responsibility for their respective budget area need to know that. And we've talked before about having the key leaders of a business need to be able to all be put in a room separately. And when asked, what are we going to accomplish this year? What is the company? What is the goal? And what is your role in it? That those answers are all consistent across the organization. And that makes a difference. And it's not that entrepreneurs are poor operators. It's just very often that they're understaffed, they're overworked and they've got a primary objective that they are focused on and all these ancillary things around the sides can often fall through the cracks. And what we found that's interesting just in the financial world, we can look at some of that lack of development or lack of infrastructure as almost an opportunity because it's not a risky proposition to implement it typically. It's more just stick to it and make it happen. That can inert to value creation because there's many institutions that won't look at a business without certain infrastructure in place.
Shiv: Totally. And the reason is that they're trying to hedge their bets. But I guess in your case, because you're focused on founders and you continue working with the founders after you're making an investment, you're preserving a lot of that institutional knowledge to help you grow this thing going forward. Is that fair?
Craig: Yeah, no, that's totally fair. And it is interesting. I mean, it's a cultural thing that's an attribute of Elan. And we say it kind of flippantly sometimes, and I think people think it's cliche, but it's really true. We recognize that our mandate is broad enough that we're going to encounter different business models, different segments, and that the founders that we ultimately partner with are the fonts of knowledge typically in the segment. The thing that we bring or the things that we bring are access to resources that these founders might not have access to on their own. And we bring them on very early, not only in our diligence process, but then include them in the value creation exercise. And the reason that many founders don't have access to these people, even if they're in the same industry, is without a private equity partner, you don't have visibility on direction and you don't have the ability to compensate some of these individuals. We're able to bring people in, incent them alongside us through options or profits, interests or otherwise, to where they have some skin in the game and a vested interest in our success as well. And that can very dramatically de-risk the execution of a growth plan when you have those resources that are there, incented, that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Shiv: And what are some of those resources? Walk us through that because a founder obviously is busy just trying to run the business, stay cash flow positive, there's a ton of stuff to manage, actually drive sales and everything else. So what are the things that you as a firm are bringing to support them on that cause?
Craig: I think industry luminaries. People that have been there have done that in a very similar fashion recently. I mean a great example is a business we invested in called Resolve Systems. I was able to bring a gentleman who had built a business, sold it to Oracle fairly recently, had spent a lot of time looking at how do you scale a SaaS model? And importantly, how do you transition from what was really an IT services platform into a true software business? And because of the time period that he grew his business prior to selling it to Oracle, he had kind of gone through that same evolution and growth pain. So having an individual like that as a board member, and we did engage him as a consultant initially to help the founder kind of get his sea legs and ultimately build out an executive team around him that was software focused rather than IT services focused, made a very substantial difference and was the absolute, you know, directly responsible for the very favorable outcome for everyone at the table.
Shiv: Yeah, I think access to the right people is so critical because when in a founder-led business, the founder is playing a lot of those roles and not necessarily the expert in all functions, but they understand the market and the customer really well and have built a solution with some understanding of both of those things. But they may not have product expertise or marketing expertise or sales expertise. And you kind of bring that the right people in can be the difference between going significantly faster and not.
Craig: No, and there's also scenarios where you have founderitis, if you will. We've had circumstances where you have good business founders are often type A individuals, they're detail-oriented, and they're cagey and paranoid, and they're reluctant to offload functions. I mean, in one scenario, we had the gentleman who wasn't a founder in the truest sense, but it was a spinoff that he was leading of a corporate parent that we invested in. Very detail-oriented, very talented guy, but had his finger in everything in the business. As a business scales, it just doesn't work that way. No human is able to have their fingers in every pie. We spent a fair amount of time talking about, hey, what do you enjoy doing and what are you best at and how can you best contribute? And it became clear that his best function was being, he was an elephant hunter in enterprise software and was able to close very big enterprise deals and he enjoyed doing that. So a CEO became a, he kept the CEO title but his function was really chief sales officer. And we made it clear that, hey, you know, make a concerted effort to offload the administrative, the HR oversight, the, you know, you have people and if you don't have people you're confident enough in, we're going to help you find those individuals that you can be confident in and thereby leverage your highest and best talent to the benefit of the business.
