11 Years as a PE-Backed CFO: What Sponsors Actually Want (w/ Jon Apter, Accordion)

0:00Jon Apter: The private equity CFOs are like drummers in Spinal Tap. They just mysteriously disappear in freak gardening accidents and things like that. It's a tough job.

0:09Devin: It's not venture capital. It's private equity. It's the private equity funcast. Pour yourself a drink and have a seat.

0:19Jon Apter: Welcome back to the funcast. We have a good one here today. We're going to talk with Jon Apter, the CFO of Accordion, about what it's like to be the CFO of a private equity-owned company. John started his career in investment banking, moved into private equity with one of my best friends, Mark Tricoli, and then moved from private equity into the CFO suite at a company that wasn't private equity backed. He's been through two transactions, still is the CFO as it's multiple sizes from when he began. And given what's going on in private equity right now, I think a lot of people want to know, should I jump to the operating side?

0:55Jon Apter: And a lot of people in banking and private equity are natural fits to be CFOs or in the finance suite. And John's got a really interesting story about how to do that. Plus, as everybody knows who listens to the show, Accordion works with CFOs of private equity-owned companies on transformations. So we're going to find out if he eats his own dog food. John, welcome to the FunCast.

1:16Devin: Thanks for having me on the pod. I've always wanted to say pod, so I wanted to get it out there before you did. Thanks for having me.

1:20Jon Apter: Amazing. So we don't know each other super well, but our paths have crossed many times because you worked at JW Childs 20 something years ago. Geez, I don't even want to say 20. It's almost 20 years ago, though. Crazy. So a stint in banking, a stint in private equity, as you do. So let's start there. Sure. The path from banking analyst to private equity to CFO. Can we cover that? because a lot of people, as I said in the intro, are thinking about maybe private equity isn't so great and maybe I should join the operating side. But you did it and you've thrived in it. So let's talk about that journey.

1:57Jon Apter: Correct.

1:58Devin: And my reason, by the way, wasn't because private equity wasn't great at the time, but happily, I started like every good young kid out of school in banking because what else are you supposed to do with your life than be an investment banker?

2:09Jon Apter: And what did you study?

2:10Devin: Were you finance? I was a total finance guy. I wouldn't say finance bro. I'm not very bro-y, but I was a finance guy, went to Merrill Lynch, did my two years, and then I got married right after my analyst program. And my wife was going to law school in Boston, and it was like, I got to find a job in Boston. Thankfully, banking sets you up for a private equity job. Interviewed at a bunch of private equity firms in Boston because I was restrained in terms of location, and that's how I wound up at JW Childs. I spent three years there doing kind of transactions in the healthcare, specialty distribution, retail, consumer products areas.

2:49Devin: And then when my wife finished up law school, we were like, where are we moving next? And we moved back to New York. And I was like, what skills do I have? I might as well stay in private equity. So I joined Evercore, which at the time had a middle market private equity firm within the larger bank. and I was there for eight and a half years before I decided it was time to try to explore something different.

3:09Jon Apter: All right, so let's talk about those skills. Like, what are the things you learn, the raw materials you leave banking and private equity with that are applicable?

3:18Devin: So I think it's less about the hard skills, about, like, what are you able to do in terms of modeling and structuring transactions. Like, that part people learn. I think that banking and private equity really taught me a work ethic of you have to work hard in this world in order to find success and to move ahead. And you have to learn how to play the political angles of some of these things as well in order to find success. And, you know, everyone does banking and will complain about it afterwards. But I think most people will look back at those days and say, probably still a great decision that I did that.

3:51Devin: And I feel bad now for the kids or the graduates coming through banking right now because they start and within the first six months, they're already thinking about their next job. So I wonder whether they're getting their full experience of banking like we did back in the day. But it was a great learning experience.

4:06Jon Apter: Well, the thing is it starts in college, right? If you're not in the investment banking club or the consulting club, if you're not doing like case study interviews and you're not practicing all the way from when you were a freshman, you don't even, the time passes you by. Like we've, we get calls from like, Hey, I missed, I'm off cycle recruiting. What do I do? Friends, you know, kids. And we're like, don't worry about it. Like just hang around the hoop and things will work out.

4:32Devin: Try telling a college to get not to worry about something now. Good luck with that.

4:34Jon Apter: I know. Then I'm like, yeah, people used to, the old rich guys that I used to work for used to tell me, like, it'll all be just fine. Like, you know, 80 % of us just shown up every day. And I was like, yeah, it's easy for you to say. But then it's also, yeah, like you said, six months in, maybe six weeks into your first job, you're already recruiting for that private equity job. Although Jamie Dimon is putting in stop to that, among other things. But yeah, I agree. It was a little more chill, though I think the work was just as intense. You learn to be fast and accurate, which at a very young age, I think is a really good skill.

5:08Devin: Yeah. And the accuracy really matters, right? The details matter, at least the way I was taught. And I find that that has translated into so many different areas of my life too, is like looking at the fine details of triple checking your work, making sure that you're comfortable with what you're speaking about, and then practicing like what you're actually going to say before you get into that room, because you don't want to be that low level associate or VP who's stepping into a boardroom and looking like an idiot. So there was a fair amount of work that went into getting yourself comfortable in that job.

5:37Jon Apter: And most of what you're doing as a junior and kind of mid-career person in banking and private equity is to help the CFO of a company, a client either you're representing in a sale or an IPO or a company you own, helping the CFO and finance team look good and be fast, accurate, and care about their work and not look dumb in a board meeting. So talk about kind of what you've learned there and how the CFO job at Accordion started. Because I believe when you joined Accordion, it was quite small. It was very different. How many employees when you started? 12. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So really small, really small, really small, 12 without a real CFO at the time, a 12 person consulting business effectively at the time.

6:21Jon Apter: Um, and we'll get to what it's become, but so why the leap from, you know, ever core to a 11, 12 person, uh, startup basically.

6:29Devin: Yeah. You know, the reality was, is that at various points at my private equity journey, I was spending more time looking at opportunities and doing closing deals and other times spending time actually with the portfolio companies. And what I found was my last four ish years at Evercore, I was really spending a lot of time with the portfolio companies. And I really enjoyed that. Give people a sense of the timeframe. When was this pre, post GFC? This would have been 2007 to 2015.

6:52Jon Apter: Okay. So things had settled down a little bit.

6:54Devin: Things had settled down. Private equity was still a little bit chaotic, but it did definitely settle down. It was getting much more competitive. So closing deals in the middle market became very difficult at that point in time. And I realized that I was no longer getting that high of closing a deal, right? It's like people get really excited about chasing a deal and then winning. And I didn't have that excitement anymore. And that's what made me realize that I enjoyed spending time on the operating side of the business, but I didn't know what that meant, right? I'd seen CFOs do it at other jobs.

