The State of Venture Capital & Private Equity with In/Organic Podcast's Christian Hassold

Summary

Podcast Summary: The CPG Guys – "The State of Venture Capital & Private Equity"

Guests: Christian Hassold (Resilient Edge Advisory, Host of In/Organic Podcast)
Hosts: Peter V.S. Bond & Sri Rajagopalan
Date: April 15, 2026
Setting: Live at ShopTalk, Las Vegas

Episode Overview

In this in-depth conversation, Peter and Sri are joined by M&A expert and In/Organic podcast host Christian Hassold to dive into the current state and strategic nuances of venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE)-backed M&A within the commerce, retail, and digital services space. Together, they explore the philosophical, operational, and economic drivers behind acquisitions, the differences between strategic and tuck-in deals, how deals are valued and executed, and the game-changing role of artificial intelligence (AI) across the M&A lifecycle.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Distinguishing M&A Types: Transformational vs. Tuck-In ([05:41])

• Transformational Deals:
  Christian introduces the concept of a "Buy Box," explaining it as a framework used to evaluate whether a target company is a transformational opportunity or more of a tuck-in for incremental capability.

  "The buy box is something that I bring to a leadership team and the investors and say, what are the problems that you're trying to solve?" – Christian, [06:14]

• Examples:

  • Transformational: SPINS' acquisition of Micmac (brought new capabilities, revenue scale, and strong leadership) [07:42]
  • Tuck-Ins: Mountain Gate’s quick add-ons to Podean (smaller additions, not transformative but new customers/capabilities) [09:19]

• Key Metric: Transformational deals have greater "blast radius"—large customer impact, new revenue streams, or leadership injection.

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2. What Makes a Target Attractive to PE vs. Strategic Buyers ([12:20])

• VC vs. PE Priorities:

  • "VCs invest in growth... PEs invest in growth but they don't need a rocket ship." – Christian, [13:22]
  • VCs look for high growth and big returns (10x); PEs want stable, scalable platforms with risk-adjusted returns for LPs.
  • Timeline for exit/divestiture is much shorter for VC than PE ([14:10])

• Cultural Fit Matters:
  Founders/operators should evaluate potential buyers as much as they are being evaluated ([15:12])

  "This is a culture match... Do I feel like this firm is going to support me in taking this enterprise to where I want to?" – Christian, [14:55]

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3. Valuation Levers & Deal Structure ([18:01])

• Key Levers for Digital Agencies/B2B SaaS:

  • Continued growth, recurring revenue, low churn, profitability ([18:38])
  • Client concentration is a big risk—ideally no one client >10% of revenue ([19:42])

    "The ideal client concentration is no more than a single digit up to 10%." – Christian, [19:42]

• Earn-outs & Incentives:

  • Useful for bridging valuation gaps or ensuring founders/key teams stay post-acquisition ([20:48])
  • Retention incentives work around 50% of the time ([24:32])

    "There's a stat out there that KPMG put out, it's like 50, 50, basically 50% of the time." – Christian, [24:32]

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4. Due Diligence & The "Special Sauce" ([25:04])

• Must-Haves in Diligence:
  • Own IP and entity rights, robust tech stack, diversified client base.
  • Importance of company “special sauce”—strong community (e.g., Salsify’s Digital Shelf Institute) or talented team ([26:30])

    "The special sauce doesn't always come out across that loud and clear. But there is a special sauce, right." – Christian, [28:15]

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5. Post-Acquisition Integration Priorities ([29:39])

• Deal Thesis:
  Define “things that must be true for this deal to make sense” by third quarter of diligence.

  • Cross-sell/upsell opportunities (e.g., $25M of Salsify into SAP’s base if SAP bought Salsify)
  • "Do no harm": Preserve what makes the acquired company unique until planned integration ([30:48])

    "Do no harm... Don't try and change the company so much that it no longer looks or feels like what it was." – Christian, [31:00]

• Communication is Key:
  Keep all stakeholders—employees, investors, clients—aligned and informed ([32:52])

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6. AI & Data’s Role in M&A and Industry Evolution ([34:02])

• Universal Questions Now Asked:

  • How can AI help scale this business?
  • How could AI disrupt/destroy this business? ([34:02])

• Effective AI Implementation:

  • AI shines when automating end-to-end, highly dynamic tasks.
  • Avoid “AI washing” (claims of AI without true automation).

  "If you've got AI in place that's in service of automation... then you've got some magic. If it's AI in service of workflow, all you've got is a cascade that will eventually fall apart." – Christian (drawing from Chamath Palihapitiya), [41:07]

• Adoption Findings:
  Shoppers expect brands to adopt AI for convenience—brands not doing so risk irrelevance ([38:53], [39:20])

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7. Operational Metrics & Value Creation ([43:29])

• For SaaS:
  Growth rate, net retention, gross retention, profitability (EBITDA), consistency over two-year period.
• For Agencies:
  Client repeat investment, contract renewals, margin per client, up-sell ability ("land & expand") ([45:41])

  "How frequently do you land a customer that's $100,000 a year and turn them into a $500,000 a year customer." – Christian, [45:41]

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8. Market Conditions: The "SaaSpocalypse" & Funding Environment ([46:21])

