The Deal Closed. Now What?

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1:09Go to netsuite.ai slash funcast. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. netsuite.ai slash funcast. I'm Paul Stanzik with the Parker Gale Ops team. and everybody in private equity likes to talk about their value creation plan, which is this set of concrete steps that you do with every portfolio company once you execute the transaction that gets you off to an amazing start. And we definitely talk about value creation planning here at Parker Gale, but the way that we talk about it is a little bit different. Jim and I did an episode a while back around our It Depends school of value creation planning.

1:50And I think the main point of that episode is we're keying off what we learn, not only in diligence, but once we own the business. And that's what today's episode is all about. It's what do you learn once you own a portfolio company and how do you adjust your plan based on what you learn in those first couple of crucial months. So to do that, I've got my partner, Ryan Milligan, with me. I'm here. Let's get into it. All right, great. Right. So you've, yeah, you talked about this concept of, we just bought a business. We've done a lot of work. You've done a lot of go to market work. You, we spent a bunch of money and all that, but Hey, we just had our town hall meeting where the dog that caught the truck.

2:29It's like caught the truck. Okay. Now what? Right. Um, everybody just stared at us and we said, Hey, this is what we're going to go do with the business. The lights, the lights shut off and you're like, okay, now we own it now. Now what do we get into right now? Now we're, we can do whatever we want. It's our problem now, right? It's our opportunity. So what changes? Like that switch flips and you just start doing things differently or are you building or what's on your mind? There's like a mindset and a feel change. Like I'd be curious to get your take on this, but the feeling and the mindset in diligence is definitely different than the feeling and the mindset in the first couple of months.

3:03Like what are we doing in diligence related to my world of go-to-market. We're basically trying to confirm that the market that the business sits inside of is a good market to be in, that we like the competitive dynamics. We're not going to get sideswiped by some up-and-coming VC wave of capital or something else. We like the internal characteristics of the business. So it has product market fit. It has good retention. It doesn't have too much customer concentration. that's more of a checklist that yes, this meets our quality bar. And I think where the bridge starts to happen, that starts to inform the value creation plan is what are we going to do with it?

3:47Like, where is the unfulfilled potential in the business? What has it started, but what hasn't it finished yet? And how can we help make the business better and kind of finish the work that the founder started? So I would say like in diligence, we're trying to make sure that the business passes those tests, but also that we can get excited about it. And then you execute the transaction, you have the town hall, which is a great capstone experience. But it is a little bit of now what? And I think the mindset and the feeling is, okay, we have an idea of what we think we want to do with the company, but we should go confirm that and build on it using what we can learn now that we have a lot more access to the market, to the customers, to the employees.

4:38And there's like an open-mindedness about that. Like, hey, we might've been a little bit wrong either in what we thought was important or the relative priority of those things. Let's go figure out what the actual answer is. And so there is like an instinctual aspect to it. There's a listening aspect to it. It definitely builds on diligence, but I don't think we're a firm that looks on what we learn in diligence as like the immutable plan for the first couple of years. I think if you're thinking that way, you're kidding yourself personally. Yeah. And I think we'll get to listening in a little bit, but let's go back to that town hall because it's a good moment to kind of jump off of.

5:14I think the real question is, where do you start? Right? Like where do you start to get this information? So we'll stay on the transition from diligence to being in the company. It's kind of like, what are your information sources? So your information sources in diligence are your own primary research, your own secondary research, your conversations, probably with the executive team, probably not a lot below that. But you kind of know what you know. You got to censor things. But you just did your town hall. What probably happened with that town hall is you talk to the executive team or whoever's still in the business, who's staying in the business about what do we need to pitch and what do we need to talk about to get people excited or at least comfortable to where the point they'll say like, all right, we'll figure out if we trust these people or not over the next six months.

6:06Are they doing what they said they were going to do or not? But my point of that is you've got this executive team. Those are kind of your day one champions. 100%. Your day one trusted folks in the organization that have probably shaped what you think about the business a lot. But there's also like literally at that moment, the deal closes, there's an incentive flip as well. So they went from making sure the deal went through and maybe they had some of their own incentives to, okay, now we're on the team together and we got to live up to everything that we just promised you and we're going to go try to do.