7:26Devin: But I was like, I don't want to be a CFO. Like that is the most anti-luxurious job there is in the world.

7:32Jon Apter: To do the same thing every day with the same people versus what you had just done for 15 years before that, which was something brand new, fires going on, new companies, different things, total variety, and surrounded by the smartest people in the room kind of people, right? Correct.

7:50Devin: And so what does a person who has limited skills of banking and private equity look for in a job? Corporate development. Of course, I'm going to go chase deals. even though I really wasn't getting that high of getting deals done. Like I literally thought I had no other skill sets other than to find a corporate development job. Um, and I went to a lot of these interviews and I remember sitting down at the interviews and I would get called at like three o 'clock in the afternoon for two hours of interviews. And I remember, you know, the head of HR coming in for that last interview at four 30 and like looking at her watch the entire time.

8:17And I was like, is this what a job is going to be like?

8:20Devin: It feels like this is a job, not a career move. I can't do this. So I started looking at lower middle market and middle market opportunities. And that's how I got connected with Accordion, which I had frankly never heard of at the time. We were a 12 person shop and they were looking to build out their strategic finance group, which was the only group at Accordion at the time. So I actually joined as a consultant for my first year at Accordion. I had no desire again to be part of an internal finance team. I wanted to be a consultant and see if I could leverage my skills in private equity to help other private equity backed companies

8:54Jon Apter: How do you take the ego hit and the comp hit and kind of the all my eggs in one basket versus? You know being in the greatest Money machine of all time private equity Personally if it works out like how did you square that find a really supportive spouse?

9:12Devin: Who had just? taking on a job at a law firm because she didn't want to do that, but she did it because she was like, in order to support the family, you got to go chase something that will make you happy. I did it. The first six months were terrible. I was like, wow, this is a really small place where there's a lot that needs to happen. The leadership team was amazing. I loved everyone there, but I was so used to this environment of sharp elbows. I was like, how does anything get done here? Everyone's so nice. This is not the finance world that I was expecting that I knew. And it was a real shock to my system.

9:44Devin: It wasn't that people weren't working hard. They were just so freaking nice. And I didn't know how to handle that. So, you know, I spoke to my boss at the time. I was like, I don't know what's going on here. Like, I'm not sure if it's going to work out with my personality. And he said to me, just give it six months. So I gave it six months. I really started enjoying what I was doing. But when our old CFO-COO left the firm, it was kind of my way of doing diligence on accordion to figure out whether I felt this was the kind of diligence I should have done before taking the job, whether this was like a real viable business.

10:16Devin: I raised my hand and I said, listen, if you need help closing the books, looking at the financials, running FP &A for a little while, I'll do this as a side job along with my consulting. And that lasted a total of five months where I was dual hatting. And then I realized, okay, this is a full-time job. If we're going to try to grow this business, I made the pitch that we needed a full-time CFO and our CEO and our COO, who are both still at Accordion and two of my closest friends were like, yep, let's do this. And that's when we locked arms and said, let's go grow the heck out of this thing. Okay.

10:45Jon Apter: So at 12 people, right? Effectively a startup in a business that doesn't have recurring revenue, right? Because you're billing and having to chase business and do the business all the time. What were those early days like when it's almost like a, you know, like a gorilla with a kitten? You're like, I'm this, I have all these skills from all these big private, Merrill Lynch, Evercore, JW Childs, and I've got this little fragile thing that I've got to do these pretty bait, in my sense, doing billing and collections and putting basic budgeting together and stuff. So did it feel like you had too much horsepower for the small things that needed to be done, or you had completely made that mental shift that you were like, well, this has to get done, so I'm going to do it, and then I can build it up the way I want it.

11:30Jon Apter: It wasn't about the

11:30Devin: horsepower, actually. It was like I realized that I needed to get the rest of the team to understand the value of finance within the organization. Like we had all this data, the systems were okay, but it wasn't like the entire team was buying into how do we leverage the data to actually drive decisions at accordion. And that was like what I started with out of the gate, right? It was less, you know, yes, I was doing journal entries and it was the least exciting part of the job, but I started really looking at the data and presenting it in a different way, kind of like I would for like a sell side engagement for any one of our clients, like really thinking about how do we get this company to grow and scale so that eventually we could have an exit if we wanted to.

12:06Devin: So yes, it was all about closing the books, putting together a budget. But from day one, I set out with a thought process of, I had worked with all these different CFOs in my portfolio company experience. I took little pieces from each of them. So from this guy Rex, he laid the groundwork in terms of you share bad news before you share good news. From this guy Wes, he had a ton of rigor around a budgeting process. This guy, Sean, he partnered so well with the CEO that it was sometimes hard to tell who is the CEO and who is the CFO. And I took little pieces of that to mold together what I thought a relevant CFO would be at Accordion at that time.

12:42Devin: And that's kind of how I made it work.

12:44Jon Apter: And would you tap into those people along the way, or is it just stuff you had learned along the way?

12:47Devin: Honestly, I tried to join these LinkedIn groups, but it felt like it wasn't my home. So it was more learn on the job, figure it out.

12:55Jon Apter: And this is like QuickBooks and kind of basic stuff, QuickBooks and Excel?

12:58Devin: QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks, yeah, true. QuickBooks, Excel. Where you hear cha-ching when you put in a check. We had one major file that controlled the entire business that when I started as CFO was on version 1820. We're still using that file in a different way now. Luckily, we no longer need to rename it each time. But yeah, it was a lot of brute force back in the day.

13:23Jon Apter: I want to get to the growth of Accordion and as a CFO, the steps. because you've been there from, I mean, very small. How many employees do you have now? About 1 ,600. Yeah, so from 12 employees to 1 ,600. So for people who are in banking, private equity, listening and thinking like, oh, it would be natural for me to step over to the operating side of a company. And the natural place in that company would be finance because that's what I do mostly for a living. What advice do you have them? What are some watch outs? What encouragement do you have for people to go explore that?

13:58Devin: Anyone who's making the jump from the high-powered private equity industry into a corporate environment really needs to assess what is the kind of corporate environment that they are looking for, right? You could find high-intensity environments in 12-person companies. You could also find environments that might be a shock to your system. So make sure you're doing your diligence that the company's ethos matches up with your own personality. Two is I think you really need to understand that there might be a different way of working than what you're used to. You know, Accordion's motto is that we are a better way to work in finance.

14:27Devin: And for the first year and a half, I didn't really know what that meant. And now I fully embrace it. Like, it's okay that we are different than a private equity firm, some of our competitors, investment banking. We believe that we are a better place to work in finance. So you have to be a little bit flexible. You also can't come in guns blazing, wanting to change everything out of the gate, because there will be organ rejection. Even though you think you're the hottest person in the room, other people might not think the same way. So you have to ease into the job and realize how you could add value pretty darn quickly.