• Deal volumes are down, dollars invested are up; only the best deals (larger, transformative) are getting done.
• Early-stage investment remains healthy, but with meticulous diligence.
• Exit climate tight, partly due to slow IPO market—rippling effect on VC, PE behavior ([47:30])
• "We're in the middle of a SaaS apocalypse right now... it's a narrative that AI is going to eat the world." – Christian, [49:02]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Evaluating M&A Impact:
  "The one distinguishing difference between a strategic add on and a strategic purchase and an add on is really the blast radius that impact that it has on the business." – Christian, [07:42]

• On Earn-outs:
  "Earnouts are built fundamentally to solve two problems... The first problem usually is a valuation gap... The second, to encourage founders to stay." – Christian, [20:48]

• On Founder's Expectations:
  "What you want and what your company is worth can be very different." – Peter, [24:06]

• On the AI Hype:
  "It's a narrative that AI is going to eat the world. And if you have a SaaS business, you should just assume that whatever you built is completely indefensible." – Christian, [49:02]

• On the Power of Community:
  "The Digital Shelf Institute... that has a value that investors will say and look at and what is the impact of that community? It's customer retention. It's repeat customers." – Christian, [27:36]

• On Post-Acquisition:
  "You need to make sure that you're communicating the things that are working, the things that aren't working. You're operating from a scorecard..." – Christian, [33:00]

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Key Timestamps

• 05:41 – Buy Box and deal type philosophy
• 07:42 – Transformational vs. tuck-in example (SPINS/Micmac)
• 12:20 – What attracts PE/VC vs. strategic buyers
• 18:01 – Valuation levers and earn-outs
• 25:04 – Diligence checklist & special sauce
• 29:39 – Post-acquisition integration priorities
• 34:02 – AI's duality in M&A (help vs. disrupt)
• 41:07 – Good/bad bets with AI in early-stage M&A
• 43:29 – Value creation and operational metrics
• 46:21 – Market conditions and the "SaaSpocalypse"
• 49:02 – The narrative of AI disrupting SaaS businesses

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Final Takeaways from the Hosts

• Peter:
  "You have to understand who's looking to do the acquisition and what their ultimate objective is... It all plays into thinking about who you approach to invest, who's going to drive the most growth and who's going to give you what you want as a founder of a company." [51:24]

• Sri:
  "That's my biggest mine is straightforward Peter. It's one word – Apocalypse... I love it." [52:33]

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Summary

This episode offers an insightful and candid look at how deals are sourced, evaluated, and owned in modern commerce, highlighting the growing importance of AI both as a tool and as a risk, the resurgence of operational rigor (client retention, profitability), the endurance of founder and team contributions, and how community building can create real, defensible value. Christian’s practical wisdom—from “Buy Box” frameworks to the dangers (and opportunity) of the “SaaSpocalypse”—will resonate with founders, operators, and M&A professionals alike.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm Christian Hasselt, host of the Inorganic podcast and M and a advisor to VC and PE backed companies in commerce, retail and digital services. And you're listening to the CPG Guys.

[B]

Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast. Set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts Sree Rajagopelan and Peter Vs Vaughn explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.

[C]

Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast. We're live at Shop Talk in Las Vegas in our usual suite. Yeah, it's literally the same suite year over year, conference over conference. That's bizarre, Peter. Doing our usual favorite programming, making podcasts of course with industry's key leaders. And I'm Sree, your co host, CRO of co founder and co founder of Think Blue Consulting, your trusted partner in your omnichannel development journey. Get in touch with me at sri@thinkblueconsulting. Now please do listen to my older daughter's [e-mail]. we're going to be again on the road, Arizona going for an NBA thing in India. And follow Lara Raj. My younger daughter is a member of the world's fastest growing global girls group, Katsai, who's just actually come back from Lollapalooza South America. And we're headed to Coachella shortly. And I'm joined today by my co host and co founder Peter V. S Bahn, who moonlights his head of industry and climbing agent at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. Peter, welcome to Viva Las Vegas. How you doing, man? It feels like we were just here.

[B]

It always feels like we're just here because usually we are just here. We go back and forth to our homes. This is our second home. We're gonna have to talk to the accountant about this. But maybe we need an official Vegas residence for the CPT guys. I think we'll get some pushback on that, but it, I don't know, it's

[C]

six or eight times a year.

[B]

We'll get to that point three where we may actually need a residence.

[C]

Now that said, Peter, this is a very important week. Yes. Laura's coming back home from South Americ. It's an important week in the Raj family. But what's happening nationally that's important this

[B]

week that's going on? We've got shop talks.

[C]

No, no, no, no, no. What's happening nationally this week?

[B]

Baseball.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Well, we've got open.

[B]

We've got opening day coming up. So The Dodgers are going for their three peat SRI three in a row and based upon who they signed in the off season, it's entirely possible they will buy their way to a third World Series final.

[C]

Yeah, it's like the Yankees of the late 90s. I mean you just get the highest payroll, pay the payroll tax over 200 million and then just buy the championship.