6:36Right. So, but that's the key. I mean, day one, it's all you got. Like you've got the executives, you've got their ear, you're, you're, you're kind of in the honeymoon phase and it's like, okay, what's next? Like what customer should I talk to? What other people in the organization should I talk to? And, but just recognize that you're seeing the world through their eyes. And over the next 30 days or so, you're going to go diversify your understanding of everything that's going on in the business. And it's, yes, it's probably going to change just based on different altitudes in the organization, proximity to customers and product and, and everything else that's going on.

7:12And there's an ongoing part of the process where you're going to be testing all of your plans. Yeah. And there's a dance that goes on in diligence between the investors and the management team that kind of ends with that town hall. And the deal process takes up a lot of oxygen in the room. So there literally isn't time to share with each other everything that we're learning as investors, trying to get to know the business and everything that is happening inside the business just operating every single day yep and so i think the most important thing is to like acknowledge that the dance of getting the deal done is done everyone give each other a high five getting a deal done is really hard but there is a little bit of a catch-up of acknowledging like okay we were bandwidth constrained because we're trying to get a deal done you guys are off running around operating the business in the meantime there's things that we don't know about each other we have things and diligence that we learn that we want to share with you you have things that have happened with customers or product or financials that have happened that we don't know about.

8:12Let's play some catch up on that. And I think that's actually where we start kind of the intensive listening portion of the first couple of quarters together. I would say like the first thing that we do that we started a few years ago is we make a really concerted effort to share the actual diligence materials with management as a way of starting that conversation and saying like, hey, we just spent a bunch of money. We just spent a bunch of time to basically do a full exam on this company, you're going to operate it. You should be armed with that information so that you can make better decisions or tell us where we're wrong or tell us what the relative priority is.

8:48So I would say that listening portion really starts by sharing out the diligence materials and then getting people's reaction to it that actually are working on this stuff every day. And that tells you a lot. Yeah. And I think that's another matter of perspective, right? So, So I talked earlier, we're seeing, we have the perspective of the management team from all the conversations that we've had about the businesses, they see it. Now, before we close, yes, we're generating all these other perspectives through our work. And some of that is pattern recognition and things that we've seen elsewhere or things that we think we can do with the product.

9:25Or we had a market study done. That's what you're talking about. So we now have a bunch of outside perspectives that is informing where we want to take the business. So we want to share that with them. And that's their listening exercise. And by the way, it's interesting to see, are they willing to listen? Are they willing to say things differently? Yeah, yeah. But you got to share that knowledge. Partially because the other thing that's now entering the fray is there's going to be a tension between private equities, excitement, and urgency. so there's a tension between our urgency to get going and listening and making sure that we know everything that we should know to continue on with those plans in place and that's a tough thing to manage it's kind of an emotional roller coaster to say i want to get going on this this and this but the deal changes so you you probably spent you might have spent two million dollars trying to get to know everything that you need to know about a business so that you can put valuable capital to work to try to operate that business and make three times your money or whatever it is.

10:37So you know a lot, but what we've also learned is that 30 days from now, what you know might be 20 % of what you're going to know 30 days from now, because every opportunity and every challenge is now yours. You own that and you have total access. You can do whatever you want at that point. You can go talk to support. You can go talk to customer success. You can go call any customer you want. You can actually go get information from wherever you want, where that is somewhat hamstrung during diligence. So that early, let people know in the business things you've learned, but then also recognize that there's probably a lot more in the business that you need to learn and go through that process that's something that we do as well.

11:18So you want to talk about either that in general, or maybe some examples of things that you've done kind of on that listening tour. Cause it's like, you're kind of like, Hey, I came in, I'm ready to go. And I think I know everything I need to know, but then you don't. Yeah. So where do you go from there? The mental framing has to be coming out of diligence. I think this is what I think, I think. Cause if you're overly sure, you're not going to listen to all the little things that pop up that could inform a better value creation plan or just like a really near-term priority that you could jump on in a quarter.