14:56Jon Apter: So go for the easy win, right? Totally. Just because there's a big rock out there, you might want to save that for later. Like go build some trust. Just like in the investment committee, like make sure the deck is tight and the story is good and the numbers are there. And then if that works, you maybe get a little more responsibility.

15:15Devin: A hundred percent. Go with the easy wins, but also build the relationships early. A lot of CFOs who are effectively glorified controllers or maybe a VP of finance tend to think of their jobs as either bean counters or Excel crunchers that can sit in a corner desk and not interact with the business. But if you really want to be impactful as a CFO or as a VP of finance or as a controller, you've got to get to know the employees you're working with. This matters especially in a professional services business.

15:42Jon Apter: And does the private equity associate VP principal job translate to like controller? Because you needed to be the staff accountant, the control and the CFO all in one. If you're joining a business, maybe a little larger with a team, maybe you don't have to do the journal entries. But yeah, I think of mid-career private equity people more as FP &A and really smart on the income statement, maybe not so good on the balance sheet.

16:06Devin: I think that's right. When I thought about building out my finance organization, I brought on folks who had similar DNA that I have. So a guy from Trilantic now sits as my VP of finance. I have another private equity professional who's my head of corporate development. I tend to agree with you that corp dev and FP &A, banking and private equity leads to those jobs. The controller role is a very different role. They look backwards. FP &A looks forwards. And so they need to work very closely with one another. but it would be hard for someone who doesn't have an accounting background to jump into a controller role and be successful or find a ton of value in themselves.

16:44Jon Apter: Yeah. Or if you're joining a small business like you did. You got to do it all. You got to do it all, which is like, sure, you want to be really strategic in FP &A and M &A and strategy, but the company doesn't understand what the company needs. You could get to that later, maybe, if you pull it off. That's right.

16:59Devin: And that's why the first hire I made was not a VP of FP &A. It was get a good controller in the seat, right? I realized those were not my skills. I needed to bring on someone who matched up with my weaknesses. He was able to close the books effectively, develop processes. And then as we got the finance function steady, I would say, then we were able to invest in FP &A and data folks to really build out what is a truly top-performing finance function.

17:25Jon Apter: And also be patient. Like, hey, we'll hire that controller when we're big enough to afford it because we need to go bill some more clients out. to get to that size. All right. So that's a great segue into the phases of building the business. I mean, you guys went from a dozen to 1600 employees. You went from not investor backed at all to FFL as your private equity partner. Now Charles Bank, I believe, right? So through each of those. And now, you know, we can look it up four-ish years into that ownership, maybe, you know, it's probably a few years into maybe another transition of some sort. We buy companies around the size accordion was when you got there.

18:06Jon Apter: And oftentimes that first finance hire, if we get it wrong, they're too strategic and they're not tactical enough. As the business scales, the challenge is they're too tactical and not strategic enough as the business gets to the scale that you're in right now. You've survived and appear to have thrived during each of those phases. So again, like for the CFOs and finance people listening to this, for somebody inside a portfolio company or somebody who did what you and I did in private equity and thinking about it. What are those stages? What were those for accordion? How does your job change over time at each of those stages?

18:42Jon Apter: Maybe break it into like that first phase, the middle, and then the current state.

18:47Devin: So that first phase was everything was brute force, right? So I was literally making every single phone call around AR because we needed a fun payroll. And we had outside shareholders that we needed to make distributions to. And if we didn't get those right, there was no business. So it was really about closing the books, yes, but just make sure we have enough cash in order to run this business. That worked out fine, thankfully, after a couple of months of making sure we had the right policies in place. The first thing I actually did at Accordion as a CFO after stabilizing was think about our ownership and talk to our CEO about changing our ownership from options-based to profit interest, more tax beneficial.

19:31Devin: No one in our space knew about that. So I was like, we got to treat our employees well. We're giving them out equity. Let's give them tax-efficient equity. So that was the first thing we did. I think it was two months after I joined the CFO. The idea was I was already getting ready, this company ready for an eventual exit. I didn't know when that exit was going to be. But I knew at some point if we were giving out equity to employees, there was going to need to be a time where we were gonna have to show those employees that there was real value in that business so a simple thing to do that a private equity

20:00Jon Apter: person would be like oh this makes total sense how fast we do it where your typical entrepreneur would be like oh no somebody told me options yeah I don't even know what our SUs are correct and like oh wow what a big economic

20:12Devin: difference to the team and it still took a little convincing to our team that because you tell them the world knows about options you tell them we're gonna get rid of your options give me these things called profit interest you're like, oh, it sounds like someone's trying to screw you over. And you're going to have to pay taxes on those when I give them to you, right? Exactly. Well, thankfully, the way we structure our profit interest, they're different. And then I had a conversation, or Nick and I, our CEO, had a conversation. This was about 2017. And we were talking about the fact that, you know, we were a nice-sized business.

20:39Devin: We had a lot of outside shareholders who weren't necessarily adding value to the business. These were friends and family who had backed Accordion, who had done crazy well backing this business. And then we had employees who had paper money. We started talking about what would it look like if we raised capital. There wasn't a need to raise capital, but it was the right time for our maturity. One, to prove to our employees this is real. And two, to kind of give credibility to our business, to the market. What time frame is this? This is late 2017, heading into 2018.

21:08Jon Apter: All right, so you're a few years in the seat.

21:10Devin: Correct. I'm effectively one and a half years into the seat. I had already laid the foundations for KPIs that we were tracking so that when this company was eventually going to raise capital, we were ready. And we launched the process and ultimately partnered with FFL out of San Francisco as our first private equity sponsor. Was I nervous? I was excited, nervous. But we had put out the stat that 75 % of CFOs don't last six months into their job. Oh, yeah. You know all the data. I was like, okay, well, this could be a problem. In six months from now, I created wealth for other people. Then I'm out of luck here.

21:44Jon Apter: Our joke internally is that private equity CFOs are like drummers in Spinal Tap.

21:48Devin: Good drummer. Great look. Good drummer. Good drummer. What happened to him? He died. He died in a bizarre gardening accident. It's a tough job. And that's your memo to all the listeners and viewers. Go watch that movie if you haven't. The original, please.

22:02Jon Apter: Highly recommend. So we raised capital. They were a great, great partner. A friend of mine was a CEO of an FFL business. Great, great, great, great fund. A great outcome and a great relationship.

22:13Devin: Great fund because they understood professional services. Yes. And they understood founder-run businesses. So they put trust in the management team, and they were acting as the appropriate strategic advisors on the board. Now, we're in a unique position because we service private equity funds at their portfolio companies. So we get private equity. And I had sat in a private equity seat, too. So my ability to talk with our private equity sponsors about what was going on in the business was not a muscle that felt totally new to me. So we built a relationship out of the gate.