[B]

Shameless. Shameless. But if you look at what the valuation of the franchise is, it's well

[C]

into the billions of dollars finally took over. Yeah, somehow some of the Yankees and the Cowboys have them all beat, which I still don't understand. Giants are up there as well, but story for another day. Woeful story for you and me on the Giants. So folks, make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform. We can get our latest episodes and go back to consume some of the 580 plus episodes we've already published. So here we go. Let's get into a fabulous conversation on M and A with an advisor to the industry. He's also host of the podcast called Inorganic, focused on this very topic. The last decade has seen quite a bit of tech companies focused on M and A exits, to say the least. A lot have actually done pretty well and some of them have been featured on the CPG guys.

[B]

Go figure.

[C]

So let's get behind the curtain and understand the why behind so many successful exits. Where the strategic M and A landscape sits today. You know, last year you and I were at Cagny. The only word that came out of every CEO's mouth. Thirty of them was M and A. M and a. M and A. That's how I'm going to buy my way out of this volume challenge. He's also a serial founder, having built and successfully exited three companies over 20 years. Led 12 plus multimillion dollar inorganic transactions across SaaS agency sectors, including most recently Wepromote's acquisition of Clio Award winning giant Spoon. Other deals include Commerce IQ's acquisition of E Fundamentals and IdeaClick. IdeaClick is one we'd love to chat about. Prior to that, working on Salsify's acquisition of Alchemix, spending an enormous amount of time with AI lately, Claude Code and openclaw specifically. So all topics we would love to cover on the CPG guys, I think we've baited them pretty well here to show up. To break it all down, we're thrilled to welcome Christian Hassold from Resilient Edge Advisory and of course the Inorganic Podcast. Welcome to the CPG guys. How you doing, man?

[A]

I'm doing great. Thank you, SRI and Peter for having me on. Really excited to be here, enjoying the

[C]

dry weather in Vegas, yet I am very happy.

[A]

It was a great transition from Boston, which was cold and wet and sleety when I left.

[B]

Hopefully the TSA line wasn't too encumbering for you. It wasn't where I was in Hartford,

[A]

three minutes and two.

[B]

Yeah, I was 90 seconds through. Thank God I wasn't in Atlanta. I heard some horror stories.

[C]

Yeah, no issues in LA either. So sometimes I wonder whether it's theater in Atlanta, but it seems real theater.

[B]

Yeah, it sure does.

[C]

All right, so in the digital line, notes of this episode will of course include links to Christian's LinkedIn profile, company, corporate websites, the podcast, all of you, and the podcast for all our listeners to access while we go on with our conversation. So I'm gonna jump right into it. And of course, Christian, very predictable. First question is gonna be about M and A philosophy and deal discipline. So you build a track record in private equity and growth focused M and A. Specifically in the digital services space. We rattled out a few of those names. How do you distinguish between a nice to have kind of tuck in acquisition and a transformational growth enabling deal in the lower middle markets?

[A]

I think that, you know, we've seen in this, this industry we'll call this kind of commerce, retail, digital media marketing services. We've seen some very interesting transformational. I can point to Syndico as a business that has not only done transformational, they've also done that add on. If you look at like how these things work, it starts with what's called a buy box. And the buy box is something that I bring to a leadership team and the investors and say, what is the problems that you're trying to solve?

[B]

This is different than the buy box on. On a pdp, different than a buy box. But it's still very important.

[A]

It is still very important. And the buy box contains things like, you know, what is the size of the team that you want to acquire? It usually has a correlation to the revenues of the business. What are the capabilities that you're trying to go get? Do you want to enhance capabilities that you already have in house? So for example, let's say you're an agency and you're doing retail media, but you're not really doing great retail media. There's like way more you could be doing. Maybe you want to add on a team that is much more specialized beyond just Amazon into Walmart or other retailers. That would be a capability add on. Another thing that you might do is say I want to get a whole new type of customer that I haven't had before. Maybe today you have CPG customers, but you want hardline customers, you want more consumer electronic customers. So there's another, it's industry expansion and then another lens of the buy box can be geographic. So all of these things before you get into the tactic of strategic or add on, start with that buy box. Now the one distinguishing difference between a strategic add on and a strategic purchase and an add on is really the blast radius that impact that it has on the business. And we can do two very relevant comparisons right now. So late last year Spins acquired Micmac. That in my view is a strategic acquisition. SPINS didn't have where to buy. SPINS didn't have that.

[B]

Spins had Destiny, which was its product locator.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But it wasn't quite as powerful as what they needed because they were reliant on third party data sources from Iri Sarkana and Nielsen IQ and that had typically a four to eight week lag.

[A]

I love industry inside.

[B]

I know he's a data. This is my, this is my wheelhouse.

[C]

How do you come from this industry?

[A]

I didn't want to go that far into the.

[B]

No, but it's important to talk about it like. But people in the age where you need, you want to go to a store, you need to know that product actually is in inventory.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And that's what Mic Mac brought to the equation.