Shiv: Yeah, I think that is definitely a thing founders miss. And even just myself being a founder, as you build the business, you are playing all of those roles and certain things are easier to delegate than others. Like on our side, client services is something that I'm completely removed from. And that's been a natural transition because we have really talented folks on our team. But things like sales and content and thought leadership creation comes through me. And so, we have been putting processes in place and hiring people to slowly offload that, but it's a longer process than like an overnight, like flipping a switch that happens.
And so how do you navigate situations like that where the founder is maybe pivotal to a function, but it doesn't necessarily need to be part of their core role going forward?
Craig: Well, I think it starts really at square one in our dialogue before we even partner with the company, right? Because I think there are attributes of individuals, some that lend themselves to our partnering strategy, and some it's just not a fit for them. So we spend time on the front end saying, hey, you know, what do you think you're good at? What do you want your life to look like? How can we enable your broader happiness beyond just this transaction that we're doing? And I think you suss out fairly early those that are self-aware enough and those that have the humility, if you will, to recognize, hey, I am the founder of this business. I have the secret sauce. I was the one that got it off the ground. All those are just fantastic feats. But this next transition, I could use some assistance that's supportive that enables me to take this business to the next level. And often that means a role shift. And we talk about that before we do the deal because again, you know, partner equity is a, there's all kinds of analogies you can use to it and you know, I use the marriage analogy often because there's this courtship on the front end before we execute a partnering, and that's a transaction in our terminology. We need to get to know one another. We need to understand, what are our motivations? Is there consistency in philosophy? Do we have the same outlook? Are we willing to question each other? Because again, we don't view ourselves as the smart private equity guys coming in that know how to do it. But we view ourselves as the private equity guys that have seen the movie before with different casts of characters. So we bring that experience set that can be helpful. But again, this roster of resources that we can bring to bear that we'll even bring in because often you're gonna have the smartest person in an industry that the chemistry just isn't there. And if that's the case, maybe it's not a fit. So, I think you're getting the feeling that there's a fairly tight screen for us to finally get to the finish line. But for the right individuals, for the right objectives, it can be a really very powerful structure.
Shiv: In those cases, how do you balance out because in a founder's case, they're looking at cash flow and growth and just looking at ongoing run rates and things like that as a way to run the business. And then an investor like yourself comes in and I get the partner-equity concept, but then the business still has certain guardrails or where it is. Like it is as a vehicle, we know how much it's going to do in revenue or what the growth trajectory is. So how do you balance that reality and things like profitability and adjusting expectations with maybe bringing in new people into it. Let's say you were replacing a CEO that's a founder-led sales model that grew the business to this point. You bring on a new chief revenue officer. They're not going to be able to close deals at the same rate, at least not right away. It's going to take them some time. It's going to cost a bunch of money to bring that person on board and onboard them and then, by the time you actually see the results, you may have lower revenue and potentially even lower profitability because of the salary that you're paying to somebody like that. And so how do you balance those things as an investor?
Craig: Well, I think the – and that's a great question. You know, you've heard the term J-curve bantered about. There is very typically, if you look at – especially from a cash flow perspective, due to the reinvestment – well, there's two parts to the answer. There's very often an infusion of capital to the balance sheet in addition to our partnering transaction, in addition to the equity purchase. So there's additional liquidity provided, but there's also a plan that we agree upon, at least in broad parameters prior to closing, that says, hey, these are the reinvestments that we're going to make. And Elan's a long-term investor. I mean, we don't, again, we're not as velocity of capital focused. And we recognize that there's going to be an initial period where you know, human resources and individuals take time to get up to speed, especially if they're new to the business. And on the revenue side, I mean, we're in a situation right now where we hired a chief revenue officer in December, and we're in that period where we're tracking developments, but the expectation is that there's still some time to see the true output from that addition, right? So I think the short answer is that we anticipate it so it's not a surprise, it's not a, well we've got this period of low profitability. That was by design and we understood that that was going to be the case. But part of that is getting our arms around what is the true sales cycle of a business. And often that takes a backward-looking analysis of sales pipeline and rate and win rate and all those things from the past before we got there. And the risk point for us is trying to say, well, with these new resources, how can we shorten that or how can we improve or expedite that? So that's the risk point, but we recognize that the question of how much can we shorten the sales cycle is a reasonable question, but even embedded in it recognizes that hey, we're going to have this period before we ramp.
