KPIs for PE-backed companies: Key metrics, systems and processes that drive growth

If you’re in a PE-backed company, you’re not just managing finance—you’re building a machine that drives valuation, accelerates growth, and withstands relentless reporting demands.

In this session, Chad Wonderling, CFO at Zone & Co, and Paul Morgis, Director of Management Consulting at RSM, will dive deep into the critical metrics PE-backed companies need to monitor for sustainable growth. Learn how the right systems and processes can rapidly impact these metrics, transforming your finance operations into a strategic advantage.

You’re not here to chase vanity metrics. You’re here to drive growth and win. Let’s show you how.

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Transcript

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Jackie Hertz: Hi everybody. Thank you guys for joining. Super excited you're here. I'm Jackie Hertz. I'm the Director of Alliances and Private Equity here at Zone. I'll be the host today for this webinar.

I'm really excited for the session we have planned and we all definitely hope you walk away with some valuable insights. For those who might not be familiar with Zone, we are a software company focused on helping businesses streamline and automate finance and accounting operations. And RSM, our partner, is a leading global network that offers audit, tax and consulting services.

Zone and RSM have been partners for years. We built a very strong partnership helping our clients maximize the value of NetSuite. We're especially excited to be able to team up on this webinar and offer some thought leadership and guidance around KPIs for PE backed companies. We'll kind of cover the critical role of the systems behind as well as processes.

Chad, I will hand it over to you to kick it off.

Chad Wonderling: Yeah, great. Thanks Jackie. And good afternoon everybody. Just by way of of introduction, my name is Chad wondering, I'm the CFO here at Zone.

I've been with Zone for, just, it'll be 13 months tomorrow. So a little over a year. Definitely more than a year's worth of work within 13 months, but it's, it's been great. But prior to Zone, I actually spent nearly four years as a customer. So a lot of what I share with you today will be from the perspective of not only the CFO seat, from the view of being private equity backed, which we are here at Zone, and the uniqueness of that, which I'll talk about here in a minute, but also from the view that of a customer and having been through this experience that we will share with you today around metrics and lead to cash.

But Jackie, we can go ahead and go on to the next slide.

Awesome. So I think first is, you know, this is intended, this webinar is obviously intended KPIs for PE-backed companies. That's the title of it and the reason why, I want to pause here for just a second and recognize something very unique, from that of a CFO seat in combination with being at a PE-backed company, is a couple things.

One is as a CFO, there, there's a few kind of foundational things that are critical for company performance and that is expected of us in the PE environment as stewards of the investment and those things are. One is we are the foundational setter for the operations of the company.

We are the builder and the owner of the growth infrastructure, which we'll talk a bit more about in more detail and what that means. So the growth infrastructure, which requires scalability.

And then thirdly, very importantly, is we are the performance leader and driver within the business from the seat of CFO, and that is expected of us in the PE environment. And I'll also say this is, that look is, I know that there's a, a large demand for CFOs out there, particularly in the PE environment, but it's really interesting. And why that is a big difference and why that's, you know, being a PE-backed CFO versus, you know, any other type of CFO is, for example, being a public company, CFO, you know, the mindset and the thought might be, I need to set and beat X target within the next short period of time. Compare that to the PE back CFO, which is I need to realize X value in y time or another group will figure it out.

And I only say that because timing is such a real element in the PE space. Timing is real. And then also take those three foundational things that I mentioned before as performance leader, foundational setter, and the builder and owner of the growth infrastructure is we are the drivers of, of the, of the value creation.

Okay? Now take that to these three circles. Right here is, I think about our role as CFO is we've gotta be masters of the business model. We've gotta know the investment thesis. Okay. And that, that obviously comes from and is driven from the PE firm and from their sponsorship. And then we've got to form KPIs and our metrics around those two things.

Which then brings us to our discussion today around the metrics. And I think what's critical about the metrics is the first thing as we think about what are the metrics to drive the business, how do we get there, is the metrics are very dependent and can change based upon the stage of the company.