[A]

Exactly. But they brought something else.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

They brought revenue scale and they brought an incredible founder CEO that is a force in of themselves and you start putting together the pieces of solving a capability gap, getting great leadership which usually brings along with a great team and great revenue scale. And now you have the makings of a strategic add on. It just, it just the buy box becomes much more stronger. You're also getting in that more shared wallet from customers that you already have, plus probably some customers you didn't have before. And so that really turns something into strategic. Well, what does a add on look like in contrast comparison? Mountain Gate in the late summer took an interest in Podean. They backed Podian and Podean is run by Travis and Mark. They're a great founder team. And almost immediately as they backed them, they did two tuck in acquisitions. One, they did Commerce Canal of New York City which is a fairly small retail media agency. But it had new customers that Podian wasn't servicing already and they had actually some capabilities around A marketplace for licensed services. It wasn't something that Podian was into, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a large team and it wasn't Ryan is a great founder, but it wasn't like some transformational founder that's been noticed and had the spotlight in the industry and really is going to have that magnitude with those, those A grade customers who want to go in and spend big dollars. So that makes it more of a tuck in. Another tuck in scenario with Podian was the acquisition of Ad Advance. Great team based out of Minnesota. They had some great technology around retail media and a category of customers that was, you know, nice, a nice ad for Podian, but it wasn't a really large business. So it didn't have that transformational element of a real big add on of a large customer base, large revenue scale. So that's really the difference between the two. And so when I work with private equity and VC backed investors, it all starts with that buy box and how you fill in that buy box and then say what do I want to go get to achieve these goals of growth and revenue add and capabilities? What kind of blast radius can I create and do I want to create? Sometimes you're not trying to do something transformational.

[B]

Great, great. So in the lower dimenal market, what characteristics make an agency or SaaS target ultimately attractive to private equity buyers versus an actual strategic acquirer? Are there red flags you consistently see. At the CPG guys? We're excited to partner with today's sponsor, Confido. Think about how many different workflows your team is managing right now. Your sales team is planning promotions in a spreadsheet. Your finance team is manually managing deductions from a dozen different retailer portals. Your ops team is building forecasts in a totally separate tool. When something changes, a promotion shifts. A big deduction comes in. Nobody finds out until it's already a problem. Most CPG brands are running these processes in silos and the cost isn't just time, it's the decisions that don't get made or get made on bad information. Confido is the end to end platform for CPG operations built specifically for for brands to run all of it in one place. Trade promotion, management deductions, disputes, sales forecasting, demand planning and retail analytics. When your trade events are connected to your forecasts and your deductions are automatically matched to your promotions, your whole team is finally working from the same picture. Over 200 CPG brands including Olipop, Bear Bells and Simple Mills are already use it. Go to confidotech.com cpg guys to learn more, that's confidotech.com cpg guys.

[A]

Yeah, there's a couple of questions there. First of all, I would point out that a strategic and PE backed are not mutually exclusive.

[B]

So it can be both.

[A]

Yeah. So a strategic can be PE backed, a strategic can be public. So I only thread that needle to point out that if you go down to the floor right now you're going to see more than 600 companies and a few trillion dollars in capital laid out across a lot of those different enterprises. There is a combination of public strategic dollars down on that floor. There's a large presence of private equity backed and a decent presence of VC backed.

[C]

It's fabulous to hear a perspective like this. Right. So when you and I go to the floor, we're looking for capability. We're also, there's a lot of our partners also on that floor. Right. It's really, our conversation is about capability. What do you do for the industry? You are wearing a lens of what's the market cap, what's the strategic value, the tuck in acquisition that we discussed. Completely different lens.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And that, and I think that honey

[C]

part is regardless, they have to impress you, they have to impress us.

[A]

There is, there's a, I think that strategic PE buyers, they have kind of different criteria. I will say one thing, right? Like if you break it down to the kind of a really simple thing, VCs invest in growth. It's real simple. They invest in growth, PEs invest in growth. But they don't need a rocket ship. What they want to know is that they're acquiring a platform that they can do great things with. And remember their LPs are pension funds. They are, you know, big difference, big difference in what a pension fund is looking for in terms of returns versus VC investors that want like 10x or versus a public market where their PE ratio on, you know, forward looking earnings could be 15, 20, 25.

[C]

Completely different.

[B]

The timeline for the horizon of divestiture sell off is fundamentally different. Right. Venture capitalists have a certain number of years that they're trying to figure out how they scale this company and then sell it off versus private equity can be very different in terms of what they're, their timeline is some of them want to hold onto it, some of them just want to flip the thing in two years after they've been able to clean up the books. Like there's probably a lot that goes into it and I think it's probably is it Important. Here's the follow up. Is it important for companies that are considering investment by a PE firm to really understand what that PE firm's overall strategy is to help them understand what's ultimately going to be the experience for having them as owners in the company?

[A]

Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a. This is a culture match. This is a economic values match. This is. Do I feel like this firm is going to support me in taking this enterprise to where I want to?

[B]

It's not just about the money. It is very much about what's going to happen after the money's in the door.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So wait, so that means founders are also evaluating who's buying them.

[A]

Founders are operators. So if you're scaled and you're. You're selling to. Let's just use the Podian example. Podean had their choice of potential acquirers. They had strategic acquirers coming after them and they had private equity. Mountain Gate came to them with a real clear story. And I'm not speaking with firsthand knowledge. I'm speaking with sort of extrapolated knowledge. Mountain Gate has a reputation for acquiring and investing in digital agencies of various kinds. B2B experiential marketing space covered. And they have established a reputation for how they operate. Some operators are very attracted to just sort of knowing the kind of partners that they're going to have in the business. So it is very much the operators picking. In some cases, a business may be a little bit further along and have professional management. The founders are kind of working in the, you know, chief strategy office or something like that. And then. And then it's. Then it's a trade between 2 pes where at 1. One point or another usually.