Shiv: Right. Yeah. And even I'm just as you're speaking, I'm thinking about what the infusion of capital plus the founder getting a liquidity event when a ton of their personal net worth is tied in the business kind of relieves the pressure to keep a certain amount of runway or cash on hand and you're being less defensive with the business and you can play a little bit more offense when you have a capital partner like yourselves involved.
Craig: No, it makes a huge difference. I mean, other benefits, you know, I mentioned debt before, we're very conservative. We don't take debt just because it's available. We do think it has a role to play. But because of our presence, there typically doesn't require personal guarantees of the founder. You know, the company is now viewed by virtue of it having a private equity partner. It's viewed as a more valuable entity, the lender community looks at it as, hey, there's this much equity behind me and I've got a professional investment firm that has every interest in preserving that equity value. And to have any equity value, the debt has to be paid off, right? It allows you to have a slightly more aggressive capital structure, although again, I stress we're pretty conservative. But that does make a big difference in founder decision making. It doesn't feel as precarious.
Shiv: I know you guys invest in software and business services and other verticals as well. So does your approach change based on the type of company that you're investing in? Because software, obviously, you have to almost preload your investment or burn capital to get to certain levels of sustainability versus business services is profitable from day one in a lot of cases. So how do you see different industries like that?
Craig: Well, I think that you can look at them very similarly as long as you're focused on stage. And we're not seeding SaaS businesses. We're not a series A, series B kind of investor or seed investor. We're late-stage. So we typically have to see ARR producing at least break-even results. And I think that there's been a real shift, especially in the past, say, 20-24 months, to a focus on not just that revenue, but proof that, hey, you can make money with that revenue. I think the days of prolonged burn with no visibility on profitability are kind of behind us. And again, that's validating for me because that's always been my focus, even in the heyday. Because I think no matter the industry, to echo what I said previously, business fundamentals have to rule at the end of the day. And business fundamentals say if you can't generate positive cash flow and earnings, it's not a long-term viable business. Fairly long-winded answer. I don't know if that covered it.
Shiv: No, that's definitely helps. I guess I'm thinking about it in circumstances where a business services entity, let's say the average deal size is $100,000 and they're pretty high gross margin on that revenue. You can see them having like a net of above 50% in a lot of cases. Whereas on software, you have this customer acquisition cost and payback periods and you have to constantly invest in the product development and even mature businesses, unless they invest aggressively, they kind of plateau off. So I'm just wondering kind of how you see that.
Craig: Well, I mean, I think that we view retention as really important. That's one of the key metrics we look at. Not only just year over year, but then looking at cohorts of customers to ascertain how long they, you know, to really test the stickiness, supposition if you will. And I think the ability to see recurrence kind of absolves some of the other issues and explains frankly why ARR businesses are valued how they are valued. I mean in a service business, yes there are elements that can be good and if you have contracts and things like that that provide revenue visibility but you know, recurrence is a unique feature of software that if you can get deeply embedded with your customers, and you can innovate to ensure that you keep relevance, I think that those are the two keys.
Shiv: Yeah, I think that's a really good insight. I want to come back to something that you said earlier. You said that oftentimes founders have underinvestment in key areas. What are some of the most common areas that you see founder-led businesses are underinvesting in?
Craig: First and foremost is the finance function. I mean I think the view is that systems are fine. Even spreadsheets, if I've got a junior controller that's been able to feed me what I consider the three or four dashboard items for my decision making, that's all I need. So I think finance area, always. Very often sales. And part of that is because you have this phenomenon where founders and family owners with a CEO title sometimes have a hard time recognizing that they benefit even if their chief sales officer or CRO becomes the highest paid individual in the company. I think there's psychological resistance often to that. So what ends up happening is you'll have underperforming sales teams and when you dig in and peel back the onion, you realize, well, hey, their comp plan is outside of market or has features that don't appropriately align incentives. That's one conversation that we'll often have with founders like, hey, get over it. If you're structured right, if your chief sales officer or chief revenue officer is making more than you, everyone is very happy. Structured right.
