Episode 60: Shiv Narayanan of How To SaaS on
Creating Enterprise Value With Marketing

Episode Transcript  

All right, I got a ton of slides to get through, so I will be speaking very fast. And you will get the slides after the QR code is on the top right there. So just a quick background about myself. I run a firm called How To SaaS. We work with leading private equity investors and software companies, and we help them scale with marketing and demand gen. I've also written a couple of books. One of them was in your bag, so be sure to check that out. Now, with that said, I meet a lot of companies weekly, daily, and almost all of them come to me with the same problem. We need more leads, we need more demand gen, we wanna close more deals, and we need more pipeline. The problem is that most companies are not ready for that yet, or they haven't figured out a lot of the other fundamental building blocks in order to be able to capitalize if they got more lead volume.

So what I wanna try to explain to you guys is a framework, regardless of what stage you're at, what types of companies you invest in, how do you think about what are the right marketing initiatives for you, and what should you start with first? And we'll start with a story. This is an example of a person that I meet very often. This is Henry. He has a data analytics company. It seems pretty good in terms of a lot of metrics. It's about 17 million in revenue, negative EBITDA, but not that much to the point where you can't optimize it. A lot of targets to go after, decent size ACV. They're growing, but their close rates could be better, but a pretty good business. And Henry came to us and he said, I want more leads. Can you help us figure this out? And we said, sure. We signed the deal. We started working on everything. And we get in there and here's what we learn right away. His net revenue retention is 70% and they're actually shrinking as a business. And so immediately I said, your problem is not more leads. We can get you more folks at the top of the funnel, but your business is contracting because you are not able to retain your customers. And so we need to start by figuring out how do you keep your customers in the first place? And then we can go back to the top of the funnel and get more folks in the door.

This is this variation, a variation of this story plays out all the time where people will tell us we need more leads and there's different parts of their funnel broken, different parts of their entire sales close rates or MQL to close rates or MQL to SQL rates. Every part of the funnel needs to be optimized and a lot of companies get this wrong. And the reason this matters is that your functional strategy is a subset of your department strategy and your department strategy is a subset of your company strategy.

Based on where your company is, that's gonna dictate what your marketing priority should be, what your sales priority should be, and all of those things need to kind of work together, and then ultimately you can kind of get to where you should actually deploy your budget. So really knowing your business context is the first step. And the idea is that to create enterprise value with marketing, you actually have to start with the highest leverage item. And doing things in the right order is the most important thing, right?

So in most companies that we meet, I would say you could probably look at problems, there's about nine of them that apply no matter what. It's either we don't have enough leads or we don't have enough traffic, we have poor lead quality, our lead to MQL rate is low, our cost for MQL is too high, our win rates are too low, our CAC payback periods are too high, we have low 90-day retention, we're not expanding our customers enough, and then finally we don't have enough net revenue retention or gross retention. And the idea is that you have to work backwards. So even though everybody wants number one, you actually have to start with number nine and make sure every step of the funnel back to the top is actually optimized. And by doing things in that order, you'll build a better business that's gonna have higher enterprise value. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through all nine of these things and show you what you can do to optimize at every single stage. And another way to kind of think about this is a full customer lifecycle, right? So these are commonly known stages like you have discovery, education, you have a decision made, then you have adoption, then you expand your account, and then retention. You want to start on the far right and think about all the initiatives that you can do for your existing customers to expand and retain them and work your way backwards to finding more of the folks that are best fit for what you are actually selling.