But we set those around while being mindful of the investment thesis and our business model. So I think as we, you know, dive into and begin to consider. Kind of the, the, from the, from the seat of the CFO, the the metrics and, and the KPIs. You know, there's no better way to really kind of do that through consideration of what we like to call in the SaaS space, the rule of 40 or sometimes referred to as the rule of X. Which is a very simple way for companies. Operators say like myself or like many of you here to evaluate our, our operating metrics in a very simplified way.

So let's just pause for a second and kind of walk through this together. So kind of rule of 40, a rule of X is the combination of two things. One, our annualized growth or year over year growth in revenue, okay? Plus our operating margin. As a percent of revenue or what we can also call free cash flow as a percent of revenue. Rule is, is that in popularized, I think I want to say in like 15, 16 by a couple venture investors is that should always sum to 40. Some will argue, some investors will argue maybe it should be something greater than 40 or whatever. That's why it's sometimes referred to as rule of X.

And if we unpack that. If we unpack that and if we think about our role from, from the seat of the CFO is there's a number of key metrics that go into what I'll kind of refer to as the rule of X output.

I think as we think about revenue growth, and again, very dependent upon stage, but here at Zone, the way we see it and the way we measure it and think about it and talk about it at the ELT level and throughout the company is net new ARR. So what is our bookings? Less, less our churn.

And then also, you know, a key metric in driving growth and even to a degree, measuring some efficiency is what we have down on the left around net dollar retention. So, so in the software space that is, that is, so you had $1 coming into the year. What is, what is that? What is that worth today? What does that $1 worth today? That's an indication of our ability to sell, to retain, and sell more products into our customers.

Then the other one is grow gross retention. Gross revenue retention. Gross dollar retention, very similar is our ability to retain customers. So we started with, with $1. What is left of that same $1 today versus what it's worth in NDR.

And then I think the other component here around operating margin is look. I, I once recently heard, referred to, heard it referred to as, you know, kind of the covid, immediately post Covid era with, with you know, very low interest rates or, or, or 0% interest rates referred to as the ZERP period where that was a period of, of growth at all cost. Now, and there has been much more emphasis put on free cash flow, profitability and operating margin.

So, you know, from the role of the CFO, and we've seen it within the last couple years with all companies, but not just from, from the CFO seat, is a lot of incremental cost cutting, okay? To try to rightsize the cost base to get closer to profitability. We all know that that could only be done so much. That is not a sustainable answer.

So that's why it comes to, as we think about metrics and what drives the business, it comes down to efficiencies. As we think about how we acquire customers, our sales and marketing efficiency, how efficient are salespeople, what are our conversion rates, and how do we drive those conversion rates. Then ultimately in the seat of finance too, the impact that we play, that then leads to free cash flow. And how we drive free cash flow.

So share all that to say ultimately, you know, within a business we can transition. Jackie to the next slide, I think within a business. Kind of the three underlying goals, particularly you know, in, in software, but in all businesses is probably, I think about it in terms of three things and how I share it with our ELT is: we want to be repeatable, we want to be scalable, and we want to be profitable.

And from our seat within finance and from the office of the CFO, we know in order to achieve those things, a lot of it is highly dependent upon. Business, business performance market, et cetera. And so where I've, where I've often challenged our team, even our leaders across the ELT, is what can we control? What is within our own control that we can drive efficiencies?

And as I think about it, and, and even having been in, been in my seat and experience this, is, there's really no more one common denominator to drive those things than to drive efficiency around cash flow. And that cannot be optimized until we have optimized the quote to cash.

And so there's a lot that we can do from our seat of the CFO to to, to drive some of those efficiencies by simply looking within and throughout what I will, what I will call, and you'll hear me refer to it today, as you know, we often think about lead to cash or sometimes in sales it's referred to as lead to conversion and then quote to cash. I think about it and we think about it here at Zone is lead to cash, success, and then renewal as we think about the full cycle revenue and customer experience.