11:52Like one of the first things that I want to do is go ride along with the sales team and figure out how do we actually talk about the product? Because we may have just talked about that at a conceptual level and diligence. I haven't had the benefit of sitting on 10 or 15 or 20 sales calls and understanding what the moments look like where a customer gets excited or the competitor that keeps getting mentioned or the snag and pricing that comes up. Like I want to get a fingertip feel for the process of going and finding, attracting, and closing new customers. Because the way that feels is always different than what the numbers could ever tell you in diligence, right?

12:32So I think there's like an experiential aspect of the first couple of months where if you don't get your hands in the soil and just get a sense of how it works today, one, you're going to miss opportunities to just do more of what's already working, certainly in sales and marketing in my world. But two, you're just going to be much more contextually dangerous to go execute those things in the value creation plan and understand how to sequence them, understand how to make them happen. like we like to say all the time, like knowing what to do and how to make it happen are very different things. Yep.

13:03And so I think those first couple of months are very key for just getting closer to how the business works today so that you can take the ideas that came out of diligence and say, all right, this is how we need to go execute them. Because without that context, you're probably going to fail at the execution part. Yeah, and having seen you do this a couple of times, there can be a nice marriage of perspectives that come out of that process. Yeah. Because, okay, you're now, you, you, have you ever been allowed to sit in on a sales call before we own the company? I don't think so. Right. Yeah. So you're going to go see the rubber meet the road for the first time on what's really happening in those conversations and what people are asking about.

13:42I mean, maybe you've listened to some gong calls and things like that. So there's potential for that. But like you're, you're there and you're in it. Yep. And you're very present. Okay. So that's what they deal with every day. So that's what's, that's their perspective. Now, salespeople and folks touching customers, they don't always, what have we gone and done? We've gone to find the outside and bring it in. Yep. So there's probably a lot of context that we now have on alternatives. Like what are the other players out in the market? What are they saying and doing? We've probably done some mystery shopping.

14:10We may even know like verbatim, like what do they say? What do they say about us? What are the alternatives? Which ones are venture-backed? Which ones have been around forever? Just all these like outside-in perspectives. And if you can marry the rubber meets the road with the, and this is what's happening around you, because again, in a company, everybody, like once you're in a company, it's just your world can kind of shrink in on you. Cause you got a list of things you got to do. You got existing customers. You got to see this, this moment of diligence can inform a bigger picture of you and a stopping point to like reset everything.

14:44As long as you marry those two perspectives, because if not, you're going to either double down on where you're, where it was going, or you're going to take a left turn that doesn't respect what they're dealing with on a daily basis either. Does that make sense? And I've seen this happen to you. Yeah, no, we're going to do a blooper reel of me someday doing the Dolly Parton quote on across podcasts like 15 times, but it's our favorite quote ever. It's figure out who you are and then do it on purpose. Like to your point about how outside perspective can inform just doing what you're already doing a little bit better.

15:18Something as simple as having a framework for how to talk about how many products you have. the company may have never pulled up and agreed on like do we have three products or four products or five products or ten products and until you understand how many products you actually have it's really difficult to have a conversation about upsell potential or white space or how you can go find growth inside the customer base so just like exposing the team to some of these outside frameworks and research findings that come out of our diligence and asking the question like what can we do with this especially in terms of like going and finding revenue that's a little bit easier to get which is almost always from existing customers versus new logos like that's something i've seen work multiple times something we always do is we say where is the white space and the customer base and how do we just do some kind of simple marketing campaign usually from the ceo about we basically do the apologist pitch which is like hey hand up we've done a really poor job of communicating to you all the ways that we can help can we just fix that so you know when to call us later on and that starts with having an agreement around how many products you have which can often start by like the research product the research project that you did from the outside in just trying to make sense of the business during diligence but that's a conversation with the team but that's that's one of those situations where like a little bit of clarity that coming comes out of diligence having a conversation with the team of like where the unfulfilled potential is, it can just lead to a really interesting point of alignment where you're like, oh yeah, this would be exciting to go after together in the first couple of months.