22:42Jon Apter: Were you involved in building the, it wouldn't have been called the value creation plan back then, the 100-day plan, the strategic plan? Like how involved were you and Nick and the team and kind of like, here's what we're going to go do with this money. We don't need it, but this is a good event for shareholders and also kind of, I don't know, kind of get the business in shape.

23:01Devin: It was like a restart. It's a reboot. So 100 % was very much involved with that. We had a good plan, a good five-year plan as all private equity funds do. And we, you know, then what happened? COVID hit, right? And surprise, you know, the business is thrown off a little bit. Thankfully, like we had actually pretty good performance during COVID, but the year after COVID, our business doubled. And our private equity sponsor, you know, after three and a half years, three years was like, maybe we should consider an exit. And thankfully, we had been ready again from day one, thinking about an exit.

23:35Devin: So again, thinking about things in phases. All right, let's take that.

23:38Jon Apter: Yep. what does that mean? What does it look like to you? How'd you do it? Like, what are the things to get a company ready for exit? Yeah.

23:45Devin: So you need to think about the company at the phase it's in and really peel back what are the value drivers in the business, right? And, you know, call it value drivers, call it KPIs, keep those KPIs to something under 10, right? If you start tracking too many pieces of data, you're not really tracking anything materially. So focus on the 10 things that are really going to move the needle and report and look at that regularly. So for us, it was like, how are we doing with penetrating our sponsors? How are we doing in terms of new sponsor relationships? How are we doing in terms of extending the average length of our engagements?

24:17Devin: Utilization rates, I imagine. What's on the bench?

24:19Jon Apter: Like how much flex do we have in this so we could grow without having to wait for hires?

24:24Devin: Cross-fungibility of the team between types of engagements. So those were like the metrics we looked at between 2018 and 2022. when we went through our next transaction.

24:35Jon Apter: What about the tactics of that? Have all your contracts in the same place. Try and be on similar pieces of paper. Know what retention has been. Track, have a really good customer cube. 100%.

24:49Devin: That customer cube is actually that file I referenced before. We had that from day one. It was pretty impressive.

24:55Jon Apter: If you just handed somebody that,

24:56Devin: they would know enough to be like, I could build about this. Correct. It's the same foundation of a data cube that we would use as part of a QOE now?

25:04Jon Apter: And how many founder-owned businesses don't even, like they don't have one until they're ready for a sale, and then all of a sudden you're like, you've got to go build it, so you're going through the receipts and the shoebacks. Correct.

25:13Devin: What they're doing is they're invoicing. They have these paper invoices that go out over email, and then they're seeing when the cash comes in. But they're not leveraging their data actually to drive any sort of insights. And why would they? Because it's the most important thing to do as a CFO, right, is look at your data and raise your voice when you see something that's going well and raise your voice louder when you see something that's not going well.

25:32Jon Apter: So data hygiene around that, and you guys, we use you a ton for that, is when we buy a business, it's like, hey, let's get us up to code as fast as possible. So you're doing it internally. What does your team look like at this stage? Like when you're heading into the FFL process and then through that, that first ownership, how much had your team changed?

25:50Devin: So I still had my controller and one other person on the accounting team, and I started to have someone who was helping out with FP &A.

25:57Jon Apter: Okay, and what did your systems look like? Like what were systems? You moved to? We moved to NetSuite.

26:01Devin: So I did that in 2000, I want to say 17. So we actually had like a pretty good system. Like time tracking, given this consultant, you had a separate business kind of tracked all that stuff. Correct. We had time tracking. We had expense tracking. We had an ERP. And we were using NetSuite as our CRM as well. So we had the foundations of being able to pull data around our customers pretty easy out of the system.

26:23Jon Apter: And how equipped was the rest of the executive team? I don't know everybody's background, but I assume they all hadn't worked in banking and private equity for like board for the board rigor and board prep and all that kind of stuff. What was that like the first go around?

26:36Devin: So because it was a founder run business, the founder really got to control the dialogue around the board meeting and he would bring in the right kinds of people to present at various board meetings. So it was actually great board dynamic. What I'll say the biggest part of my job during those years, though, was to get everyone in accordion to look at the metrics. People oftentimes think it's just the CFO's job to look at the numbers, but we are actually meant to be storytellers to the executive team, to the managers with information. And then they need to look at the information and say, so what are we going to do about this?

27:07Devin: So we really upskilled practice leaders, office leaders for the case may be every MD to understand how to look at data and actually change their behaviors based off of the data.

27:16Jon Apter: This is what it means. And this is why it's important to you. Like we say here, if you have the information, you have the authority. How do you as CFO cascade the information from that boardroom, from those KPIs and metrics that you and the investors are tracking down, disseminate that down into the organization? So if you grab somebody in the hallway and say, hey, what's the most important thing right now at Accordion? They'd be like, oh, it's this. This is what we're working on.

27:40Devin: So we're a pretty transparent organization. And that goes from like our CEO does monthly calls with the entire organization talking about what's changing in our strategy to the way we share data. given that we are a company that we need to drink our own Kool-Aid. We did a project on our own company of what a typical strategic finance project would look like. What are the KPIs of the business? How do we track them? What is tracked at the office level versus the product level versus the SKU level? And I see that data in a visualization tool every day. And I have the first link on my, when I open up my browser, it's called the Holy Bible.

28:13Devin: It's the Holy Bible of everything going on at Accordion.

28:16Jon Apter: Is this New Testament or Old Testament?

28:18Devin: For me, it's Old Testament. For you, it could be both. And I look at the data all the time. And then people have access to different elements of data. So maybe I could see 100 % of information. Practically, it might be able to see 80%. A managing director could see what's going on in his or her projects. And then down to an analyst or associate who will be able to see their own utilization. We are not an organization that feels like we are trying to hide behind the data. But we also need to be mindful of the fact that if you give too much data out to people, people start getting a little neurotic unnecessarily.

28:53Devin: So we try to protect people with not providing unnecessary data.

28:57Jon Apter: Yeah. All right. So you're founder-owned, go through a process with FFL. Now you're private equity-owned, go through a process to the new buyers. Talk about that difference between those two processes and kind of the CFO's role and how your role changed on a much bigger business, how you manage that process, how your role changed or enhanced or what new tools or team you needed and all that? Sure.

29:22Devin: It was different, right? Because you're going from a lower end of the middle market, not lower middle market, but a lower end of the middle market with FFL to a bigger fund who just thinks about things differently, right? And Charles Bank and Motive, who are current investors, Charles Bank really understands professional services and Motive really understands software, data, AI, and professional services. So it's been a great match. but they think about talent in a different way than maybe we thought about before. And they push us around our talent strategy, right? So focusing on the supply side of the business where maybe our older investors were more focused on the demand side of the business.