So let's start with poor gross and net revenue retention numbers. One thing you'll find is that retention, people talk about just product market fit in the retention space, but if you're thinking about how much you can spend to acquire a customer, it is directly tied to your LTV. Because if you think about it from an LTV to CAC ratio standpoint, and everybody, let's say, has the same type of first year revenue, and when I say high, medium, low, I mean your best fit customers, medium fit customers, or your worst fit customers, they're gonna give you the same amount of revenue in the first year, but as time goes on, their LTV is gonna be very different. And then if you compare that with your acceptable acquisition cost to get one customer, you're going to find that your LTV to CAC ratio drops from acceptable to not acceptable very quickly. And that affects how much we can invest at the top of the funnel. if we were to have similar LTV to CAC ratios on all three of those segments, for the low-fit customers, we can only spend about half as much as we can on our best-fit customers. The point is that your best-fit customers are cheaper to acquire than your worst-fit customers, and they are going to stay longer with you as well. And so in order to do this right, and a few folks have talked about this this week, is just getting your customer analysis right, so by segment, by industry, by vertical, by size of account, by segment of the market, by geography, and then looking at all your metrics, your demo to operate, your opt to close rate, your NPS, your retention rating, your different scores, on all these different metrics to figure out where are our best fit customers, and you want to find more of those people. So as you define your ICP, you want to finally convert that into your messaging and positioning, and that's where you disseminate across your website, your sales enablement, your customer marketing, and anywhere else you interact with the market. A lot of times when we work with clients, we find that they kind of know who their ICP is, or what the exact market that they're going after, but when it comes time to the messaging and positioning piece, it's not actually being communicated to the market, and then it's not actually even shown on their website. It's not in their sales enablement materials. They're not having demos in the right way with those prospects. So this converting the insights into content is critical and somebody on the team needs to do that work. Either it's a product marketer, it's the founder or somebody that's actually creating that content.

Okay next we want look at low expansion rates and one thing that I notice is that if companies very don't have a clear idea of the total customer value of their existing accounts and that's because expansion kind of happens organically. You have a customer, maybe they buy a few more seats every year, and you kind of let that happen on autopilot. This has a dampening effect on how much you can spend to acquire a customer, similar to the way that you would by having poor net revenue retention rates. Because the more you expand the account, the higher your total customer value goes up, the more you can spend to actually acquire that customer upfront and still have a healthy LTV to CAC ratio. And the three main ways to kind of do this is seed expansion, or selling more modules connected to seats, dumbed-tooth pricing, then third is upsell and cross-sell. And one thing I find that companies don't do is they don't have enough white space analysis done within their existing customer base to figure out how much more can we sell per account. And I'll tell you as a quick story, work with about a $200 million software company, pretty large business, global company, and they were so focused on top of funnel, and then we did white space analysis on their existing accounts. And we found that there was another billion dollars sitting inside their existing customers just based on the additional seats and departments that they could sell into. So very quickly, was like, even though we can spend more on top of funnel because you are very competitive in that space, there's way more revenue for you to capture from your existing accounts. So let's focus there first and let's everything else be on autopilot. You could do the same thing for pricing increases. One of the first things you talk to PE investors in the room, if they acquire a company, that's one of the first things they're going to do is increase your prices because there's basic analysis to do to say that we can increase on by 25%, 35%, we'll see a small amount of churn, especially if we have very loyal customers and the net impact will be quite positive, right? So knowing what is that and doing that analysis across different segments and I would say implement that and you'll capture that enterprise value before a transaction even happens. finally on the upsell and cross-sell side, this is just an example of a company that should be capturing part of their payments volume but it could be that you have a second product line or a third product line that you can cross-sell, just figuring out how much revenue sits in there and how much should we prioritize that because we already have those customers. I don't need to spend more money on paid ads or SEO or ABM or Outbound to get them in the door. I already have their contact information. I already know who the buyer is, so we should prioritize that.

Next, we think about 90-day retention. And another way to think about 90-day retention, would say for its more transactional type of sales, but

It's important to keep track of even an enterprise and if you have a free trial, especially important to think about how long does it take your customer to get value from your software? How much are they using it? How much time does it take to reach them a specific milestone? Like if you have a website builder, how long does it take them to connect their custom domain to your software? How long does it take them to upload their logo? How long does it take them to upload their membership database or send an email from your platform? As you start tracking these things, you want to align your activities to help them reach those milestones or success metrics because that's going to increase the likelihood that 90 days out, they will feel like they made a good decision and continue to invest into the platform. And the way you do this is in a few ways. One is great onboarding, two is great customer success, and three is great in product experience. All three of these, they need to kind of work hand in hand. And I'm describing stuff here that is not traditionally considered marketing, what I want you guys to kind of think about is everything is marketing because everything requires content. Everything requires email marketing. Everything requires nurturing of customers to get to the next step. And so marketing needs to be closely tied with all of these functions to do a good job and get to the numbers that we kind of want to get to. And so, for example, in product, we may want great customer success content in order to do a better job with this. This includes your help site, any support articles, live chat, having automation, may involve videos, website videos, and product videos, may involve interactive content, demos, walkthroughs, sandboxes, and then nurture programs through email and other different mediums that you can get a hold of your existing customers. And the point of this is that people think of their product as one thing and their content as another thing, but really your content is part of your product.