16:55Yep. No, and I think the word team there, so now I'm going to take it from the deal team perspective as well, because that's a very product and go-to-market centric approach. On top of that as well, I'd also encourage the deal team to recognize, use the word team, that type of conversation, I would also permeate like for the CEO and others, I would permeate that through the rest of the organization. A hundred percent. So, and something I've seen go well that folks do is this like start, stop, continue conversations and almost do, I mean, it depends on the size of the organization. We buy smaller businesses, so you can actually talk to everybody, but go to everybody in the organization, do your one-on-one and just get their perspective on like, what should we, what should we keep doing or do more of?

17:37What should, what aren't we doing that we should be doing and what do we need to just stop? And you might get different answers from different departments and things like that, but Like more and more in the world of this unlock, I think, is going to become more and more important in the world of AI. And otherwise, because of the following, because products can be built faster than they ever have been built before. And product can mock up things quicker than they ever have before. But a company is a system. so you definitely want to have all these perspectives from like i want to know what customer service is saying and like what tickets are they responding to i want to know what the integration team is saying and where their pain points are because again like you could come up with the best ai widget in the world put that out to market but it's like well that is reliant on like there's going to be bottlenecks like the bottlenecks are changing faster than ever throughout an organization.

18:34So you could go triple down on this initiative here, but because this service or implementation or whatever, something out of our control isn't up to code. Okay, that's great. So we just spent a bunch of money to get this done. And now we've got six months for these other things to kind of catch up and things like that. Right. So that start, stop, continue is really going to bring forth like bottlenecks, key dependencies, single points of failure, all those things that's the stuff you really want to learn in the first 30 days if you can and it's also going to show you like who do I go for go to for this like who are my trusted like we talked about the executive team so important we talked about the executive team but you want to start to figure out like who's really got the pulse of this who's really got the pulse of that or who who who's that person that they gosh they always talk about this person or that person when something needs to get done you want to identify those people early on to make sure they're bought into all this, they're rent into all this, and they know the direction of the organization.

19:32Because if not, they're going to feel left behind, get frustrated, then you lose a single point of failure and things like that. It's just totally unnecessary. So, you know, even in a situation where you know there's organization building to be done, where you know you can upgrade some talent or you're just going to have to add some people, there are people that are customer whisperers. They know exactly who to go talk to at all your big customers, and they're really key for maintaining those diplomatic relationships. There's product whisperers. They're people that know every corner of the product and they can help you sanity check your roadmap and help debug issues.

20:08And then there's just like incredible historians inside these companies that can tell you, yeah, we tried that four or five years ago and it didn't work because of this. And if we did it differently, that would work. But I think like the start, stop, continue is important, not only from an organizational perspective, it's like, these are just processes or parts of how we operate the business that we should either add or subtract. But like from a personal standpoint too, like I try to ask people like, what's driving you nuts? And what's making your job hard to do? Because, you know, inside a founder of businesses, sometimes those people just stop complaining about those things.

20:41And this creates a new opportunity to speak up and say, you know, this is really holding me back or holding my team back. And if we could fix it, it would make a big difference, not only in performance, but in motivation. and often those things are pretty addressable in the first couple of months and there's an openness to addressing those things so i don't know i think it's as much about building trust with the team and again trying to be useful versus smart not only to the company but the people inside of it yep and you can't do that unless you ask explicitly like what are we doing today that we should stop yep what haven't we done yet that just doesn't make any sense let's go address those things and like if all you did in the first six months was work on that list you'd probably be in pretty good shape.

21:22Yep. So now we've talked about, okay, so now we've respected the business we bought. We bought it for a reason. We've respected it. We've listened to it. Everybody feels bought in or at least more bought in. And there are some things that we do know some things about that are applicable to most of our situations. So are there things that as you're learning all this, you pretty much know though, we're going to be able to lend a hand or guide or bring into the fold for a business like what are things that are common that we're doing most most every time you know in these situations yeah in my world to go to market i mean reporting is kind of the starting point for everything and it's not reporting for reporting's sake i think the the weekly or monthly financial or go-to-market report and a lot of investor-backed businesses gets a bad name because your investors ask for this big 20 tab spreadsheet and the company chucks it over the fence and there's never a conversation about it.

