Ep. 149: Jesse Bendit, Apax Digital | Building an In-House Operating Team

0:00Hey, everybody.

0:01Jesse Bendit: Before we get started with today's episode, I want to take an opportunity to tell you about my new book, AI Marketing Blueprint. It just hit number one bestseller status across multiple categories on Amazon, and it walks you through a proven framework that we are taking our clients through here at How to SaaS and how to stay relevant and visible in a world with AI platforms. One of the biggest problems that we have seen across clients and companies is that the traditional channels that they relied on, like paid search or SEO, have declined significantly or are getting more expensive and competitive.

0:34Jesse Bendit: The reason for this is that a lot of buyers are starting to self-educate themselves and research on AI platforms. So a lot of that volume that was previously going to those channels is now moving to these new AI platforms. So to stay relevant, the book walks you through seven new rules that companies in all kinds of verticals and industries need to consider so that they can continue growing their pipeline and revenue and ultimately their enterprise value. So if this applies to your business or one of the companies that you've invested in, I definitely recommend that you pick up a copy. It's available on Amazon, on Apple Books, on Barnes and Noble, and even share it with your teams.

1:10Jesse Bendit: Grab a bunch of copies so that you can kind of consume the content together and start to apply it to your business. And with that said, let's move on to the episode. Welcome to the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast, where we interview leading investors, operators, bankers, and advisors to help you answer one question. How do we increase the enterprise value of our companies? My name is Shiv Narayanan, and each episode, I will dive deep with a guest to help you become a better value creator and capital allocator. So with that said, let's jump right in and let's get started with today's episode.

1:46Jesse Bendit: My guest today is Jesse Bended and he is a principal at Apex Digital. And what's really unique about Apex Digital is they are a subset inside Apex and they work with companies with a ton of operational expertise. They have a team of 30 people that they're bringing into these investments and helping them in all kinds of areas related to marketing, sales, product, AI, and a bunch of other things. And so Jesse walked us through that model. And it's something that I haven't seen a lot of PE firms have successful, but APAC seems to have figured out a way to make this work and add a bunch of value to their portfolio companies.

2:20Jesse Bendit: And they're the ones actually funding this team, which is rare in the private equity world. So I think there's a lot of great takeaways. And if you're running a PE firm and are contemplating how to structure your operating team, I think there's a lot of great takeaways in terms of how Apex runs its team and all the insights that Jesse brought to the table. So with that said, I'll leave you to it. Enjoy the episode.

2:49Jesse Bendit: All right, Jesse, welcome to the show. How's it going? Good. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to have you on. So why don't we start with your background in Apex Digital and then let's go from there. Yes, sure. So I've been at Apex for about 11 years now in a few different areas. I've been at Apex Digital for the last six years and I'll kind of explain the differences between Apex and Apex Digital. But Apex has been around for 50 years. It's been one of the early investors in tech and early stage businesses. The firm has changed over the years and has a late stage buyout practice. And I sit in the digital fund, which is our$2 billion growth-oriented fund.

3:28So we're investing in leading tech and tech-enabled services businesses. And we get to leverage the broader Apex platform and everything that comes with that to help companies that are really at inflection stages of growth and help them accelerate into that next phase. So our fund, we're doing minority, majority checks. We'll do$75 to$250 million of equity. primary, secondary. We're very flexible on the structure. And the reason for that is we're concentrated in the number of investments and want to be a real partner. And so we are more agnostic in what that capital looks like. APRAX broadly, we have international investments, and we also bring a lot of industry expertise and focus on specific sectors.

4:16And then we take a a very operating mindset. So we have 30 internal operators. These are practice area specialists because we want to be a partner on the journey, not just silent capital. Got it.

4:29Jesse Bendit: And you mentioned that you guys do minority and majority investment. So like what determines that or what types of businesses are you looking for? Yeah. Often it's honestly what the management teams or the existing investors are looking for and situational, right? Some businesses are at a stage of growth where they're burning more capital. They have primary investors and minority investors who want to remain on for the ride, but they're looking for that next stage of investor who has some of the capabilities we have, have seen companies at a larger scale to take on a new minority position and provide primaries so they can continue to invest in that growth.

5:08Some companies are a bit more mature. They have investors who are looking to fully exit. and we come in to be that majority partner and help guide on that stage of growth. The beauty of what we do is because we can be flexible, it allows us to situationally be responsive to whatever the investors, management, or other parties are looking for. And then we can also be thoughtful around what is the best type of capital for these businesses. Some debt makes sense, some it doesn't, some primary capital is needed, some it's not, And some are looking for the optionality to say, you know, we don't want primary today, but we might do M &A down the road.