Shiv: Right. And what does a good structure look like in your mind?
Craig: Well, I think it's definitely tied to and it depends on what you're selling, right? And there's all different schools of thought on how much you need to incentivize continued client coverage to retain those clients after they're won. I mean, it's pretty basic to have hefty commission structures on the front end. We typically see tiered that rapidly drop off in percentage terms but do require the salesperson to nurture and feed those relationships because again, you want to support retention and be attentive. And the thing that I think folks often overlook is that constant customer contact can dramatically influence your product development investment, right, because you're getting direct from the market feedback, you're hearing from the customer on a regular basis what's working, what's not, or their wish list for feature sets that you may or may not have. And so it can be kind of a positive feedback loop all the way around.
Shiv: What about areas like marketing in particular? Like what we see is when we come into companies and given that that's what our firm does there's an under-investment in just go to market in general around demand generation, around content and even just data in general across the board not just in marketing where companies don't completely understand where they're investing their budgets and what the return on that is. I'm curious if you see that as well?
Craig: That was my third, I think I had finance, sales and marketing was third and they're not necessarily in that. Well I think finance is the most typical, marketing is probably the second most typically under invested area. Because you can often ask founders and they don't really know what they do, what marketing people do. You have somebody that has a degree in marketing that can make nice charts and in some cases we've seen even some fairly creative output that looks creative, but is it hitting your customer target effectively? Are you measuring the return on the FTEs you have devoted to those activities? Typically not. And so we have availed ourselves of external marketing folks like yourself that have come in and it's really pretty dramatic. And when you watch a founder's eyes kind of open and say, my goodness. I hadn't even thought about this connection to the overall sales effort because you silo sales because that's where you see the revenue come in and you don't really recognize how the marketing function really is absolutely critical, not only in the messaging and positioning the business but supporting the sales function at the end of the day and increasing to higher close rates.
Shiv: Yeah, and on the data side and the finance side, it's kind of interconnected, right? Like the finance discipline, like there's a difference between just doing the bare minimum on finance and accounting and then strategic finance that is looking at cash flow and connecting financials to all the different functional areas and building the right roadmaps for each of those areas in partnering with all the different leaders. And I think data is just such a critical element of that to understand performance and what's working and what's not working. Do you see that in founder led businesses, like because the founder is just trying to run the company through feel it feels like in a lot of cases, is it just like something that's overlooked and how much of the focus is on that once you're coming in?
Craig: Well, when I mentioned finance and visibility, I was really eluding to the strategic side. I mean, we had a scenario where early in our partnering, the founder would show a pipeline from his sales team at our regular updates. And it looked very impressive because it was a long list and it was probability weighted and all those things that you can do to make to make what is essentially an exercise of unknowns appear to be known. It was really the CFO that said, wait a minute, I'm going to look back at these pipeline reports for the last two years and develop what our real hit ratio is based on the assigned sales activity that was tracking costs for their pursuits of these names. It basically opened our eyes to our pipeline is about a third of what it needs to be if we're going to hit our revenue target. And that's just based on experience and what we've seen. And so you can have what looks like a nice probability weighted pipeline that's kind of bunk because the historical reality is it takes a pipeline three times as big to yield the revenue target that you've laid out.
Shiv: I would say that's one of the most misunderstood concepts is fully understanding your pipeline coverage, looking at your sales cycles and how long it takes to close deals. And ultimately, like how many leads do we need MQLs or SQLs and looking at all the conversion rates at every single stage. And then how much budget do you need to drive that much pipeline to get to the targets that you want to get to? We find that companies just don't do that math. And so then they wonder why are we missing our targets or a VP of sales is kind of their average tenure is like 18 months. It's just because they don't understand that fundamental framework.
Craig: Yeah, no, and it's interesting. I mean, we even have a business in the portfolio right now that it's a similar type exercise and it's very illuminating and it can be a little deflating for the existing team, right? Because that's the way they've been doing it for typically a couple of years when we come along. And it necessitates a sense of urgency and a new approach often to try to enlarge that pipeline. There's no question it's a huge needle-mover.