So having said all that, given all the dependencies that that can exist to drive a cash generating machine within the business, you know, there's a lot of requirements as we set up and optimize our quote to cash process, to become hyper efficient around governance and around data and around information. Let me pause there. And and I think we do have Paul on Paul. Paul, sir, you can, you can take it from here on governance.

Paul Morgis: Thanks Chad. So I'm not sure if the introduction was made, but I'm Paul Morgis, I'm a director in our management consulting practice at RSM, helping technology companies go through lead to cash transformation projects and thinking about the people, process, tech and data, and the operational processes that underpin them.

So over these next few slides, what I'll share is some of the, my experiences that I've seen around common operational challenges companies face with executing a lead to cash process. How we at RSM think about approving processes, the underlying technology and data. And then summarize what some of the common threads I've seen with companies that have successfully built this out across the enterprise.

So to start, you know, I start with some of the challenges and by no means what you see here is a comprehensive list. But here are some of the common indicators or pain points we see companies facing that are often symptoms of a fragmented or disjointed quote to cash process.

Some of the key ones I'll call out, I, I do commonly see often is, is really the first is. It's really a lack of alignment or communication between the front office or your sales and the your back office in finance.

This comes in a few forms, right? Sales team having significant process variation in deal structures and with these kind of creative new deal structures without the downstream alignment in finance, it really poses challenges for the finance team to really be scalable and drive that automation that we're looking to to build as we grow.

And you commonly see with this is that finance being the swivel chair and the data transfer between your CRM and ERP for that order entry and really setting up the billing schedules appropriately.

Another indicator I commonly see is, is from the seat of the finance team is, is really a high volume of cancellations or even billing disputes. You know, both these are, are common symptoms of either poor customer experience, whether that's in the onboarding, support or billing phase. Or even just miscommunication, right? A sales rep selling a deal with a set of expectations to the customer, but really not matching to what's being communicated or, or translated to our downstream teams, whether that's professional services or, or really billing from the finance seat.

But at the end of the day, right, as companies think about scaling, whether that's through like global expansion, new product offerings, operational complexity rises and without the appropriate governance across the end to end process. The more challenging it's gonna be to harness the data across the quote to cash process to produce those accurate and actionable KPIs that the, the CFO wants to see.

If we go to the next slide, you know, we wanted to share a few, kind of how we think about it at a high level- the process, and I, I think about it across three dimensions. So the first is really having, having clear business outcomes defined. As, as Chad mentioned, right, you know, dependent on the investment thesis of the private equity group or, or the CFO, it's gonna be in one of these buckets around top line growth, retention, building a foundation to consolidate acquisitions or, and or cost optimization, or, or all of them.

And so we really want to first start with aligning on that, ensuring we have the right KPIs to drive the business outcomes. Second on the bottom left there is, is kind of a pictorial view of a cross-functional alignment.

Lead to cash touches every function of the organization. And so to do it right, it really starts with translating the organization strategy and how the business wants to operate, and then building the end-to-end process across these different teams that clear handoffs procedures across and a cohesive end-to-end journey.

Then last is designing the process through experience. Right? I think at the end of the day, we want to improve the customer, the partner, or even the employee journey. And for lead to cash, it's really like, if you think about it, it's really linking those front office opportunities, contracts and subscriptions and renewals, driving those automated renewals, but then having the right processes and infrastructure in place to automate, handoff to those downstream teams. So that can be your professional services, support, provisioning and invoicing. And when done right and pieced together, this really optimizes the customer's engagement with the organization.

So if we jump to the next one here, so now, you know, as we think about it, we have the business strategy, the KPIs, we have a a go forward process. Now it's critical to ensure you have a scalable tech stack to support that.

As you see on the page, here is an example of, of a leading practice tech stack across lead to cash, but ultimately this is an illustrated view and ultimately might vary based on your needs and requirements as an organization.