5:48We want the funding for that.

5:50Jesse Bendit: And we can be super flexible. What we're looking for, you know, I mentioned we're pretty concentrated, so we'll do 15 to 20 investments per fund. We don't want people sitting on 10 plus boards. We don't think we can be properly focused if we're spending our time across so many different companies. So typically we're looking at, you know, three to five boards per team member. And the idea is each of us has areas we focus on. We want to really know those industries, know the people that are involved, have experts that we work with and have real feces around those industries to know what categories we're looking for.

6:26When we come in, that helps us align much better to say, here are opportunities we see. what are the opportunities you see as a team and really add value as a thought partner versus just going along with whatever the company might be doing at that given time. So we want to be selective. We want to add value outside of just the capital. I think I said that earlier, but we typically aren't the investor who wants to not have a thesis outside of what the existing operating model is. So we want to have our own thoughts around value levers we can pull. We want to have those conversations with the management team during diligence and say, here are three areas we think we can accelerate actually.

7:13Here's how we've done it before. Here are examples of where we might be helpful. And that's usually where we think we can deliver returns that might be differentiated.

7:22Jesse Bendit: How do you approach investments where you're a minority investor versus a majority investor. Obviously, you have different levels of control there. Does your approach change significantly between those two types of investments? Yes and no. So look, when you're in a minority seat and often there's a handful of investors that have voices on a board. And so navigating that, speaking up when we actually do have expertise and information is important, but also knowing when to defer to others with expertise and where other people might have examples or portfolio companies or third parties they work with that are more relevant.

8:00You know, I sit on, as an observer on one board, Guesty, where we're one of many different minority of investors. We've been in it for five years now and others are coming in more recently. Some of those that come in more recently have new ideas and those are often really beneficial and help add that value. We also have some more context because we've been involved for five years and have seen it go through different phases and understand the market in a different way just from having that experience over time. On majority deals, there's less voices in the room. So it's more important to bring as much of the capabilities as we can.

8:37There's less people to really rely on outside of ourselves. So often that means a bit more involvement. Management teams might lean on us a bit more. Regardless of minority or majority though, I mentioned the operating team. I mentioned keeping ourselves concentrated in the board. We give companies the menu of options of what APAC can offer. So we have specialists on the operating team who all they do is SEM. We have people who all they do is SEO. We have data scientists, carve-out specialists, pricing experts. And so all of our portfolio companies know the resources we have. And then it's their job to pull on us.

9:15We always say we're a pull, not a push model. We want to make ourselves available as much as needed, but it's availability, not prescriptive.

9:25Jesse Bendit: Talk about that team of operating experts because that's larger than most firms have on staff. So how does the model work and are you billing out to your portfolio companies or is it funded by Apex? Just help us understand that. Yeah, so it's totally funded by Apex. Our investors pay for this and we pay for this because we think it adds value above and beyond what we could do otherwise. So it's good for us. It's good for the companies. and we think it actually adds returns for ourselves and everybody involved. The way that it started was the current CEO in the US was on the C-suite at Orbitz and Priceline.

10:04So he had a very digital demand gen type background. And so when he came over to Apex, that was the first capability he added. And what we found is that portfolio companies wanted to use that expertise. and then kept asking for more areas of expertise. So that team has grown over time based on the demand of our portfolio companies. So starting with that digital demand gen side, it moved into rev ops and data science and now AI experts, product experts, infrastructure experts. Cybersecurity is a big topic these days. So we have a person who just focuses on that. And so each of these people are really the best at what they do.

10:45They're people who are in the sweet spot of their career where they have the experience and they're still really energized to get involved. And they're people that have that practice area versus general consulting knowledge because we want them to be as much of a resource as possible. So that can be a 15-minute conversation. It can be working alongside management teams on six, nine-month engagement. And we really want that to be a model that they can use as needed. I mentioned the pull model, but that's really how that team functions.

11:20Jesse Bendit: Got it. Yeah, I guess the tricky part there is that you're mentioning a lot of different areas that these guys can help in. But at the same time, I'm imagining almost all your portfolio companies need help with a bunch of these areas. Like we found that a lot of our PE partners, they have a handful of operating folks. And then as they figure out that there's a certain area that needs help, they need to kind of dive deep. And then that's usually when they're bringing partners like us in for different subject areas. So help us understand that, like, how are you able to dive deep with the portfolio company, with the team?

