It's really, it comes down to the business where it's at and what it needs to do.

Can I add something to that? Yes.

If possible, I think it's a good idea to ask that question to more than one person.

So if you're a CEO coming in, you should ask it to multiple people on the deal team or multiple people on the board.

If you're a management team member, ask the CEO and ask the investors.

Cause I think one, if people are on the same page, that's always a really good sign, no matter if you're talking about comp or anything else.

And two, if you are noticing differences, you should know that going into it, just like you should know what your compensation structure is and what the equity is and all that.

And

Paul? I think...

You know, Jim and I talk a lot about the It Depends school of value creation, which I think we subscribe to here at Parker Gale.

And I think we've done a really good job of recognizing that the plan changes after you spend a few months inside the business with the people who've been running it for a long time, because you just learn a lot more.

It doesn't mean the levers are different.

It doesn't mean you feel different about the market or the basic underlying health of the business, but...

the challenges and opportunities that you go attack first, both to build trust and build momentum, are going to be different than what you thought they would be in diligence.

For sure.

and to your point is we should look at every quarter and say is are these still the things yeah are these still the metrics something changed everybody has a plan until mike tyson punches you in the face right and the market loves to punch you in the face and customers like to punch you in the face and uh so you should be adjusting that adjusting that all the time

So let's, uh, you know, let's get right to it.

Yeah, and this is, this is just a quick punch list of if you, if you look at Jim and I's calendar, what's the stuff that we look forward to, 'cause we know it moves the needle, what's the stuff that we do consistently across the portfolio, 'cause everybody needs it, and what's the stuff that we have belief in, because we really, we really do think this is gonna help.

Yeah, no surprise, like shocker, AI is my first one, but I...

There's a lot of talk about there coming from multiple angles on like, "Hey, AI's a thing," but what does that mean? And like where should you start if you're a smaller technology business trying to take advantage of this big, confusing, slightly intimidating wave that everybody is talking about? Here's my take.

I think you should be teaching your people how to use consumer grade AI tools and starting there and putting all of your effort into that before you think about anything else.

Because, one, people want it.

Like people are not getting the most out of tools like Claude and ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini or whatever.

Yep

So I'll let you take the two-by-two since I, since I did the crossing the chasm.

Yeah.

Uh, ultimately, this, this comes down to, like, how do you define your offering and how do you define what you're working on? Well, like, at any given moment, you're making a decision about what you're building and what you're selling, which is the axis across the top, and who that's for, like the market that you're going into.

And what you find is inside of any software company or inside of any company that has a product, like, you're constantly having conversations about what to build next, how to finish what you started, and where the opportunities for growth or profit or both might be.

And if you don't have a framework for how to organize those conversations and kinda say, like, "Yeah, that's exciting, but where does that fit in terms of the markets that we're in today or those that we might wanna expand into, and what we make today and what would be brand new for us?" That's gonna be a problem for a bunch of reasons that we'll get into.

But the point is you need a framework to figure out, like, what are we actually talking about here, and how should we treat those conversations? This is the framework that helps you do that because it creates a nowhere to hide, very simple way to organize, are we talking about the market that we're in today or another market? And are we talking about the products that we have today or something brand new? And there's different imperatives and different things that you should talk about depending on where you find yourself in each of those four boxes, but the first step is figuring out what are we actually talking about, and I think we'll get into, like, should we be talking about that? Because this is also a good tool to, to check yourself, and I think it's your biggest use case in product and engineering, which is like, where should we be spending our time, and what should be off to the side but maybe not our number one priority that's distracting us from what the core of the business really is?

You know, you know, this is, we sort of summarize each of the bullet points here, like, you know, this is why you would do it basically from a PE standpoint.

Yeah, and, and there's so much value to go create, especially in our world of companies it... and especially in the first couple years of an investment, in this box without ever doing anything else.

What does it look like?

Yeah.

Well, what's the problem with the typical hiring process? The problem with the typical hiring process is it takes a long time, like scheduling time with you, scheduling time with me, scheduling time with the CRO.

Already you're talking about a lot of headaches and probably two weeks of just back and forth before you nail it down, and you all hear different things, 'cause you're all asking different things, and you're all hearing the answers in different context, and there's no basis of comparison that's statistically significant.

So if you've written a good profile and you've all agreed on what matters in this role, you're gonna hear me say that a lot, um, our approach is to take that profile, figure out what you wanna ask to test for those things, to go super deep on their history and their career, and to do that where we're all in the same room.

So you, me, the CEO, the CRO would all be in that conference room over there with the same interview guide, with the same two-hour block, and we would ask the person the same questions so that we hear the same things at the same time.

And then we have a blind calibration.

So how do you get to structure? How much is enough, uh, without being too much? And what are we asking for that?

No, right

...

if you're, if you're a new product.

For an established company, we've seen, we've seen it work for and against us, where if we manage to get new logo growth growing, you get some bonus points for it, and if you're getting fat and happy off the customer base, but you haven't cracked the problem getting yourself to introduce to new customers, that can hurt you in an exit process.

So I'd say those are probably the two most common, but what does a buyer wanna see, and what would they reward you with from a multiple perspective? They wanna see that you're in an end market that they like, that they can see themselves spending four or five years in, 'cause that's what a private equity investment means.

They wanna know that there's a lot more customers out there to go get-

Yeah

... and part of the thesis was we believe we can turn this off with relatively no impact to the business.