[C]

Your point, though.

[A]

See what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

[C]

But I got an interesting one for you. Mountain Gate.

[B]

Right.

[C]

The way they're operating, don't you think they'll need a podcast mechanism that reaches the entire CPG industry and retail?

[A]

I will tell you that.

[C]

And I wonder if you know any of those, because all of those acquisitions they're doing, they need clients to give that some shots. Anyway, in any event, we're moving on.

[A]

You think you're shameless?

[B]

We are shameless. And proudly so.

[C]

What you're talking about the cbq?

[B]

I don't think who.

[C]

I had no idea. That's what we get every time somebody sees us for the first time.

[B]

Much taller than I imagine. Like we're on a podcast. How do you imagine how tall we are?

[C]

We do tell them we have perfect podcast faces though.

[B]

We do have. We do have Pod Faces for podcasting.

[A]

I will just no joke on the point you made, which I know was kind of a pun. One of the best things I ever did was start be an organic podcast.

[C]

Oh, we couldn't agree more.

[B]

I think you probably agree that as the host, nobody learns more from the people that you interview than you as the host.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Because we get to ask the questions that we want answers to.

[A]

It was an audit mechanism. It forced me to audit my own work and made me better.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

And then everyone. Then it was making everyone else better because they were listening, like, oh, wow, I loved how you taught me on. So I think, you know, it's hard work putting ourselves out there and preparing and doing this.

[B]

You can't phone it in. If you want your podcast to resonate, you have to do the hard work. The nicest thing, and I bet you hear this from your guests is when they look at the questions that we're going to ask, like, wow, you actually put some thought into this. Like, yeah, we do. We, we want.

[C]

Christian says that afterwards we are only like 20% in, so I'll move on. And the next one I have actually is on valuation and deal structure for growth.

[A]

Right.

[C]

So you've given us a little bit of the highlights of what's happening in the industry, how they're looking at the industry, but what valuation levers. So I'm getting a little bit more myopic now and tactical. What levers tend to move the needle most for digital agencies and B2B SaaS and private equity? What scenarios do earnouts or seller financing play a critical role in aligning incentives? Post that magic moment of close.

[A]

Yeah, well, there are two pieces there. I'll, I'll sort of keep the first one simple because I think once you hear it, it's. It kind of lines up. The end of the day, you're acquiring a business. You want to see continued growth in that business.

[C]

Yep, yep.

[A]

You want to see the clients are

[C]

sticking around recurring revenue.

[B]

So low churn. Low churn and high acquisition.

[A]

If you're a software based business, then you want retention rate to be, you know, 110% growth because that, that, that

[B]

recurrent recurring revenue stream grows retention higher than my. It's a heck of a lot easier to grow when you have very low churn.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And I would say that the other metric in software is more. More today so than any time is profitability, it's kind of become a thing where profitability really matters more. So because of how competitive the markets are in services, there's there's this element of client concentration which is a little bit more pronounced. It's not because it's not real in software, but because it tends to be a feature concentration.

[B]

What, what do you mean by client concentration?

[A]

A single client is. Represents 40% of the revenue.

[B]

That is, that is a challenge because it doesn't basically hedge you against.

[C]

Yeah, one client leave is 40. That magic number is 20. That is like, is there a number or is it determined on a case by case basis?

[A]

The ideal client concentration is no more than, you know, a single digit up to 10%. Because the practical reality is, is if you're running a great business, but you're in the, you know, sub 20 million range, there's going to be a client that's going to be like the one and a half to $2 million client.

[B]

Because it just go back to some case studies from business school. I remember one involved, I think Verizon at the time. And this one company, they were their, their sole biggest client, the 80% of revenue. And the problem is, is that Verizon understood that and they used their, that, that power to basically starve the company. They wanted that company. They really wanted actually to acquire it. And they just starve them until they would just sell out at pennies on the dollars and then they did all the investment, ramped up the business. So yeah, you as a. That client concentration puts you at peril. If one customer is too important in the portfolio.

[A]

The one thing that you asked. So just leading from, you know, growth targets, client retention, recurring revenue. We were talking, you were asking the question about earnouts. Earnouts are built fundamentally to solve two problems.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

The first problem usually is a valuation gap. The seller wants a hundred million and the buyer is willing to pay 85 million. Right. And they just want to figure out how to get the deal done. So they set up some targets that give the seller the opportunity to capture that hundred if to get there. If they achieve certain metrics that are mutually agreed upon. Earnouts are also sometimes a way to say, hey, I, I just really want you to be here. So if you're here in year one, you get 25% of this bonus pool. If you're here in year two, you get.

[C]

That's more the team and the people and keeping the founders, that kind of stuff.

[A]

Yeah, but it, but it can be very heavily concentrated on the founders because again, a lot of these, a lot of agency businesses especially are very much about the relationships that the founders have with the client. Magic sauce?

[C]

You bet.

[A]

When I Acquired giant spoon like the magic sauce of those three founders and their next level leadership team was very, very critical to the deal thesis. And so you want to put incentives in place to keep them there. And you know, whether, whether it's Podean acquiring additional agencies and wanting to keep that talent or spins acquiring Rachel Tippograph and her team, like you want to know those people are not going to go be gone. Actually, we pick a pack for you, Melissa Burdick. What would PACU be without Melissa Burdick?