11:51Jesse Bendit: Are you adding more resources or are these subject matter experts almost like deploying themselves into the specific investment where there's an opportunity? Like, how does that model work? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. Every person only has a finite amount of time. And so I think the first thing is that within portfolio companies, we help prioritize what the most important areas are, that there's value to be gained. And so our team does need to prioritize within their own initiatives where they're going to be most focused. I think you hit on something else that's super relevant. You work with a lot of PE companies.

12:26We work with third-party experts too, right? So we build a bench of third parties that we think are the best at what they do. And where our team can be really helpful is in bringing the context from an investment thesis perspective, bringing the context from knowing the portfolio company and the team, and then bringing the context from having worked with those third parties before, and really bridging that gap to make everyone as effective as possible in that relationship. No situation is the same. So not every third party is right for every situation. but knowing the context from those different areas allows us to, to think strategically about where this company sits, what is most effective and translate that to, to partners that could be useful.

13:09So that helps to build the leverage, the operating leverage within our teams that it's not one person who's responsible for, you know, 60 plus portfolio companies and saying, cybersecurity is a big topic. Everybody needs to be focused on it. You know, One guy can't manage that big of a portfolio, but through our additional resources, partners, experts, we're really able to use that knowledge base to get our portfolio companies what they need.

13:36Jesse Bendit: How does the operational model work? Can you expand a little bit more? Because a lot of investors and GPs are hesitant to invest so much in operating teams. And we've even seen firms that have scaled up large operating teams and then scaled down in recent years where just there's a lot of fixed costs and overhead associated with that. So how does that work, especially when you have this more of a pull model than a push model where the companies can select into these services? Right. How are you making sure there's enough utilization, enough impact from this team and the ROI is actually there for the firm?

14:10Yeah. I mean, look, when I joined 11 years ago, I think the team was 12 at that point. It's 30 today. So we haven't seen it go up and go back down. Because as I said, there's more and more areas that our portfolio companies are asking for. And we want to deliver that to them. There's the anecdotal side, right? When I ended up being seconded at Boach Group and then working there full time, that was the portfolio company I worked with. there were super tangible areas where I had never been in an operating role before. I had a lot of good connections on the operating team. And I was dealing with issues like affiliate marketing.

14:49I didn't know how to start that program. There were people within the team that I could ask about, ask what programs they were working with, think about the economics of it and help get it set up. And they had that experience. They had that knowledge. So that's like the anecdotal side. And the realistic way we measure it is, you know, that team is super data driven. So they track their hours, their projects, where they're working, where they're spending time. And then they're reporting back to board members and those of us that are involved with the company on a regular basis and saying, here we are on the project.

15:22This is what's delivered. This is what the expectation was. And this is where we are today. And we're able to measure that within the company. Right. We have one initiative right now at a company I work with, Dealer DMV. They historically haven't had a BI business intelligence program. And we were able to introduce them to a third-party partner. That partner was able to step in and really guide them on setting up their Snowflake instance, using Claude on top of that and other programs to create outputs and visibility. and they were able to do that in a lot less time than the business could have done it by itself.

16:02So you see that. You see that in reporting that we're getting now from Dealer DMV. We're seeing that in the ability to really track their revenue and customers. And that's reported back to the team in terms of where they spent time, what resources they used, and what was effective.

16:19Jesse Bendit: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's great. I think the fact that people are getting involved at that level and are able to support these companies. Do you think there's like a advantage that you guys have given that you have this team in terms of the amount of alpha you can generate because of the subject matter expertise that you've built on this team compared to firms that maybe don't have a lot of these capabilities in-house? So it's hard for me to compare not having worked at another firm on the investment side, but I like to think yes, in kind of two respects. First of all, when we're doing diligence, often we can find areas that others might not find.

16:55I imagine Boat's group where I went to work. That's a perfect example. We took a thesis there that it was a family-owned business. It had a great market share. It had a great brand within the marine industry. But they hadn't invested in the business. They didn't have a true dedicated team. They weren't putting dollars reinvesting in technology and product and customer outreach. And it had historically been a print business that moved online, and they had never really gotten that digital DNA. And we saw a huge opportunity to invest in digital marketing and demand gen in using the brand to really accelerate traffic growth and to actually use the opportunities they have to see financial results and financial performance.