22:20I like to say data is only as good as the conversation it creates. So our intention is to create very high quality, but very easy to produce, very high frequency reporting that tells us exactly what we're doing, how well we're doing it, and where the challenges or opportunities might be and what we can do next. So every business gets a weekly go-to-market report that covers sales and marketing, and every business gets a monthly commercial review where we protect the space to talk about what we see in that report and every software company is different but like the reporting is pretty consistent so i think we've landed on like a very strong perspective on what are the questions that matter how do you go find the data to answer those questions and how do you get into a groove where you're just churning that stuff out every week so i think that's number one i think number two is we talked about it before but like we're always looking for the easy cheat code growth inside the customer base.

23:19Usually that comes from companies we buy tend to have more than one product. And most customers have very low awareness of how many products we actually have or all the ways that we can help. So we try to fix that problem. And like one of the things that I love to do is a letter from the CEO in the first year, which is get the person who runs your company, who customers love to talk to, by the way, to send an email out to everybody and say, if I'm new, really glad to meet you. If I've been here for a while, hey, it's been a while. And one of the things that we realized is we've been really bad about communicating what's on the menu.

23:56Let us fix that. And by the way, there's some new stuff on the menu we'd love to talk to you about. A lot of customers will take you up on that if you send that note. And then it creates this really cool loop that you can close later on with a second email from your CEO that says, here's all the stuff that I learned after I talked to 20, 30 of you. And we run that play with pretty much every company that we buy at some point in the first year. So I'd say those are the big two levers is just get reporting in place early, lend a hand with that reporting. So it's not just a homework assignment that you chuck at the company and then go look for the growth in the customer base.

24:32And then as you're doing that, you're going to notice stuff because you're going to have a bunch of conversations with customers that you probably weren't having as frequently before and you're going to notice things in the data that point to infrastructure issues in your rev ops whether it's your crm or demand gen systems or whatever that tell you like well we actually can't give you that metric because this thing over here is screwed up okay cool let's go make a plan to fix that thing um so i don't know like making the little issues obvious through better reporting and then just increasing skin-to-skin contact with customers, nothing bad ever happened from doing those two things in the first six months of an investment.

25:11Yeah, and I've seen that. Those plays are kind of for existing customers, and at the end of the day, what you're really looking to establish is maybe whether you're new or not, you know, they're probably going to get wind that there's private equity in the equation yeah their mind goes to one or two places either they're gonna get more resources they're gonna get less you know they're either gonna be pushing the you know the the EBITDA up or they're gonna be spending that EBITDA to innovate or you know and all that so I think you want to take control of that narrative from our perspective there's we're gonna want to invest in the product and find the right balance of earnings and growth as we kind of take this forward.

25:51But you want to create this message of, and then live up to it, of control. Like, we're under control. We know what we're doing. We're very deliberate about our plans and our communication. And then just kind of engagement and motion and delivering things, right? So, we have a plan. We're delivering on the plan. We have a plan. We're delivering on the plan. And that's, you kind of get that in place. So, yes, we've definitely seen that pick up steam and go, well. How about for new customers, right? A lot of times, you know, are the things that you want to be, what are the categories of things that you're thinking about?

26:27New logos is often an issue and that's an area where, and it takes, honestly, it takes some time to kind of get that motion going if it's not in place already. But for new customers, like what are the types of things that you're thinking about for new logos? I think what we find is these are founder-owned businesses, right? And so there's a lot of lines in the water that they would have loved to thrown in but they just haven't had the resources the bandwidth or the time to think about them and so most of the markets uh that these companies sit in the the awareness is very low of the brand that we're taking on so it's like okay well how do we just go put more lines in the water and get louder about what people love about us and usually that means adding a couple of new channels like this is kind of the summer of the webinar for us at Parker Gale right now, which a lot of that's driven by the innovation and just new products that we have in AI.