[C]

Excellent. Excellent.

[B]

It would be a shell of itself.

[C]

Wouldn't exist.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, you want to just keep them delighted.

[C]

But it's a major problem for pacvu.

[B]

It's a major problem for Melissa if she wants to retire.

[C]

Yeah. We were chatting with Melissa what day? I think Monday morning I was chatting with her and yesterday and I just reiterated that I said when you leave

[A]

in pacview and she can't, Melissa's having too much fun. Yeah.

[B]

I do have a question for you on what you talked about is you made mention of when the acquiring company has a certain valuation and the founder has a different. When you see a significant gap, are there particular reasons that the gap is that is that it's very big. That big. Is it oftentimes to some degree the bravado of the founder thinking that it is truly worth that and is it rational? Because my impression is if you're on a PE or a venture capital firm, you have a particularly very clear methodology of how you do things and you cut through all the fluff. Right. Versus founders tend to be. Unless you're a serial entrepreneur where you're always doing this. Sometimes if it's your first time, first rodeo, you have an inflated value of what you think your company is based upon. Ego. What, what. What's kind of like the driving force behind some of these massive gaps?

[A]

Well, look, ego is part of it, but what is that ego driven by? I've spent 10 years building this thing, okay. I've taken on a quarter of a million dollars.

[B]

Not to say it's not legitimate, it just.

[A]

Yeah, but it's like I've taken on debt. I've mortgaged half of my house. I've made a lot of sacrifices in my life and I decided in my mind that when I sell this, this is what I'm gonna get, this number. And by the way, they're. They're very, they're like, okay, I need to get 40 million because, you know, 40% is going to be taxed.

[B]

Here's my angel investors, here's my current.

[A]

Here's that. And they, they get down to the exact number they want and so it is usually back in.

[B]

That's what they need to make it worth their while. But that may not necessarily be reflective of what the market conditions say that this company is actually worth. It's what they want. But what you want and what your company is worth can be very different.

[A]

Exactly. And a lot of deals don't get done because value.

[C]

The one follow up I wanted to ask on that is how often do you see this stay incentive work out versus not work out.

[A]

You know, there's a stat out there that KPMG put out, it's like 50, 50, basically 50% of the time. Part of it is by design and part of it is just kind of the way it happens.

[B]

So let's talk a little bit about this evaluation process.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

What's a must have due diligence checklist for in this space? You know, around tech stack, client concentration, monetization models, you know, recurring revenue quality. And are there any surprises that you often encounter as you're going through that checklist?

[A]

Yeah, well, they're always, there are always some kinds of surprises. They just, they come in different places. The due diligence checklist is probably one of the most irritating parts of the process for host sides because it's like 150 very specific asks, half of which are drafted by lawyers and accountants and doctors. Oh yeah. I mean it's, you know, there's just for a lot of them are required. They're very specific requestion questions that are

[B]

not like a survey monkey required. I mean if you're Gonna put down

[C]

30, 40, 50, $100 million to acquire something, it sounds reasonable to ask those questions.

[B]

Yeah. You're actually going to talk to some of their customers. You're going to go beyond just they give you a printed out document.

[A]

Yeah, that's one element. But I'll give you a really simple one. Do you own the full right and title to the company?

[C]

That's a good one.

[A]

To a seller it might be. Why in the hell are you asking me that question?

[B]

Do you have the ip?

[A]

But. But yeah. Do you have the ip? But if you don't, if something goes wrong and you didn't ask that question and they didn't state on the record the answer.

[B]

Oh yeah. 6% of the company is online.

[A]

You never asked me that question. You didn't ask me about. My mom owns 25%.

[C]

Totally get that.

[A]

So a lot of.

[C]

Did you guys have a trademark?

[B]

Peter, are now we have a registered trademark. So we are. We are legit. We're too legit to quit.

[C]

So 150.

[B]

It's on the suitcase.

[A]

I accidentally fell us into a rabble. But what I said you. What you were fundamentally asking was the right question, which is, you know, when you. When you kind of put it all together, what are the must haves? Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Everything at the top that buy box always has like a special sauce.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

I think about. I think about our friends at Salsify.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What is the special sauce of Salsify?

[B]

Okay.

[A]

It's not the product. What do you think it is, Peter?

[B]

Well, is it the second most famous bald descendant of Cuban ancestors as their chief marketing officer, as you like to tell himself?

[C]

No. But he did say the team matters. So you can't rule that out.

[A]

Yeah, Here, here, here's what it is.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The Digital Shelf Institute is like we love the dsi.

[B]

What they do in terms of creating knowledge, thought leadership for the industry. It is. Stands apart.

[C]

I really want to hear this out. So you're saying the Digital Self Institute is an important part of Salsify.

[A]

Absolutely.

[C]

From an acquisition standpoint.

[A]

You know how many people work so hard to try and build customer community and fail and they're active. They've built a conference.

[C]

That's our friend Lauren.

[B]

Lauren Levak. Gilbert.

[A]

Peter Crosby is a part of that secret sauce. They created what is now a conference that you must go to if you are in this industry.

[B]

The Digital Shelf Summit.