29:55Devin: And so now when I think about the metrics that I'm tracking for a business today, it's around how productive are our MDs? Are our MDs ramping as fast as we can? Is revenue per employee what we want it to be? Are the margins appropriate for a business like ours? Are we leveraging AI effectively? Those are like the different kind of metrics we look at today that we were never looking at in 2018 to 2022.

30:19Jon Apter: And did HR report up to finance at some point and that split at some point or is it still with...

30:24Devin: We actually always had it separate. So underneath finance, again, we're people business. We don't have someone by a true COO title. So we kind of each manage our own domains, but marketing people and finance have all rolled up to the CEO. And underneath finance, we have our CTO, our chief legal officer, M &A, and certain elements of operations. Okay.

30:48Jon Apter: So with the Charles Bank motive relationship, have you become more acquisitive, or is it still organic?

30:55Devin: No, we've definitely become more acquisitive, not because they're pushing it, actually. We felt like we weren't ready to do our first acquisition until probably it was 2020 we started looking at M &A. We just didn't have the muscle or the people to integrate businesses.

31:09Jon Apter: Many of our deals at our lower middle market stage are mostly an organic play. And then we sell to the guys upmarket from us. And they're like, okay, now it's time to do some M &A because we've got enough scale and skill to be able to integrate these things. So it makes

31:21Devin: total sense. And so we've done now 12 transactions. Really? Yeah. So we've got like an M &A machine going, which is great. And I'm proud about what we set up. But we're not just doing M &A for the sake of doing M &A, right? Like we're not a holding company that has a bunch of different standalone companies. We integrate heavily the businesses that we acquire both from a backend and from an employee standpoint and from a commercial side of the business.

31:46Jon Apter: All right. So let's talk about that. And the CFO suite is how do you do M &A well? What have you learned over the years M &A well? What's the CFO's job like for that?

31:55Devin: It's also, actually I was laughing because the 12th one is usually the hardest one. The most recent one in your memory is always the hardest deal to actually get done. We could close across 12th kid or something. Exactly, exactly. Early on, it was just me, right? So I had to do everything with the help of third-party advisors. I was the one managing the QOE to running diligence to building out a model to handling the legal contracts and negotiations.

32:18Jon Apter: But you knew the steps. You knew what it was supposed to look like at the end, which is a huge skill.

32:23Devin: And it's a huge value add. But also what I learned was how to talk to founders, right? So this is where private equity folks can be really successful in a smaller company is like, you could talk about what makes your company different and get a founder excited that their equity might grow faster under your platform than on their own. Like that is a huge win. So I like honed in on that part of my job of really getting the messaging right and building relationships with founders who some of them I still call dear, dear friends, mentors, and hopefully they would view me as a mentor as well. So it's a lot of handholding.

32:58And what's really important with doing M &A at the size that we were is making sure that the other side, who's oftentimes not banked, doesn't feel like you're taking advantage of them.

33:08Devin: Because we're a people business. So the only way it works is if you feel like you're going to be able to be married for the long run together.

33:17Jon Apter: So are you on the phone with the lawyers negotiating the deals, negotiating purchase agreements, negotiating working capital, all that stuff? 100%. Okay. So that's…

33:26Devin: Then. Yeah. Not now. Okay. Now we've built out an M &A team that's a three-person team plus two people who are focused on integrations. They are doing the first round of calls. And this is what was necessary to build a scalable organization. They're doing all of the filtering. And then when there's an exciting opportunity, they bring the right people along. And I am oftentimes one of those right people to bring along. And then I'm kind of helping oversee elements of the M &A process. But when it comes to day-to-day management, I have to have trust in the team. because that's one of the other things that I've learned is if you're going to invest in bringing on people who are like you, you have to let them fly, right?

34:00Devin: Like you can't micromanage. You could train them and advise them and ask leading questions that might get them to where you want them to get to, but you have to give them a little bit of a leash.

34:11Jon Apter: All right, so for CFOs who haven't done a lot of M &A or any at all, give us the things you've learned about being the CFO of a private equity-owned business that's acquisitive? What altitude do you need to fly at and what's changed as the business is scaled?

34:32Devin: CFOs can't assume that they can do everything, right? There are going to be certain CFOs that are really good at controllerships, some that are really good at FP &A, some really good at capital markets, some really good at corporate M &A, right? It's okay to ask for help when it's not your skill set. If you don't know M &A, make sure that you understand how to look at a business, but don't get yourself overly involved with trying to be the one negotiating contract terms. That's where you're going to need to rely on a skilled lawyer who understands your business to help guide you. Because if you go in there thinking you could do it all on your own when you don't have that background, you're going to wind up pulling out your hairs.

35:03Jon Apter: How much should you lean on your private equity partner? Where do you end and they begin and vice versa in a typical experience?

35:10Devin: So what I find is that the private equity sponsor is really good at screening and can help run the analysis, but they should not be the ones building the relationships with the other side. So if the private equity firm is helping you with the diligence, and then you have a list of questions that you want to ask about the business, like you're going through a QOE and you want to ask follow-up questions, it does look a little weird and sets the wrong tone if the private equity sponsor is the one doing all of the diligence in the business. Because ultimately, you've got to figure out how to integrate them.

35:39Devin: So you need to be versed enough to take over from the private equity firm.

35:43Jon Apter: And are you running what some people might call the IMO, the Integration Management Office and all that, that thousand point spreadsheet where you're doing M &A and you're like, all right, we got to switch over payroll. We got to do this. We got to do that. We got to communicate this. We got to talk to this customer. Is that happening inside your company or is that happening in the private? It's a hundred percent in our spot.

36:03Devin: And I'm not sure that like, even when I was on the other side in private equity, I wouldn't have known if that was my skillset to play IMO. Thankfully at Accordion, because we do transaction execution services, we already had the playbook built out around IMO. So I was able to leverage what we were doing as a consulting firm for internal purposes before we actually built out a team to run this day to day.

36:22Jon Apter: Yeah. All right. So we talked about the tactical side of M &A. Let's talk about the people side of M &A, as well as running a growing people business. What role can the CFO play on the culture side?

36:35Devin: I find that that I'm gonna spend 10 to 12 hours a day at work, right? That's more than I'll spend sleeping and at home with my wife and kids and my dog. So like if I can't bring my best self to work and have fun while I'm at work, like that's a pretty crappy life. And I've always said when I joined Accordion, if I ever have five days in a row that I'm not happy going to work, I'll know it's time to look for another job. 11 and a half years later, like maybe I've had one or two, but I feel very confident And this was the best place for me to land. And I'm still thrilled to be here. But bringing your best self to work means like you can't take yourself too seriously all the time, right?