27:19And so like, we can't help ourselves, but talk about it. But yeah, it's, you bring up some of the basic marketing tactics of paid ads, webinars, trade shows, and the resounding response is something like, that's a great idea. And we haven't done one of those in a while. And it's usually because we're really busy. We don't have a huge team. We'd love some help to pull it off. And we can provide that help both in the form of just like lending a hand, but we have stuff you can steal from other companies. We have templates, we have project plans. And a lot of it is just getting more lines in the water.

27:53I think that's more effective when you build a really good list. And so one of the things that we figure out in diligence is, yeah, what does our ICP look like? What is the market segment that if we were going to go into a zoom info or an apollo or something and filter on the industry classifications and the size of company we probably want to focus here and so if you leave that in diligence and you never go build a list and you never get it into your crm and you never start marketing to those people and you never give that list to your sales team and say these are the 50 names that you should probably go focus on you're gonna have a hard time with new logo because that's where it starts.

28:31It starts with segmentation targeting and then positioning the product the right way. And so a lot of this is, none of this is like revolutionary to companies that are just entering the portfolio. A lot of them just need some help with that last 20 % of operationalizing it. And so on the new logo side, I think it all comes back to having a workable list, lending a hand to put more lines in the water, and then adjusting based on what you learn. Makes sense. So why don't we put a mirror on ourselves and just kind of say, how do we do? You know, what does this look like? What does this look like when it goes well?

29:08And then maybe we can talk about what does this look like when it gets a little sideways? When it goes well, I think we're surfacing something conversationally with the team that lines up decently well with what we learned in diligence or what we thought the value creation plan was, but that both sides are excited about. Like we're excited about it because we feel good that we were kind of right about where the opportunity was. And the team is excited about it because they've been thinking about it for a long time and they just needed some extra help to pull it off. So the upsell campaign is almost always one of those.

29:45It's like, yeah, we know we don't talk to our customers enough. We haven't run a coordinated campaign against that in a long time. Let's go do that. Will you help us? And our answer is always hell yes. right yep um so i i think it's about finding a couple of things that you're really excited to work on that you can pull off in like a quarter or less and using that to pick up some steam to work on something together and build some trust and then usually go find some more pipeline that wasn't there before and i think when we're doing it poorly we get into this weird zone where we're rigidly focused on the value creation plan, but then we're letting the inevitable whirlwind of the business and the fire drills that come up every single week kind of distract us.

30:31And so you end up playing a little bit of whack-a-mole, but you never get that conviction that like, okay, we got something here, we're driving it, we're working on it together, and there's some intentionality behind it. So I don't know, if you find yourself like stuck between the diligence deck that's growing increasingly stale and just like the stuff that pops up that's really tactical every single day, but it doesn't feel like you're making progress, it's probably time to pull up and get in front of a whiteboard and say like, what would be a needle mover that we could go work on that takes advantage of some untapped potential in the business?

31:06And you can probably figure that out in a day and go work on it. And it doesn't mean the whack-a-mole stuff is not gonna pop up anymore, but it is gonna give you something that you're going to be motivated to work on where you can feel like you can build some momentum with the company. And I think from the investment seat where I've seen it pick up steam quicker is when the alignment process does happen between perspectives of, because there's people in seats doing things like trying to sell, like it's not, they're not trying to sell, they're running their plays, they're doing it the way they've done it and things like that.

31:43if you don't get them on board with that, then it's, they're going to kind of glad hand you and then just kind of keep doing what they're doing, or it's just not going to mesh or maybe you're wrong or maybe you're off a little bit, right. Maybe being off 20%, it just kind of throws the whole thing off. So as long as you're getting all that on the table and taking a step back, you know, it is really hard in a business once you're in it to be like, there's so many things in any given day. Um, but can you sacrifice half a day to get on the same page and to really plan this out to look at your list and just like agree on the why yeah and then and then kind of push those plans forward when everybody's on the same page then it kind of comes together and moves forward or if there's not enough resources in the business at the time to kind of push those things out you obviously need to hire or or there's people that are just like this just i disagree either they disagree they could be right but like they disagree or this isn't for me then you got to kind of go through those cycles as well.