Number six is high CAC payback period. So if you were to segment out your different customers and look at what percentage of your base it makes up, how much opportunity is inside that segment, and what your CAC payback period is, you would be astounded at where your investments are actually going. And this is actually a reverse example. In a lot of cases, enterprise customers are more valuable and have better CAC payback periods because you can invest more to acquire them. But I actually recently encountered an example like this where smaller customers were more valuable to this company. So I wanted to point that out. And then if you think about how much budget you're allocating to the different segments, you will often find that you're upside down. So in this case, this company thought that going upmarket was their big lever. They deployed a ton of budget. They hired sales reps. They created content, spend money on paid advertising, did all of that. And it turned out that enterprise customers would much rather prefer to use something like Salesforce with customizations versus choosing them for their platform. So they made a mistake, they should have been more focused down market or middle market, but most of their budget was going up market. again, coming back to this point, your best fit customers will inversely have the lowest CAC. You need to understand that piece because how you allocate your budget changes dramatically. Another way to think about your best fit customers having the lowest CAC is that your customers are often your best fit customers.

So they should be the ones that you focus on in terms of expansion and retention. And that's also why we do that work first. Another way to kind of lower your CAC or think about segments is your go-to-market approach should be different based on the size of customers you're going after and how big the total addressable market is. So the higher your ACV, often the more limited your TAM is and the more customized your campaigns need to be. So you're going to be increasing your customer acquisition costs, the more tailored you get to that one-to-one segment where let's say I was telling somebody an example over lunch, let's say you target the 500 largest hospitals in the country, you have to be very focused in your messaging and positioning and outreach efforts. It has to be very customized and tailored. On the flip side, if you're selling a transactional product and it's low ACV, high TEM, you can be more one-to-many and fishing with the net and inbound. And getting this wrong can lead to a lot more cost of acquisition being invested in the wrong segments and low LTV to CAC ratios. And another way to kind of visualize this is to think about the channels that you're investing in. on this chart, if you look at ACV versus channels that are applicable, oftentimes we see companies investing in channels thinking they're doing a good job, but for their segment of customers, that channel is not relevant. I talking to one company that sells into neurosurgeons this week, and they said, we're doing a phenomenal job with SEO. We're at the top of Google for all the keyword terms that we'd like to rank for. I said, okay, are you getting the leads that you want to? The answer is no, because hospitals and neurosurgeons don't buy that way. So you could be as good at SEO as you want, and all the people in that market might think of you if they potentially search, but the point is that they're not searching. How they make decisions is by talking to each other, looking at referrals, getting more, it's more of a relationship-based sale. So for your context, which channel is most applicable, and being very hyper-efficient and focused on those channels, is gonna bring your CAC down quite a bit.

Next, low win rates. And we could talk about sales efficiency. I'm not a sales expert, but it very closely ties with marketing and it's pretty much intertwined. But the point is that it's really important to understand your closed lost reasons. And it's amazing to me that when we come into companies, we ask them for this type of data and they don't often analyze it or at least look at it detailed enough. The most common ones are you're too expensive, we are not in the right timing in terms of being able to make this decision. We chose a competitor. There's not enough internal support. And then finally, we're actually going to do nothing. We're not going to work with you or anybody else. We decided to focus on other things. as you start to understand who is deciding what within this list, different initiatives or priorities emerge. One thing that I noticed is that when we talk about sales enablement, there's often a huge gap. So we talk about sales reps a lot. This sales rep sells more or we do well with this region but not in this other region or territory. But we don't talk about enough is how do we enable the sales team? One common problem I see in all businesses or a lot of founder led businesses is the founder is the main rainmaker. And the problem that that person has is I can't get my other reps to sell the way I do. Well, they don't have the industry knowledge, they don't have the relationships, they don't have the context. So the way to bridge that is to create a lot more content that trains them, that educates them, and enables them. You need battle cards, you need sales decks, you need objection handling questions and answers, you need email cadences. There's a lot of things that the founder does that these people will never learn unless we actually have an internal content production system that actually teaches that to them. And then as you have all of that content and information, what you need to do is by ICP, by vertical, by segment, have the right sales materials and run customized demo experiences and sales cadences to those folks that can be done at scale not just by the founder but by all the different sales reps. And as you do that, you're gonna see your close rates grow up dramatically.