37:14Devin: Like you could try to give out that persona of the big, scary CFO rules by brute force. But what fun is that, right? So I try to interact with as many people as possible. I try to get to know people as well as possible. Much easier when we were a group of 150 people than it is 1 ,600 people. But I still make it very clear to everyone when they join a corny. Like I care deeply about everyone. whether I know their first name, last name, their dog's name, their kids' names or not. Like I care deeply about everyone at Accordion and I will do my darndest to make sure that everyone at Accordion is as successful as possible.

37:46Devin: Whether people believe it or not, I can't say, but that is the truth. All right. Tell me about the costumes because I've seen photos. Yeah. So I said, bringing your best self also means don't take yourself too seriously. And that means sometimes you make a fool of yourself. Yeah. So I'm okay with getting people to laugh at me. So we have these big off sites once every two-ish years or non-off sites, holiday parties. And I'm oftentimes put in some sort of costume to make people laugh. That has been everything from dressing up as Daft Punk to Elton John to an elf, which is shocking as the Jewish kid dressing up like an elf for the Christmas holiday.

38:24Jon Apter: Did you have a friend at least with the Daft Punk one? I did.

38:27Devin: Thankfully, our CEO was Daft Punk with me. It was good. We had a Taylor Swift and Elvis with me on stage. We were three amigos one year. And it's just lighting up the mood, right? During these off sites, you're going to be talking about strategy. You're going to be talking about real meaty stuff. Celebrate a little bit too. And we always do those costumes around celebrating our core value awards, which we feel strongly in our core values. These are not values that are like integrity, fast paced. We speak to our values regularly and everyone at accordion should and could recite our core values so we celebrate them um at these off sites and we we try to you know spruce it up a little bit it was like in 30 rock

39:07Jon Apter: when uh they went to the off site and they talked about their six sigmas themselves they're dudes

39:12Devin: each of them embodies a pillar of the six sigma business philosophy teamwork insight brutality male enhancement, hand shakefulness, and play hard. Wish me luck.

39:26Jon Apter: Hand shakefulness, I think, was Liz Lemon's favorite. I love Liz Lemon. I feel like she would have been the best boss. All right, so now you're 1 ,600 people, right? What's the CFO job like at that scale? I mean, from 11 to 1 ,600 through two private equity transactions, likely a third in the next several years, unless they CV you and keep you forever. I mean, given the success, maybe that happens. That wouldn't be a bad thing. So how do you pick what you do and what you don't do?

39:56Devin: And that's the hard part is I still want to have, like I love this company and I still want to have my hand in everything, but I can't. So it's hard. It is like a - Walk us through what you let go. At what stages you let go certain things? As my job expanded from being purely CFO to taking on legal and a risk and elements of technology and operations, I needed to build up a team who really could manage the day-to-day of finance. So I, for instance, am no longer the person having conversations with our practice leaders around their performance of the business. I needed to delegate that down to the finance organization.

40:32Devin: And we have now finance business partners who are assigned to each of the practice leaders and are meant to be their sidekicks, just like they have an HRBP, to understand everything that's going on in the business. So I might not necessarily be the most versed on every detail that I used to be, but I still am reading everything that gets sent to them pretty rigorously. What would be the things you'll never give up? I don't think I could ever give up the financial corporate strategy. So how are we thinking about capital raising and thinking about a company getting ready for sale from day one? I love that part of the job, which is mapping out what is our value drivers and how we're going to track against those.

41:15Devin: regularly. So I can't see myself giving that up. I am happy to give up the budgeting process. And I have. But when it comes to working closely with the CEO around strategy, that is where the most value I could add right now. So when we're making decisions, pushing, is this financially viable? Do we actually want to be in this space? Are we going to make money in this space? Are the investments worth the outcomes? That is where I'm probably adding the most value right now.

41:39Jon Apter: Yeah. All right. So let's go back to the scared little 35 year old who's jumping out of private equity and into this little startup. Right. What would you look back and what advice would you give?

41:50Devin: I wish I wasn't so scared at the time. OK. Right. Like it's like everyone needs to take a risk at some point in their life to find either success or happiness. And I wish I didn't wait until I was 35 to feel comfortable in my own skin that I was ready to make a risky bet. And it was a risky bet. like it was dude your wife like went and took a job to pay the bills it was a risky bet to take like a 75 pay cut um it was a risky bet um but i i had a father who was an entrepreneur um and he came home every day happy with work and i wasn't doing that every day so i needed to you know stop and smell the roses and see if i could find actual happiness um because you can't put a price on that so now let's talk about eating your own uh cooking or dog food whatever you want to say

42:34Jon Apter: I want to talk about what's next for finance and the CFO suite. We've used you a lot as we buy founder-owned companies or carve-outs. We're doing these kind of value-oriented tech buy-outs where there's not a lot of data. There's not a lot of systems. The people who are there aren't going to be the people who are going to be there for long. That's not a big surprise. That's why they come to us and say, hey, what got us here isn't going to get us there. So first step we do with you all is data hygiene, right? We got to know where all the data is. I mean, we bought a company and we said, what's your accounting system?

43:12Jon Apter: And they said, Clopatech. Excuse me? Yeah. And Jim, my partner, was watching the VP of finance move around the screen using the keyboard. And he was like, hey, you're moving so fast because she had been there 40 years. You slow down and use the mouse. And she goes, it doesn't work with a mouse. Wow. Dude, this was like seven years ago. And it was a German software company. And it was so old, it was an East German software company. I imagine she's great at Atari games. Exactly. Great at Tetris. So that's like one story of stuff we step into. Another one is we did a big carve out recently, brought in an ex-investment banker to be the CFO, not dissimilar from you, not dissimilar in age either.

43:58Jon Apter: And we went from literally closing the books in six weeks because it was a pure carve out without a lot of systems that came with it to then four weeks, three weeks, two weeks. He closed August in 36 hours. We brought you guys in early, get us on NetSuite, get the data hygiene, other things. We've added some AI on top of that. but that's with a young CFO and a staff accountant who do no journal entries on a business with 6 ,000 customers. They can close the books in 36 hours. Now, that's now been thrown down as a gauntlet challenge to all of our other CFOs in the portfolio. So the other CFOs don't like this guy very much.

44:41Jon Apter: But Accordion loves it. But it's been a very good test case for us of trying to get there. So it's possible. Kyle on your team and I joke around making finance fun again. Like all this technology is going to let finance people do the fun stuff rather than the rote, boring stuff you get sick and tired of.