17:41That wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have that dedicated digitally focused team within our operating practice. So they, in the diligence side, identified that. And then on the operating side, once we invested, we're able to actually help the team execute on that. In the short term, by being much more involved and regular calls and cadence, in the long term, we hired people internally within Boats Group who had that expertise and could really take it on themselves. And we're able to advise on who those right people are because we are bridging that gap. So that's a perfect example where we can identify it in diligence and then execute on it when we actually make the investment.

18:20And as I said, because we're concentrated, we can pick opportunities where we actually see that value add. It doesn't hold true across every industry and every company. And that's why we're selective in what we cover and how our groups and verticals break down.

18:35Jesse Bendit: Yeah, I can totally see that. Like in a lot of private equity investments, there is a bit of a disconnect between what's happening in diligence and the value creation planning and then actually rolling that out post close. Like is the same team working on it? Is there like a connecting person or group in between that? Like we get pulled into diligence engagements and we kind of help PE firms from the outside. But then in firms where there isn't an internal person kind of running that process, sometimes things can get lost. So that definitely resonates. Has this been a differentiator when you've been out there trying to close investments or trying to close targets and to say like, hey, this is what we can bring to the table as APACs to help you get the most out of this investment for the next turn?

19:18Yeah, and we get the question often, like, who is the team on this post-investment? And the reality is, is that it's the same people who are involved during the diligence period that are involved throughout the investment hold period. And so us on the investment team, we sit on the board. We're kind of that central repository of information to say, these are the priorities of the business. This is what we're talking in the board meeting. And then we can also help get them connected to the right people in the operating team or third parties we work with or other portfolio companies that are having the same problem or running into the same questions.

19:51That consistency, I think, is really important and a differentiator when we talk to portfolio companies. And then introducing a lot of our partners or operating professionals, I think, really resonates with a lot of the management teams. They see that often these are companies, especially at the Apex Digital size, that have reached scale by being really scrappy. Often they're bootstrapped. They've managed to build a really nice product market fit from a less resource-heavy base. But when they see our capabilities and how we've seen companies from$10 million of revenue up until our buyout fund has companies that are a billion-plus of EBITDA, and we know where landmines can be, where skeletons can be hidden and our operators can talk about that at different phases.

20:44I think that resonates really well to be able to say, you know, when you get to this scale, you need to put in an HRIS system. These are HRIS systems we recommend. We just put one of those in and deal our DFB. You know, these are BI tools we've used in the past. These are partners that can help you get it set up. These are often the issues that people run into when they're getting them set up. We can talk about that during the diligence stage. And I think that management teams appreciate having a bit of a, I wouldn't say a crutch, but resources they could use that are free and they otherwise would not have available.

21:22Jesse Bendit: We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But before we do, one of the most common and important value creation levers that we hear about on the show from private equity investors and our own PE partners is go-to-market. Yet when these same PE partners bring us into their portfolio companies or new target investments that they're exploring, we find that the marketing function is quite immature, underutilized and under optimized. And so that's a huge opportunity that we see inside these companies. And if you have a portfolio company that you feel like it's scaled a lot faster to drive more pipeline and revenue, or you're looking at a new investment where you feel like that could be core to your investment thesis, well, we'd love to explore that with you and figure out how we can partner with you to drive more enterprise value creation on the marketing side, similar to the way that we've done with major PE firms like TA, Updata, HG, SDG, and many more.

22:14Jesse Bendit: At this point, we've done hundreds of engagements across hundreds of industries and verticals, and we have a ton of benchmarks and frameworks that we bring to these engagements to help you drive as much enterprise value as quickly as possible. So if that sounds like something that you might be interested in, you can just email me directly at shiv at how to SaaS.com or go to our website and schedule a demo. And we'd love to speak with you about it further. And now with that said, let's get back to the show. is there an operational framework that you're using to figure out like hey for this business or this investment this is the biggest value creation lever or for this other investment here's where we should start like how are you determining where you deploy this team or which people are working on what here the real answer is we don't have a playbook i know some some firms take the approach of having a playbook and it's pricing and cost cutting and those sorts of areas.

23:10That's really not our approach. We have an investment thesis when we go into each business, right? And those are the things that will make or break whether it's a successful partnership. Those investment theses are usually the ones that are going to drive the most value. And so you can often tie those to where we need to focus with the business. If it's on the marketing side, there are certain people who are going to be most relevant there. If it's on the product side, we have experts who help think through roadmaps and how to prioritize and how to build the product development team around that.