Next is high cost per MQL, and I'm speeding through this because I can see the shot clock, is if you look at your conversion rates, do you know what they are at every step of the funnel. how much, how many, what percentage of leads get to MQL, what percentage of MQLs get to SQL, what percentage of SQLs get to close. And you'll find that what is the average number of leads or demos that you need to hold in order to close one deal. A lot of companies don't know this number. You need to know that. And the reason for that is ultimately it helps you establish how much can you spend on average to get a lead in the door.

As you understand that number, we call that our acceptable cost per lead if you will, or cost per MQL, you can then benchmark that against your different channels and programs that you're running to see if you're being efficient or not in those channels. So you might have a global conversion rate of MQL to SQL of 30% and SQL to close of 35%, but it might turn out that some channels are way more efficient at closing more deals. So those are the channels that you wanna invest more into before you invest in the inefficient ones. In this example, the opt-to-close rate from events is way too low, it's 15%. And on the flip side, from content, it's 45%. And on partner, it's 70%. I think somebody talked about partners earlier. So why would I not invest more into content and my partners before I go to five more trade shows this year? But what's one of the first things companies do when they're doing well? They go to more trade shows and they collect badge scans and contacts and they start sending out cold emails before they've done some of these other channels in work. And as you start to go through this for every single channel, what you're gonna find is you're gonna have an acceptable cost per MQL and an actual cost per MQL. You can kind of compare those two things. And you'll find that some channels are way more efficient than others. And those that are, we need to scale up. The ones that are not, we want to scale down. And you can often reallocate your budget to figure out what's working and what's not working.

Next, you have your lead to MQL rate. So in this company's case, spending about $60,000, their lead to MQL rate is 5%, so their cost per MQL is 20,000, which seems okay depending on the size of the sale, but their actual acceptable cost per MQL is $8,000, so they're spending way too much for what they need to do. So what we need to do in order to figure this out is get our lead definitions in order and connect it to some of the RevOp stuff that we've covered today. I often meet companies that have the wrong lead definitions. I recently met a company during marketing due diligence engagement where they were equating their outbound conversion rates with their inbound conversion rates, but the lead definitions on outbound were treating contacts the same way that inbound was treating leads. And so the conversion rates look very different. So you're not comparing apples to apples between two different channels there. So you really wanna be able to compare each and every single stage across every channel and treat them equally so that you actually are getting the right insights. There's some rev-ops work that kind of needs to be invested into. The last thing I'll say about this part is to create custom nurture paths. We talk a lot about best fit customers and verticals and all that kind of stuff, but when it comes down to the actual execution of that, we need great content. Content is the variable that distinguishes great companies from kind of good companies. And so what does that need to look like at every stage of the funnel? We have the ICP, how are they finding us? When they come in, how are we gonna nurture them? What's the offer that we're providing them with? How are we gonna nurture them through the next stage? And how are we gonna convert them through the closed one? And then for every single segment, we want different nurture paths. So at a very simple level, it might be by vertical. It also might be by stage of funnel. It might be by segment. It might be by geography. It might be by language. You need to have hundreds of nurture paths, the larger you grow as a business. And if you have multiple product lines, it should look like a very complicated flow chart, but that content production needs to be ramped up internally.

Next is lead quality. On lead quality, you're gonna find that if you look at the top of funnel efficiency inside channels, there's a ton of waste. And in this example, if we were just to look at their spend across verticals, we found about 1.2 million in spend across different verticals and about half of that was being wasted. So, their conversions are good, but their cost per conversion is way too high in some of that spend. So that becomes an easy amount of spend to reallocate, but also just why are we focused on those verticals if the conversion rates are so low? Likely is that those verticals, even though we're getting the right amount of at bats with them, the reason they're not converting is that they're not a good fit for what we're selling. And the way to fix this is to work backwards on every channel. So if we were to look at the buyer journey of swim lanes, so people who are in a consideration stage and ready to buy, people who are in a knowledge stage are just kind of exploring, awareness stage, they're just kind of looking for information.