Generally thinking, we want to be selecting the software that can support your business requirements, making sure that it's enterprise ready to handle future requirements that you might have as you grow and scale. And then lastly, along with the applications you see across each, each of the functional areas, it's almost equally important to have a clear data and integration strategy. Which is typically supported by a middleware platform that can connect the data across these various platforms.

We jump to the next slide here, and staying on the topic of data, I've been through many of these lead to cash transformation optimization. And at the end of the day, data is the foundation. At the top of the pyramid, as you see here, the CFOs want to want to get that consistent, accurate reporting packages to make informed decisions. We've aligned the KPIs to make sure we're we're reporting and looking at the right things to drive action across the organization.

Where companies really struggle and sometimes it's kind of obvious, is the actual underlying data and the data governance that supports those KPIs and the, and reporting packages.

I work a lot in the tech industry specifically, and I think about it in three different buckets for, for my clients. The first is around around establishing appropriate data governance protocols. This is really focusing on your master data, having a single source of truth for customers and products, and once you have that, you can then sync that across your ecosystem.

The second, and I think it's probably the most important, is your contract and subscription database. This is where you're really gonna do all your ARR reporting, but why, how you make this accurate is having business process rules and system validations to ensure that we produce a clean and accurate contract and subscription records to understand what the customer has entitlements to.

And last one, where I spend a fair bit of time, but with with my clients is around the chart of accounts. It's enabling the segments and dimensionality that a lot of these systems have to simplify, but also meet those management reporting requirements.

If you stitch those three core things together for me, that's the underlying, I call it, reporting cockpit and then you can really stitch together a lot of the other pieces around it.

So to jump down to the next page here, to close the kind of operational process pillars out, you know, I wanted to leave it with what are the things that I see organizations with successful quote to cash processes having. I think about it in like these six big pillars.

The first is, is having clear, clear executive alignment on the strategy. This is getting together the CFO, the CRO, your, your chief customer officer, and really aligning on how do we go, want to go to market, how do we want to do business, and getting all aligned at the executive level.

Once you have that, you then start defining what are the customer pathways we want to bring our customers through? This can be your direct sales motions, your e-commerce, your partner motions, but having a clear view of how do you want to bring the customer end to end.

And once you have that process defined, then you support it with the data and tech. So we want to have an integrated application architecture. When you have systems that are, are not integrated together, disconnected, it does lead to a lot of, you know, obviously manual data transfer, but also disconnected data and systems and how you stitch together produces inaccurate KPIs.

The fourth one is data governance. You know, I'm hammering the data piece a little bit on this too, 'cause it's just one of those fundamental things that we, you, you want to make sure you get right. Have all the right tech in the world, the right process. But if you don't have data, we're not gonna be able to produce the KPIs you need to get.

Adoption of process automation is important. You know, a lot of these tech systems that you, that you saw on the previous page are designed to be best practice. So how can we leverage out of the box where we can to build that scalable model and, and customize where we think it's appropriate and really trying to focus those customizations on improving the experience of of our customers.

Last one, which I find more often than not is just documentation, right? What are the decisions that we, that we've actually made, how do we want to ensure that those get solidified and really brought through, whether that's training and building the procedures of our functional teams, but also ensuring that whatever we build in our systems, we're not one week later turning around and, and changing the whole thing.

There's a little pictorial view on the right hand side, just giving you kind of a snapshot of, of just like as simple as documenting where you master master data is important, right? As we think about our leading practice between a CRM and ERP, we want customers to be mastered in your CRM system and sync down to the ERP for billing.

I've seen product in your product catalog in, in both systems. I've seen it in CRM and ERP. You want to define one as your master and sync it between, between the systems. Contracts and subscriptions are typically sourced in your contracting engine and pushed down into, pushed down into billing, and then invoices, right? Invoices mastered in your billing system and syncing that back up to Salesforce. So your rep, so your sales reps can see the outstanding balances of your accounts. As simple as that is and that model is just tremendously important as you think about data documentation and governance.