23:46If there are competitive dynamics, it's thinking about how we really differentiate ourselves in the market and across the business and across the go-to-market organization. So it really depends. And that changes over time too, right? I mentioned And I work with a company, Guesty. They are one of the leaders in short-term rental property management software. They had a great product for small and medium-sized businesses when they first came about and really grew into that. As they've grown, they've started to serve enterprise customers. And the market has changed as they've grown, right? Like AI has become super relevant for all of our businesses.

24:27For that in particular, they have these customers that have very task-heavy jobs. It's making sure that they have bookings and pricing and maintenance and cleaning. And so there's a real opportunity to add value to those customers through emphasizing the AI products they can build. That's a newer opportunity for them, right? Like that's come in the last few years where customers understand that, customers want to buy that, and the value prop resonates. And so that's been something that we've looked to be an additional help on as they've built out that roadmap and really thought about the marketing for it, the product development for it, the pricing for it, and the testing for it.

25:07So it changes over time. It depends on where the thesis is up front. And then we want to give the resources that add the most value in terms of long-term business success.

25:19Jesse Bendit: Yeah, that definitely resonates because obviously, depending on the stage, depending on where companies are, different levers end up mattering. You touched on AI there. Can you expand on that and just explain like with AI coming up and that as an opportunity in front of these companies, how are you approaching that or how is that intertwining with all the other initiatives on the value creation side that you see and that you're helping these companies with? Yeah, it's something we've been thinking about for a number of years, as have most others. Obviously, within the last six months, this continues to accelerate for good end that, right?

25:55There was a huge sell-off in software earlier this year. I think for good reason. There's legitimate questions behind the software landscape. I think that's in the public markets. They reacted. I think the problem is that those sell-offs were applied indiscriminately. So we're thinking about what the real risks are and what the real opportunities are. From the risk perspective, we look at every company as, and this is even before the AI conversation, but can customers replace you? Are they going to build it yourself? And then now there's this path for AI native upstarts. Who's going to compete with you?

26:34Who's going to come in? And so we're always asking those questions from an analysis perspective at investment, but also afterwards to make sure that we continue to have leadership in terms of the products we're delivering. And ultimately, in those products we're delivering, the question we want to ask is, what value are you delivering to your customers? I think one of the reasons that there was a sell-off in SaaS is because historically, SaaS is related to this seat-based model, right? And as we continue to evolve within this world, that will become less of the proxy for value, how many seats you're delivering and how many people are using you versus what is the actual value you're adding.

27:15So I mentioned Guesty before in terms of the agents they're building for their customers. That's adding tangible value. Their customers can now get more revenue because they are able to expand their operations and they can get higher margin because they're able to do it more efficiently. and Guesty is enabling that. If you're delivering that value to customers, then there's value to be had for the business. And so that's what we're constantly getting our portfolio companies to focus on is how is this adding value to that end customer so that you continue to be sticky for them and also continue to have greater and greater demand.

27:53Jesse Bendit: Yeah, yeah, totally. All of that resonates. I guess my question would be on the AI side. Are you seeing more work that's being done inside these companies on the product side or on the go-to-market side? Because on our side, what we are seeing is that companies are seeing declining paid media traffic and performance, declining SEO traffic. So AI visibility is one of the biggest things that we are helping private equity firms and their portfolio companies with. I'm curious, where do you see the biggest opportunities? Realistically, both. But kind of touching on what you're describing, we invest in marketplace businesses.

28:26Because Google traffic has often been the most important driver for a lot of those businesses. And Google was always based off of your content and your links and everything involved there. People knew the formulas. I think more and more when you're looking at what was SEO, it translates to what the new world of search is within LLMs. And that's trust ultimately, right? You have to be trusted by your customers. You have to be trusted by reviewers. You have to have the content that still is accurate and that people are looking for. And that gets you more visibility within the new version of discovery.

29:07And so I think it's only more important today to get companies to think about how they're continuing to enhance that trust, but also to make that trust clear to the market, because that's how they're found and that's how their reputation is built. And that's how people are doing research and finding their software products and their partners today. So I think it's a super relevant topic, not only for our marketplace businesses, but for all of our business to be really that source of information.

29:42Jesse Bendit: What about on the products that have you seen any dampened demand for companies in a world with AI? Like we're hearing from some companies that customers are saying like, hey, we want to see how much we can leverage AI to build an in-house application or other alternatives to solutions that you can purchase off the shelf. I'm just curious, like on the product side or just demand overall for a category or type of type of product. What are you seeing there? Again, this really depends on what the business is. So I think when we make investments, we have focused on a rubric of where that won't necessarily be the case.

