How Sage CEO Steve Hare grew Sage to $3.8B revenue and 11K customers in 2023.

thank you Ray for kicking us off because we're recording thank you Nathan and all the founder paths are pulling us together it's a great Community been part of for several years I want to talk about three Frameworks to help you forecast and inform your board and make this interactive and come into it as I said my name is David Apple I run the mobile sash protocol at Sage The Sage is the world's largest provider model solutions to the office of the CFO and I've been part of winning the business over 2 000 clients and a lot of this is an automation about what's come from those discussions because we want to pay it forward everybody so the next 20 minutes we're going to cover three different things how to identify your targets how to identify your metrics set your targets and how to track progress it comes over at the time I want to make this interactive everybody how the Pieces come together so let's get started talking about identifying the metrics but just really quickly I'd like to know who is everybody who here is in sales and go to market a market okay who here is in finance thank you who here's a CEO or founder okay great for everybody that's coming in the first thing I want to just talk about is uh I want to put this in a story because what you really ultimately want to do is just in your story that you're telling you what's your meaningful underlying business dynamic that you're telling across these different metrics that are here I want to tell the story of the French cathedral building the 14th century in medieval France there was a cathedral building hustling down the dirt road he passed three people stacking practices and the first one what are you doing I said oh shut the grass okay it passes the second one what are you doing Mom stacking bricks to build a wall okay pass is a third person what are you doing I'm stacking bricks to build a wall in order to learn how to build a cathedral one day fast forward in the future first person instead second person is barely scribbling by anybody want to take a guess what the third person is doing I think the building cathedrals and so you earn your clients business through automating some core process and in return closed deals critical but it's only stacking breakfast if you've done it right you put in a data intelligence layer based on the information that you created in The Firm critical that's only building a wall if you really have understood from your product Market fit what's happening in the market do you understand how to help them prosecute the mission and have a shared Consciousness once executive team on the process that you're helping optimize in a way that quantifies that and that's how you help build your clients Cathedrals and it's so critical of me thinking that way what today's market uncertainty when so many contracts are getting cut or just getting lowered negotiations will be happening so you think about what is your cathedral building uh mud meaningful underlying business dynamic for stacking bricks there's the core six C's if anybody has anybody taken Ben's SAS metrics Academy of course thank you there's always one at least one customer in every room but if you have a bench world class and help and educate you on what's Happening Here but underneath all this is the core metrics that the investors are going to look at I'm happy to send the slides to anybody who wants to see it coming afterwards but then there's a lot underneath this based upon your billing model that's critical to what's actually going to happen what's the quantity of your customers what's the length of your contracts usage billing or subscription of transaction land and expand or simple deal that comes through are you young high growth are you privately buy out with a solar growth model you just have to constantly pick red pill or blue pill what it is is going to be unique about your business but whatever you're doing to tell the story it needs to be tied back to this and how revenue is coming in to what's happening with trying to how you're trying to help build the cathedral now I want to share underneath this we do a lot of work with KeyBank Capital markets they are the number one IPO investor bank for IPOs and this is 12 different firms that went public and how they calculate churn look at the different ways that people are calculating how the numbers come in the point here is you can create it your own way because right now we're about identifying where the metrics are that you want it's and it's almost a journey as opposed to the destination on coming together as an executive team on how are you going to Define walls or bricks walls and Cathedral with the clients and they'll think I love about I just point out box you can see that in the back comply ACV does anybody know what implied ACV is customers have spent over five thousand dollars a year in ARR with them they drew that line but there's that kind of flexibility in the metric that you build as long as you've done it together and that's Ray smiling because part of the SAS metrics board is to try to standard boards to bring some continuity and consistency to this how it all comes together underneath all this is your cohorts because as you grow as a company there's different stages upon the maturity that you have that we're going to talk about in the next section and as you win clients there's different reasons on why you've won their business but you want to Stack rank them so you're back to what's the meaningful underlying business Dynamic tied to financial metrics but against the cohorts of the customer that you have and this is the underpinnings of the story every year I go to the large investment Banks annual investor conferences so they just had them two weeks ago in San Francisco Morgan Stanley Goldman Sachs GMP Key Bank and because I work with a lot of the boards and directors of our clients trying to understand how they tell their story and this is the pattern upon which how they're really telling the story we could we even Tam and a couple other things for the purpose of getting this done so I just want to ask everybody because I'll make this interactive whether you want to write it down for yourself or bring it up into the group what is your cathedral building key underlying business measure that you have does anybody want to volunteer or if you just want to think to yourself and write it down or if you don't know think about how you can think for those of you that go to market leaders CEOs how can you lead that conversation with your executive team and with your board because when everything's important nothing's important but how do you really know what that one measure is in order to guide everybody and that's a central part of your story humans forget facts you'll forget most of this presentation I hope you remember the cathedral building story and I hope you think about how you apply that as the one thing that story the metric is static what's the metric for you for our business it's how do we win the billing model of our clients that's the number one thing we can do is they build an entire process of building model with us that's everything hey Drew thanks for coming let's get into section two set in your targets so we've done a lot of work and found a pattern on how companies grow or simplifying it but C product Market fit series that you prove you can sell it series B prove you can expand and keep those customers seriously and Beyond make it repeatable profitable and predictable and then a big milestone take a capital efficient model move it to Jason private products and geographers this is the Continuum that whatever it is you sell whatever your billing model is this is what your smart astute investors whether it's debt founder path or venture or private Equity this is the encapsulated additional one simple theme what it is they're looking for you to do that you need to then be able to forecast against so who here's uh zero to three million half of you just want to go in depth a little bit on this and again I'm happy to send the deck out and I'm oversimplifying the world because running the business can get included in a lot of variables but there's three things that folks are looking for do you have a good value prop is defined in the revenue growth do you understand your customer as defined as good sales cycle and starting to build a repeatable model and then can you demonstrate the value of your customers which is the average sales price ability to dictate what you think the growth of sales is going to be based on the sales price this is what investors are looking for in this stage in order to get to the next level of what it is you need to forecast for what your mud is for everybody for each of these I'm just going to ask of you based upon the stage which of these three you think is strongest on you'll need to tell me unless somebody wants to volunteer but wherever you're taking notes or something like that which of the three are you strong are you strongest on which of the three of these things you could take the most amount of work to improve and ensure you're clear as a team because I want to make this a good takeaway everybody from Hamilton the session then next stage an AR that's coming up how are you different is defined by the win rate how are you repeatable based upon the sales cycle to get to the revenue that you have and then how are you demonstrating economics with what your cap is and then what your LTD cap ratio is so back to whatever makes you specific and unique this is what people are looking for at this stage the forecast begins to be able to put in but the trick is is because there's so much variability always...