Chad Wonderling: That's, that's, that's great, Paul. And, and I'd say just flip back, just real quick one. I, I, you know, that, that's great. I would say, you know, even, even connecting this back to metrics, you know, a couple things while Paul is hitting data, I'm going to hit two other things, and, and they relate to data is one is, is we go back to executive alignment.

Executive alignment on strategy. But let's also, let's also be explicit about executive alignment on strategy and metrics, like what are those metrics that is, that the ELT is looking at on a periodic basis that because if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And so I think that's critical too. Executive alignment on, on metrics.

And then also too is, is, is the alignment and the importance of data at the ELT level in terms of the alignment, because as we can tell and as we're trying to, to kind of depict here is like, so much of this impacts sales, it impacts marketing. It's, I have conversations with, with our chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer nearly every day about this topic in a good way because we've all got to be all over it.

And then I think from the seat of the CFO, it's one of these things where, particularly with data, data's a great example, but in this context is ask yourself if nobody owns it, then my, my rule of thumb that I've learned is the CFO owns it.

So Paul spoke a little bit about and referred to, shared a little bit about you know, those those successful implementations, what they've, what they've been like or what they've looked like are some of the commonalities. And, and I think I shared at the outset that, that I was a customer of Zone of Zone for nearly three, four years before, before joining in my current capacity.

And we went through a big re, almost like a re-architect. And, and in, in real optimization of our entire quote to cash process. Okay? Because we knew within, within our finance team that we wanted our quote to cash at, at a, at in, in a prior life, prior to Zone. Of course we wanted that, but even still here at Zone, we want that to be a, a competitive advantage for us.

So just some examples as we went through and re-architected and optimized our quote to cash process obviously we worked very closely cross-functionally with revenue operations, all of our Salesforce administrators, sales team, marketing team, et cetera. But the, the investment that we put in and what we realized by reducing our DSO from 60 days down to 48 days, that's real cash. That was absolute real cash.

And then the other thing too is, is, you know, the thing that I feel like is often underrated that, that we experienced in our past was, as we, as we re-architected and optimized our our quote to cash process that actually improved, oddly enough, the customer experience with respect to they understood their invoice, they understood their invoice, they understood what they were being charged for, and then what we're able to do is while reducing customer invoicing questions by 85%, we're able to basically unleash some of that resource back within the business to drive more value from a finance side.

And, and then the other thing that we did that we realized, you know, often, you know, I referred to DSO, but often, you know, what is not considered within DSO is are you actually invoicing on a timely basis? And so what we are able to do is over 98% of our invoices were invoiced on the subscription start date. Which was a significant improvement from where we used to be.

We reduced invoice preparation time as we developed more automation. And of course it all started that automation was only successful through clean data. We reduced our invoice preparation time by over 80%.

And then interestingly enough, you know, there was one question in the poll, something about gap forecasting is what we were able to do through clean data, through re-architecting and optimizing our quote to cash process is that resulted in such clean data and at the, almost like at the subscription line level for what we were charging to our customers, that we used data from our ZoneBilling product to forecast future gap revenue. So the level of accuracy with our financial forecast, it increased. . It increased that allowed us to make better, more informed decisions.

So those are, those are just some, some kind of some experience points. But Jackie, we can transition off to the next one. And so while that definitely impacted cash flow, how we thought about the business on a marginal basis, but on a real basis there was also a level of efficiency. We experienced as well. And I think what we were able to do is we kind of took this concept of quote to cash. We broadened it out because it is so holistic and it involves so many different functions as we thought about it in terms of lead to cash. And then also how we thought about renewals from the process. How we thought about upgrades and what we were able to do from, because we had clean data, because we had the system and the automation to handle the upgrades, the upsells on our particular contracts. That then led to, of course, accurate invoices, but also a, an element of flexibility. Okay. And also scalability from an operational standpoint, very good. Next one, Jackie.