Shiv: And so given that there are all of these gaps, how much of the effort that you're putting into these companies is on the education side or catching up the founders and executives in a more professionalized framework to run their companies? And how do you go about that education?
Craig: I think a lot of it is bedside manner and understanding the entrepreneurial mindset. In law, it is an entrepreneurial endeavor, so I think I can relate to that. In my career as a principal investor, I've had to – it's never optimal when the investor has to take an operational role even on a temporary basis, but I've had to do it twice. For extended periods of time, one was a near-period almost a full year and the other one was about eight months. And in both of those circumstances, it gave us some institutional relatability and humbleness and a willingness to spend the time to explain why. Most good entrepreneurs are highly persuaded by data in evidence and to the extent we can share with them, hey, this makes a difference. And a lot of it is pretty fundamental, Shiv. I mean, a lot of it is, you know, we'll always institute a fairly robust audit process, for example, which to most founders seems like, why am I going to pay an outside firm to come in and do that? It seems like a lot of money, right? Which is relatively short-sighted because it does two things. It not only sets you up, for external analysis for people looking in, but it informs your internal processes because to go through an audit, you have to have certain controls, processes, procedures in place that need to happen. But the reluctant founder that says I don't really want to spend the money on that, I can show them a list of potential acquirers in the future that won't entertain a business analysis unless the company's been audited, right? So it's a direct empirical demonstrable value impact. When it comes to internal structures, you know, one of the hardest discussions we often have is developing a formalized quarterly board cadence. You know, because very often it's just us initially and the founder and their designees on our shared board representation. And so it can feel a little unusual to say, okay, we're going to have this formalized board meeting and we want a board package that contains these elements. But again, it's not just to check the box or to have the information there, it's to go through the exercise because going through that exercise on a quarterly cadence changes kind of your behavior day to day because you've got this reporting period and if we've done it correctly, we've set up at the beginning of each year, these are the milestones that we as a board are going to be looking at achieving during the year and each of these board check-ins or how are we doing towards those milestones? What are their impediments to achieving them? How can the board be helpful to you to get rid of those log jams so we can move forward? But again, it's a fair amount of hand-holding, it's referencing. I mean, we'll often let existing partners talk to our prior partners and commiserate about you know this doesn't seem that important and they can hear first-hand that yes it does make a difference and it does increase the value of the business fundamentals.
Shiv: Yeah, it's like that John Doerr thing of ‘Measuring What Matters’ or Jack Welch kind of just management by objectives and metrics and all that. And the more that you put into place, the better off the businesses in terms of measuring things on an ongoing basis. And then you have this feedback loop to adjust things, which as founders, you kind of just skip sometimes because you're focusing on the most important thing of the day, but not necessarily having that professionalized organization.
Craig: Well, and our goal is, look, we want to make a founder operator's life better. I mean, very often it feels like your hair's on fire, you know, running around trying to execute. And if life doesn't improve, quality of life doesn't improve by virtue of our partnership, I don't think we don't view it as overall success. Does that mean that people are still going to keep working very hard and sacrificing personal time and everything else that could just go along with running a business, sure. But we're creating a path towards an end game that hopefully, if we've done things correctly, is much shorter than it would have been had you been standalone and often at a higher point on that steeper growth curve.
Shiv: I think that's a great message and a good place to end the episode. But with that said, what is a place that founders and other listeners can go to learn more about what you do?
Craig: Well, our website is elangrowth .com. You can see our website that also has a list of our transaction experiences, a small list so far. And we occasionally do white papers on the industry and we'll have links to those on our LinkedIn page as well because Elan Growth has a landing page there. And we've done a couple of podcasts like this where we talk about what we do.
Shiv: Awesome, we'll be sure to include all of that in the show notes. And with that said, Craig, thanks a lot for coming on and sharing your wisdom. I thought there was a lot of great content in there for founders to take away and improve their businesses. So, appreciate you doing this.
Craig: Well, thanks, Shiv. Appreciate being a part of it.
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