32:39But I think you really need to, from a CEO's perspective and from a board's perspective, or, you know, because like, you also need to realize the board carries a lot of weight. So like, as the, you know, if you're the, whether you're the chairman or the deal team member, like when you say do something, somebody's going to do it. Right. So you got to choose your words carefully, but really what you want to do, you don't want to just dictate you want to inform you want to do the listening tour you want to listen to them you want them to listen to you that all gets put in one big soup hopefully that gets cleared through some sort of alignment exercise that gets turned into plans and then you go execute but if you skip steps along the way um it's chaos would be a nice word you're probably not going to be going many places if that doesn't happen yeah and that i i think i'd be curious to get your take on this like that starts to naturally arise and feel like a really organic process if you spend a bunch of time together in person like in the first six months of an investment i should have on my united app three or four flights to that company or i'm probably screwing up and it doesn't feel organic because we just haven't spent time in person together you should be spending time with customers and partners if partners are important yep and if you do that if you're spending a bunch of time with the team at the company and with the people that you're trying to sell to and anybody who helps you sell your product it's going to be hard not to notice together something that just bubbles up that you start naturally kind of attacking and so if it feels hard and it feels like, ah, there's a lot of priorities that we could go work on, or you're not quite sure.

34:29It just feels like you're getting stuck in the whirlwind. My advice to people would be to examine that, examine how much time you are spending interpersonally with the people in the company and the people in your market. And you might just need a little bit more of that. Jason Lemkin from Sastr likes to say, when you feel stuck, just go talk to 10 customers and you'll kind of know what to do. And I think that advice holds, whether it's relationship with the portfolio company or like trying to get growth or performance going. Works in both cases. Yeah. No, I think it makes a lot of sense. And sometimes it's hard for private equity folks to do that.

35:07But my learning and advice to folks is just be brave, which means all of our training is that in a meeting. So you start as an analyst and you kind of move up. But in a meeting or in a situation, like you, people look to you and you have the answer. You have the information. You have the answer. You know what to do. You're helping people move faster. Don't let them look dumb. It's just kind of like how you come up in the business. But then once you're like, that's different than being on a board or in a business. Being brave to me is venturing into a conversation where you don't really know where it's going to go.

35:41You don't have complete control where it is. You have knowledge and perspectives, but you're kind of going in being like, I don't know how this is going to go. I might be talking to a customer right now that's really pissed, but I'm going to learn something. Or I'm talking to a partner that there's opportunities for alignment of incentives and there's opportunities for conflicts of incentives. That's okay. Let's just get it on the table and get into it and then kind of play this dance. But some people are just like they want to be in control and they feel like they don't want it to get off the rails.

36:13But if you can if you can be brave and take your perspectives into that and be present in it, it usually goes pretty well. And you learn a lot. And that doesn't mean that you just got to have thick skin or just put on the hat that says, like, there's things I need to know. There's things I need to figure out. I can't hide from them. I got to get them on the table so I can deal with them and just be willing to have those conversations where you don't have the answers. and big ears, little mouth, use the mouth where it's needed. But otherwise you're kind of taking it in and then figuring out how to get onto the next thing.

36:44It's almost like karmic. It does come back to you in ways that you can't expect. If you spend a bunch of time with the people inside your portfolio companies and you spend a bunch of time with people in the market, even if it's weird and you don't even know what the agenda is, is this a sales conversation or a partnership conversation or are they a competitor and they want to kill us? It doesn't matter. Go have a bunch of those conversations and just jump in and good things happen. And I think the problem is if you're 6 to 12 months inside of an investment and you're feeling a little stuck and it's not going as well as you want it to, if you really did a personal inventory, you'd probably look in the mirror and say, I never really jumped in.

37:27But the good news is investments last for four or five years and you still have time. So go jump. That's my advice. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's a good place to end. Thanks for all the time today, and goodbye for now.