So Paul, I can, I can kind of, I can kind of kick off here is, and, and, and then, then you can, you can jump back in, in, in terms of in terms of BI, you know, I think the thing that, that is very critical. More, more broadly with respect to just lead to cash and that process, but really just around metrics is, you know, simplify, simplify, simplify. And from my seat as the CFO being in a software organization is. The slightest kind of impact and improvement within the metrics that we measure could have a big impact in terms of business performance. Okay. And how do we do that? By having visibility into those dashboards and those operating metrics that we view on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis.

Paul, anything you want to add here in terms of on a more technical level on BI and reporting?

Paul Morgis: One thing I, I will call out Chad, is a lot of my clients, you hear this coin of customer 360 or really understanding everything tied to the customer. And I think what BI really enables right, is to have that one view around the customer that we can stitch together data that all of these different functional teams are looking at into a single picture.

And I'm getting more, I'm in more and more conversations where, how do I get to a single customer, 360 view, that's a single source of truth that everyone in the organization is looking at in the same way. I think the challenges I often see is, for example, sales reporting a different number than finance and, and all these different reports that reports that come out and people are confused of what's the true number. And I think if you build bi in the right way, have a clear view of who, who your customers are, and then stitch together the transactional data around the customer, I think it really empowers to have a single source of truth around the customer and really conserve them in a much better way.

Chad Wonderling: Yeah, that's great. That's great because there's a lot of different elements and cuts in, in terms of how we can look at the business in terms of segmentation, customer size to make better and more informed decisions. That's great. Next Jackie.

And, and, and this is really just, just an example actually from, from, from one of the dashboards that we use here at Zone to kind of run our business from, from our reporting product and kind of all, all that, all that we're just trying to depict here is kind of simplify, simplify, and then just clear alignment on what are those, what are those key metrics.

Okay. And, and obviously for me, and for us, that's, that revolves around our investment thesis as, as we think about, as we think about driving our business.

Yeah. So a couple things path forward and, and Paul I'll let, I'll let you jump in, but, but I would say from, from you know, from, from my side, and Paul, I'll let you hammer on, on data and in some reporting is, I think the key thing is, is. Define what those key metrics are in your business. Okay. That drive the in invest investment thesis because it is our job as the CFO, from that, from the office of the CFO to, to drive performance within the business. Getting alignment on those KPIs, because we cannot improve what we don't measure. And then I think the other component of it is, like from our seat is. And the role that we play is in order, in order for the business to be repeatable, scalable, and profitable. That cannot happen in the most optimal way with a suboptimal lead to cash process.

Paul you can take the others.

Paul Morgis: Yeah, no, I mean, you hit it, hit on the head, Chad, there and I think to make that optimal process, right, you need the inputs to the system to produce the output that you're looking to get, right? So I just, to hammer the point home in, in a sense, data is the foundation.

Put that through the processes and the reporting tools you have, and then you start getting accurate reporting and KPIs to really drive the business, you know, business decision making.

Chad Wonderling: That's great folks. If you have any, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat.

Jackie Hertz: Chad, it looks like we did get one question. I think it was more along the lines on the contract side, but wanted to know in terms of what type of tools do you guys work with in terms of helping support contract changes?

Chad Wonderling: Yeah. So probably a few different elements of that, but I think the, the, the, so. Let, let me, let me first speak from that of a because I'm, what I'm hearing the question is, is is around like amendments. Amendments, amendments to contracts, and that can be the amendment process. And what that means within the, say, amend to cash process and amend to invoice process can be really, can be a big nightmare.

And I think what's interesting is, and this is me speaking from that of a customer and a, and a prior user particularly of the ZoneBilling product. Is that was the benefit- one of the quick benefits that we realized, I didn't mention it in, in, in some of those things that we had realized when we had made that investment is the way that the, that the billing that the ZoneBilling product is set up is it is able to handle and is flexible enough through the subscription records to handle contract amendments. Okay. Which is unlike many of the other products out there that allows and permits for more flexibility. That makes it a lot easier.