[A]

The Digital Self Summit. People have to. And the slack community and everything that goes around it that has a value that investors will say and look at and what is the impact of that community? It's customer retention. It's repeat customers. When I help you get a job somewhere else because of this community, are you going to come back and give us a little bit more consideration, Christian?

[C]

Are we therefore unofficially saying Lauren Levak deserves a raise?

[B]

I think that might be what it might be. It's an unspoken but clearly obvious Rob Piyush. Are you listening? Are you listening to us?

[A]

But I think I. Yeah, that's the special sauce, right? The special sauce doesn't always come out across that loud and clear. But there is a special sauce, right. For Giant Spoon. The acquisition idea did last year with W promote the secret sauce was their creative was incredible. Their campaigns were powerful. I mean, one of their commercials made me like well up because they were so well done. You know, talking about the history of GE as a company. So there's a special sauce, but that backs into Leadership in people, financial profile, customers. It all kind of works through. Again, it's back to the buy box. It's a very consistent story all across. So that's really kind of how you think about evaluating these businesses and running the diligence. Going back to that, you know, kind of to that why story.

[B]

Great.

[C]

Fascinating listening to this now. Company gets acquired, it's post acquisition at this point. And so after closing, what what are the top priorities to de risk the integration, bringing the new acquisition in. And then the investors are going to want to see accelerated value because after all that's what they bought the company for. And so what are those top three priorities to de risk integration and accelerate value realization in a digital agency or a B2B SaaS platform?

[A]

Every deal I run lands on a deal thesis, right about what I would call the third quarter of the diligence buying process. The deal thesis is things that must be true for this deal to make sense.

[C]

Got it.

[A]

We will cross. Let's just stick with Salsify because it's. Everyone knows what Salsify is. Let's just say that, let's say that SAP buys Salsify for $2 billion because Hybris has been migrated out and they need a middle market PIM solution. First thing that SAP that adds up, the first thing that SAP is going to say is we want to install $25 million of Salsify into our middle market base. That's going to be deal thesis number one. Okay, deal thesis number two.

[C]

And you're the one usually preparing this and kind of hinting to it. Or do they come to you and say I've got a deal thesis. What do you think?

[A]

If, if I'm the buyer, if I'm working for the buyer, my job is to make sure that there is a deal thesis.

[B]

I don't go find.

[A]

My job is to make sure that these things happen.

[C]

So you evaluate and then come up with what it is like at the

[A]

end of the day, you, I, I work for you guys. I work for you. You guys are the CEOs of the podcast, the CPG guys. And I am going facilitate you defining what that deal thesis is going to be. I will tell you whether I think that deal thesis is going to make sense or hold and there's going to be people who will model it. But that's how it works. So there's cross sell, there's upsell, but as a part of that, one of the very, very important things is like next to the deal thesis, do no harm. What does that mean don't break things? Don't try and change the company so much that it no longer looks or feels like what it was.

[B]

Change the name, change the product assortment.

[C]

In the B2B and digital SaaS space, does it happen as much as in the brand space where they acquire, acquire a company, new brand comes in, they want to merge it and integrate into the old school way of running a very large corporation and usually they screw it up. Do you see that in the software space?

[A]

It does.

[C]

When you say do no harm. That's exactly what it is.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a really interesting lesson. If you look at how Syndigo retained a lot of brand names for a period of time and it was kind of confusing. Like, you know, what were all the assets that were in there? And they eventually kind of consolidated the portfolio. There's a recipe, there's a playbook to run for acquiring a business, maintaining the semblance of the brand primarily for customer recognition and for demand generation that that business might be creating. But one point or another becomes untenable to have all of these names. I mean, look at wpp. They are finally reacting to the pain of years and years of add ons with like 900 different names under their portfolio. They're finally consolidating and simplifying their business in a way that the market can say, you know, what is WPP stand for? So there is rationale and there's a reason to do it. It's a question about the timeframe and how you mutually align with the leadership of the buyer and the seller to kind of get it there. And I think that leads to the last sort of key ingredient, which is communication. You need to make sure that you're communicating the things that are working, the things that aren't working. You're operating from a scorecard to what

[B]

to which constituents you're communicating. Everybody. The employees, the investors, the clients, all of that.

[A]

Yeah. It's an entire funnel of communication and that communication is adapted for the audience.

[C]

Okay, fascinating. A reminder to audience. We're speaking today with Christian Hassell from Resilient Edge M and A Advisors and host of the Inorganic podcast.

[B]

So Christian, how do you structure cross functional governance, sales, product finance and ops in a PE back deal to ensure that there is rapid, disciplined execution?

[A]

Can I suggest we skip these two questions?

[C]

Yeah, we can skip.

[A]

I think we should go to AI and data. I think these are, I think people

[B]

like, I'm going to scrap the last one. We'll go to the fun. So Christian, how do you evaluate and incorporate artificial intelligence and data driven product improvements in these companies to really unlock the scale potential? And are there specific bets you avoid in early stage growth scenarios?

[A]

This is a great question. It's obviously a very hot question. What is the real possibilities of AI? Do we really know what they are? Today I've seen every investor look at every single deal and ask two questions or how will AI help this business? And what will AI do to disrupt this business model and completely erode the revenue? So every investor is looking at every deal.

[C]

I think both are a real possibility. The second one especially.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I think no one has it safe.

[A]

No one. No one's safe right now.