45:01Devin: It really is right now. So what have you brought to it and how has that made you a different kind of CFO? So I think that we've always had a view at Accordion that the finance organization should be a strategic hub in a company. And that is like a real switch to the private equity ecosystem in the last 10 to 15 years, where it used to be that the finance function was viewed as a back office function. Get me the numbers. Make sure they're right. And then we'll decide what to do with it. Correct. The people on my team have an understanding as to how they're not just in the business of value protection, which is kind of call it back office, but they're in value creation mode too.

45:36Devin: So everyone on my team should know what is their job going to do to lead to value creation. So if I'm working on a global delivery exercise with someone on my finance team, I am tracking the percentage margin improvements. And at year end or at mid-year with that person, I'm going to be talking about how did they do to improve the margins of the business, right? So you got to start thinking about the finance organization that they should be able to pay for themselves with real value creation. And that means now with all these exciting tools that are out there, we could just get faster and smarter and focus on those strategic things that are actually going to move the needle to create value.

46:15Devin: And one of the other things that I've noticed a lot of CFOs focus in on is just trying to hit your budget year after year after year. And this is where being a CFO of a private equity-backed company is going to look a little different than a corporate environment, where I feel like my job is to create equity value. It's not to hit my budget every year. Sure, I love to hit my budget every year, but that's really more about are you a good budgeter and is your business growing appropriately? But you could grow equity value a lot of different ways, and that's frankly, I think, my most important job is to create equity value.

46:47Devin: So my team is incentivized around equity value creation. My and the entire executive leadership team's compensation is tied around in-year equity value creation, not around just revenue growth or EBITDA growth. So we speak this equity value creation story all of the time, not only within Accordion, but specifically within my finance organization.

47:08Jon Apter: And what's changed in the last 12 months? What's happening out there?

47:12Devin: We're able to do a lot more with the same number of people. So we're adding a ton of value to the people who we are partnering with on the front lines of the business with fewer people. So we are leveraging plenty of different AI tools out there, different systems to really run the business. and every project that we're taking on right now, we're thinking about, should that be handled in the US? Should it be handled with our team in India? Should it be handled by agents? And we make sure that every process, we're kind of starting with a fresh sheet of paper to make sure that we're designing it appropriately.

47:43Jon Apter: Yeah, same thing. We've written a lot about big companies will use AI to cut costs. Middle market companies will use AI to make people's jobs more fun and not hire as many people as you grow. This is just going to add scalability to it. but this is not a cost-cutting exercise for us. This is more scalability exercise.

48:00Devin: And it's definitely not a cost-cutting exercise right now. Most people are spending more on AI than they should be. And so much of the job of the technology team at Accordion and my team is, how do you actually do these things in a smart way? So six months ago, we were celebrating people who had the highest token usage. Now, if you have the highest token usage in the organization, you're getting a phone call saying, what were you doing? And can you prove that there was a real ROI on the work that you were doing?

48:27Jon Apter: Yeah, let's double click into that for a second, because this is the first real AI budgeting cycle. And most people are flying blind because last year it was like, play with it all or don't touch it yet. This one is like, how do we put a return on this? And CFOs have the pen. So how do you go from maybe a broader question, just AI, from being put in a position to be Dr. No on everything? when it's like, well, you kind of have to experiment to see where it goes, but also we can't over-experiment and waste money? How do you find that balance at this scale?

49:01Devin: So we're looking at, we look at the ROI of every investment we make at the company, whether that's AI related or M &A related, or even if it's planning an offsite, like, was there a true measurable ROI for that? And now, thankfully, the tools that are out there, we could start measuring impact on a lot of the work that we're doing. It is true that I am, I let the leash have some slack around AI usage because in order to get people comfortable, they need to play around with it. Frankly, it's the people who are playing around with it are not driving up the cost. It's the people who are versed but just need a little bit more training as to how to do it appropriately than the people that we're focusing in on.

49:37Jon Apter: One of our CFOs, his line was that his job was to teach the company, the leaders in each of the functions, how the business works. So they could have context for how they run their department.

49:48Devin: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And if you think about what's the next big wave of consulting services, and we're already seeing it a ton on Accordion, is getting the right governance around your data and the right AI usage put in place. That's what the consulting model is going to look like in the future.

50:03Jon Apter: Yeah, to be able to say, here's why we have this policy. Here's what this means for the go-to-market team. Here's when we, you know, the reason we're funding this is outside of your department, because this is what happens for the rest of the business. And because we're so equity value driven, that's a good thing for you, right? It's like we have more than one kid and one of them has a wedding coming up. It's like, I still love all my other kids, but right now as a family, we got to get this wedding off without a hitch. So we're all going to pull together and do that now. That doesn't mean you're less important.

50:36Jon Apter: It just means this is our number one goal right now.

50:38Devin: And I think the benefit of being in a private equity backed environment is that everyone's going through this at the same time. And I think people realize this is like a blip in the market, right, where people's costs are going to go up higher than maybe what they had thought of. And I imagine when all these companies go to exit, like there will be some normalization around AI spend in these quality of earnings reports. Because I think people are trying to figure out what is a true, stable AI usage that is appropriate.

51:03Jon Apter: Yeah, like the Uber is going to have like the oopsie 2026. Exactly. We blew through our budget. So make a prediction about, yeah, your world, either finance or consulting or private equity-owned businesses, you know, 12 or 24 months from now that maybe is, yeah, other people may not appreciate given the seat you sit in.

51:23Devin: I think that this concept of a five-year hold is out the window at this point. I think everyone's going to need to be planning their business for two years, three years, and maybe even seven, eight years, CV years, right? This concept of everything is going to be exited in five years is just not reality anymore. And that does change the mindset of the CFO a little bit because you might be working in shorter sprints than you had otherwise thought of. And when you think about spending your dollars in year one, you need to make sure you're recouping those investment dollars in year two and three if you have a three-year exit versus a five-year exit.

52:00Devin: That's one that I feel like the portfolio companies are going to need to adjust to. At the sponsor level, we're already seeing it. I think every sponsor is going to have AI sitting on their investment committees. We're already putting that out there at a lot of sponsors because they could look at all the data of all the history of all deals that you guys have looked at. The minutes of investment committees know what kinds of questions Tom, Dick, or Harry are going to be asking better than Tom, Dick, or Harry do. And they're going to actually have a vote on investment committee. And the top private equity sponsors are already doing that.

52:32Devin: And we've built that out for a lot of sponsors as well.

52:35Jon Apter: So there's an agent that consumes all the information happening in the investment committee decisions and an agent gets a vote. Correct. And then you can go back after five or 10 years and see how well that agent did. And think about the branding rights for that agent, how exciting that would be. That's going to break some people's brains because private equity is generally slow to adapt. I think a lot of people are running plays that worked pre-COVID, pre-GFC, old school private equity plays. And the speed at which things are moving is just astounding.