Jackie Hertz: Thanks Chad. And I think we might have another one, Elliot, can you see the chat, the Q&A chat?

Eliot Cohen: I can. Yeah. Someone has posted that, Chad, you mentioned that you had used the, the data from ZoneBilling and other operational reporting. I think the question is around, more specifically around the tooling and, and the, how you reported on that NetSuite native data that is extended and enhanced with the ZoneBilling product.

Can you touch on that briefly?

Chad Wonderling: Yeah. So I can tell you how we did it. I could tell you how we are doing it now at Zone, which are two different things. So, and then, then Elliot, you can guide me too if, if I, if I need to go deeper.

But you know, the way that we had previously handled kind of you know revenue by customer and kind of gap revenue to be recognized kind of a waterfall over time. It was basically a, just a, a simple data download basically out of NetSuite through the ZoneBilling product. So it was like nothing, nothing pretty. Some sort, some saved searches were, were, were created. It wasn't very pretty whatsoever.

However, now one thing that we're using here at Zone to help us is our Solution 7 product, connecting that into, into NetSuite, obviously, in in which it, which it is natively connect or is connected. Then, and then through the ZoneBilling products, then we can have it in Excel through an automatic connection rather than some, some saved searches that then create a lot of data manipulations. So it's through the Solution 7 product that we're doing it now today in terms of forecasting all of our gap revenue with the contracts that we do have on the books.

Eliot Cohen: That's great.

Paul, wondering if you have anything that you want to add on kind of the, the reporting front.

Paul Morgis: Yeah, I know, I know Zone has a, has a lot of great capabilities within the tool and, and then I'm not sure if everyone on the call has a ZoneBilling tool set, but you know, I've seen other tools that, like a BI or your FP&A automation tools that can support some of that financial forecasting capabilities that, that, with the right data structure and connections can sync your NetSuite data and ZoneBilling data too, to provide some of that financial forecasting capabilities as well.

Jackie Hertz: Awesome. And I think we have one I now am able to see. I think we have one last question at least in the chat. In terms of, you know, industries, any specific guidance relevant to certain industries? Or is this kind of more, you know, agno, industry agnostic as you talk about, you know, governance, best practices and system stacks?

Chad Wonderling: I'll, I'll say, I'll let Paul chime in too, but I think in terms of like best practices, data governance, I mean, that is definitely industry agnostic and I only say that because I've lived outside of the software industry and that, that that's true. That's true no matter. But, but Paul, I'll let you answer on, on tech stack and kind of what you've seen, and I know you're primarily tech, but you can shed some light on that.

Paul Morgis: Yeah. I mean, I, I think at the end, like an enterprise process, irrespective of the tech stack, you know, can change between what you're, what you're in, right? So tech stack primarily, you know, if you start going into like industrial products or completely different motion, but, but generally speaking there, what I've seen in the market is these tools are, are becoming more industry specific and providing the kind of needs and requirements that are, that are specific to the industry.

Because you think about, like in my, my specialties around tech is, is. The typical tech stack of your Salesforce and CPQ and integrating with zone, like a ZoneBilling product and an ERP. You know, these tools are designed to support the business model. And so when I think about, you know, best practice with tech, it's, you know, we want to get to a point of we're automating renewals, we're standardizing how we co-term contracts.

We have effective processes of how we do amendments and all that pushes down to, to billing for, for accurate billing, but also, you know, we have the right tools in our ERP to, to calculate rev rec appropriately with the 606 guidance. So I think there's, there's definitely different tech stacks I think, that align with specific industries, but ultimately, at the end of the day, you want, you want full alignment across your enterprise process, across the different functions, and then the tech to support it may vary across what industry you're in.

Jackie Hertz: Great. Thank you Chad. Thank you Paul. Thank you everybody for attending. Really appreciate you guys being here and hope everybody has a good rest of the day.

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