You want to work backwards from people who are ready to buy to people who are completely unaware. What we find is companies are doing equal amounts in each, but they haven't captured the value from people who are most ready to buy today. And so their efficiency across channels is low. For example, why would we invest into PR and awareness campaigns when we haven't done late funnel content or advertising on Google to get the right fit leads in the door? And what you're also going to find is that it's better to have fewer leads from the best fit customers, then more leads from the worst fit customers. So as an example here, on the left side of this table, you have conversion rates, and the worst fit customers obviously have lower conversion rates, but higher in volume. They have more visitors and more demos, but you find that as you work your way through the right of the funnel, the best fit customers, because they convert at a higher rate, have way more wins and revenue that's coming into the organization. This is definitely gonna be true for pretty much every single business. So we wanna focus on the channels that are bringing in those best fit leads.

And then finally, the last one, which is the main one that I get all the time, is more traffic and more leads. And what you want to do is you want to map out your market. You actually should start with your TAM, not just tactics. We find that companies are good at jumping to tactics, but just strategically planning, like how big is the market that we're going after? Is it 10,000 targets, 100,000 targets, 500 targets? How many of those best fit customers that we talked about do we currently have in our base and what percentage of the market is still available? Is it greenfield? Is it whitespace? Is it brownfield? I have to take them from a competitor. How many people am I talking about? And then looking at penetration and understanding that. Next, we want to think about is our budget allocated to those best fit customers? In most cases, you'll find that budget is equally distributed between best fit, medium fit, and worst fit, which is probably the worst thing you can do because 70 to 80% of revenue comes from your best fit customers. You actually want to allocate most of your budget to your best fit customers. And so as you understand your TAM, or I don't want to say TAM like your SOM or exactly the customers that you can win, from that, what percentage is your penetration and how do you go and get more of those folks, that's where you want to deploy most of your budget. And then you want to track, are we actually on pace for our expectations? Are we spending whatever we expected to spend? What are our leads, MQLs and ops? Let's have realistic expectations. We see a lot of board meetings go sideways because the investors have the wrong expectations or the executive team didn't do their job to set the expectations correctly for what's possible. So let's set the right expectations first and then let's track. Are we going to hit our expectations? Are we behind? Where are we behind and why are we behind? And what are we going to do to fix that? So tracking expected versus actuals should be an ongoing board update. Should be by channel, should be by stage, should be by segment.

And the idea is that if you go through all of this, you can almost guarantee, you're gonna see, if you get like a 5% lift in all the domains I'm talking about, your enterprise value will go through the roof, like two to five X easily. And it's just about, it's a long slog, like it sounds simple when I'm presenting it, but as you go through it over the course of a couple of years, you're gonna see conversion rates increase throughout the funnel, more leads, more pipeline, more revenue, and it will drive up your enterprise value. And a good way to kind of visualize that is to think about every dollar that you invest into marketing today, if you have a healthy CAC payback period, if your LTV is like seven years, if you have net revenue retention rates above 100%, could be worth almost $10 seven years out when it comes time for an exit, or three years out, whenever that time period is. So getting these numbers right, and getting the right order right is critical. I actually have a good amount of time, making good pace.

So I actually thought about how can I bring value beyond just the process? So I wanted to highlight a few value creation opportunities for you. One is just this pyramid of sophistication that I talk about with our clients and private equity folks a lot is to understand what it takes to actually build an organization that drives more pipeline from marketing activities. And I think of it as like four layers. So layer one is your foundational work. This is your time and segmentation, your product marketing, your sales enablement, your go-to-market strategy. Layer two are your programs. This is your customer marketing, your content, your demand generation. Layer three is your resourcing. This is your revenue ops and data infrastructure getting your team right, getting your budget right, and then finally you have the outcome of revenue growth. When we come into companies that look more like this, where they have some of these boxes filled out but not the others, or even the ones that they are filled out in, it's kind of okay but not good enough, and so they're struggling to achieve revenue growth. And our philosophy on this is to start at the bottom left and sneak your way to the top of the pyramid as quickly as possible. Whether you do it with us, whether you do it internally, whether you do it with your CMA, whoever you do it with, whether you do it with your PE firm and their operating partner, you have to do this work. So doing it as quickly as possible is critical. And the first stage is to get to good enough in every box and get to some degree of sophistication. So for example, if you don't understand your time and segmentation, get it to at least iteration one and start to action that in your activities and content and programs and everything else. If your sales enablement materials aren't built out, let's start with a couple of verticals and try to scale that up and then get to some of the other ones and so on and so forth for every single area.