30:22DLMV is a perfect example. Basically, they build electronic titling solutions for car dealerships. Electronic titling is not the car dealership's core competency. They want to sell cars. Electronic titling is complex. You need to integrate with DMVs. you need to have each of 50 states know all the fees and the restrictions and the processes. There's thousands of jurisdictions in there. A dealership is not going to want to build that themselves. I think pricing is key here. And we mentioned some companies do price per seat, dealer DMV prices per transaction. And so for every transaction, the dealership's getting value, the consumer's getting value because they need the titling.

31:04And so dealer DMV is taking the the relevant value there. So for a company like that, the short answer is no, we're not seeing a decrease in demand. We're actually seeing continued growth momentum because customers are looking for the best product that is automated and has the best data and experience. Because of their data and experience, they're more accurate and they're better able to use products to automate their own software. So in those situations, I think the answer is no, we're not seeing less demand. I think customers are demanding you to innovate within your own product in those situations and say, I will look for something else if I need to, because I know that this is easier.

31:48I know that you can do this more efficiently. I know you can do this more accurately. And if you're not doing that as best as possible, then I will look for alternatives. But they have huge incumbency advantages from that data and experience and knowledge and integration that's really hard to replicate for either the dealers or for new upstarts. I think where you do see that is for companies that don't have that level of dependency within the business where people and processes aren't ingrained, where it doesn't have integrations with the data and core systems, where it's a pure interactive level and not really core to the underlying customer value.

32:29I think that's the reality. And I know there are companies out there that are facing those challenges.

32:36Jesse Bendit: How has all this changed how you're building the teams inside portfolio companies or how you approach the overall management or org structure to drive the most value? There's more efficiency in a lot of our teams. That often means we invest in growth businesses. So these businesses are still growing their headcount because, you know, there's more that they can be doing. I think this creates additional opportunity to build product faster, to deliver greater results to customers. But each of those individuals that we're adding can be incrementally more efficient. Product teams, instead of having larger pods focused on fewer products, you can break down those pods to smaller teams.

33:18Product managers can be more integrated with developers and iterating back and forth because you've unlocked that layer of who needs to be building code, how you actually iterate on code, how you deliver that code. So processes are changing. And you're seeing within development teams, they can be focused on more at once. Within sales teams, there's more tools that are able to make them more efficient. So at dealer DMV, we brought on Gong, and that's making the sales team able to go out to more prospects, to convert on them faster, to have the right conversations, to deliver the right messaging.

33:57Um, and that's super effective, but that doesn't mean we don't need more salespeople, right? Like the dealer landscape is very much, uh, a person relationship business and that still exists. So we're able to really supplement and improve our team. And that's really exciting for these businesses that can move faster.

34:18Jesse Bendit: Yeah, that's awesome. I agree with everything you said. Unfortunately, coming up on time, I wish we could have kept going further here, but Jesse, If people want to learn more about you and APACS, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, I mean, we're always looking to meet people who are excited about the same opportunities we are. As I said, our fund looks at tech and tech-enabled services. I specifically focus on real asset areas, so prop tech, auto tech, construction, industrial manufacturing. My email is jesse.bendit at apacs.com, and people can feel free to reach out. We love to have conversations and just talk about how the world is changing, how we're thinking about opportunities within businesses that are more exciting than ever right now.

35:00So, you know, we're excited to be out there and meeting all those that are kind of in the same boat.

35:07Jesse Bendit: Awesome. We'll be sure to include all of that and all the links in the show notes. And with that said, Jesse, thanks for coming on and sharing how Apex Digital structures its team and creates all this value. I think it's rare in the PE world that there's a team such as this that's adding a bunch of value for their portfolio company. So I hope the investors and other GPs that listen to this podcast will learn from it as much as I did. So I appreciate you doing this. No, I appreciate you having me. And it's a fun conversation. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Before you take off, just a few requests from our side.

35:36Jesse Bendit: Number one, if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or YouTube or wherever you go to listen to your podcasts. Number two, if you are in the market for due diligence services, strategy consulting or fractional CMO services, please get in touch with us at www.howtosass.com. and third please buy a copy of my new book exit ready marketing it covers a ton of concepts that we take our customers through private equity investors b2b companies ceos operating partners and marketers and there's a ton of great value in there that expands on my previous book post acquisition marketing as well so with that said i hope you enjoyed today's content and we'll see you on the next episode