53:08Devin: But the good thing is, is like private equity firms are adapting themselves as well. Like they're no longer just investors. They're going to be moving towards more of an operating model of themselves. And everyone's needing to figure out how to leverage AI for their own usage as well. This is like the core of what private equity does. So yes, it is alarming and scary. And I'm not saying it will be the only vote, right? We're not getting rid of management committees and investment committees. But, you know, if you're going to drink the Kool-Aid or push your portfolio companies to do something, you've got to be looking at it yourself.

53:37Devin: And this is the area where sponsors really should be looking at it.

53:40Jon Apter: Yeah, well, this first wave was like, we're going to replace our VPs and associates with AI because, you know, the machines are so good. That is ridiculous. It's not going to happen. In fact, if it's making everybody so good, hire more because then you can comb through way more stuff. That's one. I do think the machine is really good at consuming information, running against some rubric you have, and spitting out an outcome. So recently we released to the wild our scorecard for how we evaluate and underwrite software companies right now in the age of AI and a Claude skill that you can download.

54:15Jon Apter: So go to our sub stack and play around with it and run it yourself. and just say like, okay, it's going to, you can give it a website. It'll give you a guess. We think this company is exposed here. Give it the investment committee memo and all your diligence. Oh, this thing sings and it will ask you probing questions and it will ask you more follow-up questions you should go back to management with, whatever. I also think in diligence, agents are going to talk to agents because what happened to diligence? Hey, here's the long list of questions from the sponsor who, you know, or the bidding sponsor.

54:48Jon Apter: And then you have to have the investment bank talk to management get all the answers. No, they should just be making requests to each other and filling out the data room on the fly. That would be the holy grail, right? There's no reason why on a lot of other pieces, it couldn't do that. And that'll just speed things up. And as you speed things up, you can make decisions faster. You'll make bad decisions because you're moving too fast. You can make good decisions because you have more data.

55:10Devin: I mean, we say private equity is not quick to adapt. And I agree with you. But I think there is this innate desire to try to push the boundaries a little bit, right? Like The industry is in a little bit of a flux. The middle market's going to get contracted a little bit, right? So people are going to be able to differentiate in some way or another. And those that adapt to AI faster are probably going to find success.

55:30Jon Apter: Dude, we're the only private equity fund with a podcast. There you go. So you guys had to come and find us and say, like, please let us be on your podcast. No, meaning that, like, they're like, we can't do social media. You can't do podcast. It's like the only way you differentiate yourself in the middle market, in my opinion, is sourcing. You know something other people don't know. You know people other people don't know. And you see something before anybody else sees it. That's the venture model, right? You have to know that person at Meta who's going to leave and start this company. Because if you don't, then they're going to go talk to Marc Andreessen first or, you know, somebody at A16Z.

56:03Jon Apter: And then it's over. You don't even have a chance to invest. In the middle market, you can do that. You can, like I told you earlier, there's 30 ,000 companies in my ICP. Until I know the founder of every single one of them, my job isn't done here. obviously very long private equity. I do think we're adapting maybe faster in ways that don't necessarily move the needle, I think.

56:27Devin: But it's focusing on the one, like, figure out the parts of your job that are really not value-added anymore. I mean, you remember back in the day when FactSet and CapitalIQ came out, everyone's like, no, you got to spread your own comps. Like, you cannot trust that data. Like, I hope people now in investment banking are not getting pins printed out.

56:43Jon Apter: I have facts set, like, codes burned into my brain from, like, knowing what the actual free cash flow definition my boss wanted. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that. No, those are amazing. And, you know, we've all moved to PitchBook at this point, and it just hit a button, and it all gets done. But, again, I think these machines are very good, and we're all testing out how to use them. I think it's going to allow all of us to do the fun stuff more. And you have to have unique ideas, unique skills, unique access. And that's how you differentiate it. I also think this whole operating model inside private equity is going to change dramatically.

57:19Jon Apter: We're still running the post-GFC play of I need generalists in my operating team that I'm billing out to the portfolio. Oh, now I need specialists that I'm billing out to the portfolio. my view is like you need a handful of like absolute killers on your team inside and then you go hire accordion or somebody else who just is so far ahead of you on this I mean you guys have so many more reps than my eat them the person I can hire to do the stuff you do internally I just have you guys do it and partner with my expert internally to get where that we're there just to be the support and

57:51Devin: make those guys look good at their jobs like they should not be doing you should not be paying an operating partner.

57:56Jon Apter: You're working with hundreds of private equity firms. You're seeing thousands of portfolio companies across industries. Like, why would you try and figure this out yourself? You don't have enough reps, hire accordion. There's my, there's my, yeah, my pitch for you guys. All right. So give me, your dad was an entrepreneur. You grew up in Rockland County, right? So you were like salt of the earth guy. Yeah, totally. Mom or dad, advice they gave you that rattles in your head that you can't believe you still think about and maybe have even said to your children?

58:25Devin: So my mom's a therapist. So any sort of advice that she gives, I have to like tune out a little bit because there was a lot of talking. They were very good at what I would say things like I'm happy or I'm sad. They're like, no, you're feeling happy or feeling sad, right? Like those emotions are going to change. And we talk about that a lot, right? You are not your emotions. You're not your thoughts. Correct. So at work, like I am mad. I am frustrated. I am angry. No, I'm feeling angry right now, but I know tomorrow when I wake up, I'm going to come into work, feeling energized and excited. Like my, my emotions.

58:55Jon Apter: That is a very ACT, uh, DBT, CBT. Yeah.

58:59Devin: You can tell I have a junior in high school. Yeah.

59:01Jon Apter: That's a lot of very, uh, uh, very sophisticated stuff back in the eighties. I imagine that's what having a therapist mom. So you're now doing saying that any advice from an entrepreneur dad, as you stepped into the

59:13Devin: entrepreneurship, don't listen to your entrepreneur, don't listen to your therapist mom. And now, And now, by the way, my therapy is instead of talking to someone, I spend$20 a month on unlimited car washes. And when I'm feeling sad or feeling frustrated, I get in my car, I go in that automatic car wash, and all that water washes off, and I feel like a fresh person.

59:31Jon Apter: That's an amazing visual. Let's end on that beautiful visual. So next time you're frustrated, next time the associate bamfs up the model, next time the M &A team comes in and forgets to have checked something on the diligence front that rears its ugly head in the 11th hour, don't yell. Don't act out. Just get a car wash. Just get a car wash. There you go. John, great to hang out with you. Pleasure. Thanks for being a great partner at our firm, and bye for now.

59:59Devin: Technology issues, middle market PE-backed companies. They bicker with each other and they don't take themselves too seriously. It's not venture capital. It's private equity. It's the private equity fun cast. Pour yourself a drink and have a seat.