And then, you want to think about where you can actually create value as you're working through this pyramid. So the five most common scenarios that I see is one is there's insufficient marketing investment. Often these companies are sales led or founder led. There's very minimal in terms of marketing spend, not that much or less than 5% overall revenue. There's not a true marketing leader. So that's one. Number two is there's a ton of wasted program spend. We've seen a lot of bloated marketing budgets that are not driving the amount of revenue you'd want to see. Number three is there's an understaffed organization, so not enough people in the right seats or not enough of the right skill sets. Number four, excuse me, is a bloated marketing organization. We recently had one organization that had over 150 marketers, and that team has been brought down about 50 without losing revenue. And number five is M&A integrations, where multiple companies are coming together, and there's a lot of overlap, and we want to find efficiencies.

In the first scenario, if it's sales led, you want to kind of scorecard that pyramid and see where you are. What degree of sophistication do you have in every single box? And you're going to see glaring weaknesses inside your organizations. And you want to start working through each and every single one of those to build sophistication. And the faster you move through it, if you get it from a two to a four, it's a huge thing. Even if you get it from two to a three, it's a pretty big deal. And you're going to find that you're actually not doing certain activities and you'll actually be at a one, like data tracking is one of them. We come in and we ask for certain reports and companies don't have those reports. They haven't tracked, for example, marketing spend all the way through to revenue. So that becomes an immediate opportunity for those companies. Number two is program spend being wasted. And we see this often in larger companies because there's so much spend going on, nobody actually stops and says, should we actually be spending $10 million here? Should we actually be spending this 2 million on this side initiative that we're working on?

In a lot of cases, we'll see that a company spent in this case, about 9.35 million, we brought their spend down by about almost $7 million and they only lost about half a million dollars in revenue. So that's a crazy tax payback period on the money saved that can now be reallocated to other activities. And this is actually the case in a lot of companies, especially based on the last cycle from like 2021, 2022-ish when companies raised a ton of money to now becoming more profitability focused. We're doing a lot of this work and finding so much waste in their existing program spend. Next is on understaffed marketing orgs. If you don't have enough people, you cannot do this work. It's just, I see so many companies with one or two marketers and they don't have enough leads and they think the solution is just hiring an agency to do some paid media work. That's not the case. You need internal folks to actually think about this stuff daily, to be accountable for it and move the ball forward with content and demand gen programs. And so having a good hiring roadmap to figure out what are the empty seats inside my organization that I need to fill out so that marketing has the support that it needs. And not always looking at it as like short-term focus because the trade-off is I can hire one more sales rep and they're going to help me close a deal this year but the marketer may not. In order to build a sophisticated organization you kind of have to do both and have to figure out somehow how to fund both of those things.

Number four is bloated organizations and just coming back to this example. A lot of times we'll see a company that has way more marketers than it actually needs for its context. So how can we shrink that down to focus on the essential value creating people on the team so that we can be more efficient with our spend and actually allocate that budget elsewhere in the organization or even to program spend. I would say for larger companies, this is a big opportunity because there's often way too many people for the work that actually needs to be done. And then you can also flex with on demand talent so you don't have those fixed costs. So you're kind of accountable. And then the last one I'll just mention is M&A integrations. We come in with larger firms like TA and HG where they're merging like five, six businesses together. And they all have distinct products and customers. And they need to merge the branding. They need to create demand gen plans. They need to have a content roadmap that's consolidated. They need to figure out a new org structure for all of these organizations. And finally, they need to have a unified budget. So in a lot of these cases, you can build a unified plan across the board for multiple brands even though they play in different markets and you're find a ton of efficiency and opportunity as well. even if you are doing like one bolt on or tuck in acquisition, some of this work can actually create a ton of enterprise value.

And the last thing I'll leave you with is I was thinking about how to wrap this up is this is, think everybody should be thinking about this. There's four major marketing mistakes. One is the wrong strategy, two is the wrong focus areas, three is the wrong budget allocation, and four is the wrong team. Every marketing mistake or problem that you see can probably be categorized into one of these four things. A lot of things that we talked about today were about strategy and focus areas because order of operations is very important. I didn't spend as much time on budget because budget comes next. First we diagnose and figure out where the issues are. Then we figure out how much money we need to fix it and get us to the next level based on the forecast and objectives. And then finally, do we have the right people in place? Do we have the right team? Do we have the right marketing leader? So getting that right is super important. So as you're kind of thinking about these companies, think about it from these four filters, and you'll be able to create a ton of enterprise value.

And with that said, I'll stop. I have 10 minutes to spare.