[C]

Unless you are the writer of Claude or Google Gemini.

[B]

Unless you're It's a nano banana. I'm still trying to figure out where they came up with that name.

[A]

But anyhow, I think that, you know, the one thing that I've seen is a pattern. Look, we still are so early that we don't have the answers to all the questions. But what we do know is within a software company or within a marketing agency, a services business, AI can be incredibly impactful if it has incredibly clear instruction on what it's supposed to do. Examples of the end state work it's supposed to produce as an outcome. Am someone overseeing the movement of the agent through the workflow. And I've, I've experienced this personally. Right. I, I started spending time about three months ago on OpenClaw which is an open source AI platform that you can basically load on your own Mac studio and run with. You know, it's an. This is a great example I think because it just really simplifies things. What do we all want? We all want a 247365 executive assistant. Can you go out on the web?

[C]

Couldn't agree more.

[A]

Can you go out on the web and just look at all of the job descriptions of an executive assistant and why can't you just tell a model I want a virtual executive assistant who will handle all of my calendar full stop. You can't do it. You actually have to go through the nuanced use cases of what you know, knowing it needs to be able to know deterministically how to respond to different

[C]

scenarios and know you which happens over

[A]

time and no, you, you can give the agent a personality and you can tell them what your personality is but then you also establish patterns. I sent Peter an email and said hey Peter, love talking to you at Shop Talk. Can we get together for an hour and have a follow up on that conversation that is different from me saying, hey, Jessica, that's the name of my agent, copying her into an email and saying, hey, can you offer two times for Peter and I to catch up? Two completely different patterns. So that is like a oversimplification of how much you can accomplish with AI if it has really clear instruction. And so bringing it back to the big picture where you started, the question for businesses, the blast radius impact that I think you can have is finding the most, you know, step by step by step problem, simple problem that you have in the business that could really replace humans. Focus on solving that problem, ferret it out, get it to a point of perfection, and move on to the next thing. The mistake I've seen businesses make and a lot of agencies make is try and solve five different completely unrelated problems. Throw a team of people on it, have committee meetings, but there's like one person trying to write the code or write the prompt, and success.

[B]

What I hear you telling me is that we're still a bit of time away from me being able to use AI to completely replace Sree as my co host.

[C]

He doesn't know that I've already gotten an agent.

[B]

He's already, he's already building his agent together.

[A]

Yeah. And you could be writing, you know, your podcast with Notebook.

[C]

So here, here's.

[B]

We don't even actually have to be here and our agent can interview your agent.

[A]

I mean, like, well, let's just get our next year look at the agents.

[B]

We're getting our agents to do this entire podcast.

[C]

Yeah. What's scary is I think that may be fathomable a few years from now. Let me, let me share some data points here. So the other hat that I wear is a consultant through Think Blue Consulting, midway through a project working with nine retailers on the impact of AI on shopping, everyday shopping. And so we've done a ton of primary research, we're midway through secondary research as well as we're doing a panel with Nielsen IQ consumer panel, which we should have the results back shortly. This is not a small panel. This is a well thought out panel by Nielsen. What we're learning is the maturity curve of AI in the industry is at 50 different spectrums. Some are very early excited, some are very scared. Some are knee deep and already building agents. Some are building very proprietary agents for productivity. But you know what's consistent? The shopper. The shoppers made it very clear, consistently, primary research, panel research. I am going to be using AI to make my life easier. And you Better be ready for it. And if you're not, you're not going to be in my consideration set. It's scary.

[A]

It's a real thing. It's a real thing.

[C]

It's here.

[A]

So it is here. It's not going to solve every single problem tomorrow, but incrementally, I think it's having a huge impact, especially in this industry, on product data and consumer. You know, we're going from, you know, hey, Alexa or Hey, Siri to, you know, our own agent building our shopping list for us and going and doing the work on. Okay, well, it's not available on whole Foods, so I'm going to go to doordash or, you know, like, these things are coming at us.

[C]

So I was saying the whole script for this episode, I could have gone to AI and ask, do give me questions.

[A]

If you wrote volunteers by hand, then I respect you a great deal because I have.

[B]

You don't have. You don't have to respect.

[A]

I've not written a podcast.

[C]

No, I did write them.

[A]

I did write. I have not written a podcast.

[C]

It took me about two hours.

[B]

We start with AI to do the research and frame out feed me topics.

[C]

But I write it myself.

[B]

We then tweak it.

[C]

To do.

[B]

Yeah, to do what we actually want to talk. But you're absolutely right. If you don't start using AI to give you the foundation and then spend most of your time just evaluating something, what are the right ones versus literally having to. If I had to sit there, I used to. When we start to launch this podcast, it could take Shree and I an hour and a half to prepare long, long questions.

[C]

Much longer.

[B]

I mean, to actually write the question. There was the research. I'm not. I'm just talking about writing the questions was an hour and a half, easily. Now it's boiled everything down to 20, 30 minutes.

[A]

Yeah, I would say that the. This is a perfect. This actually podcast scripts are a perfect example of the limitations of AI.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

They. They can overcomplicate an outline.

[C]

Couldn't agree more.

[A]

They give you prompts that you're like, why are you giving me all this information? And. And so this is a human in the loop that is still required today. You have to make.

[B]

It has to make sense. It has to fit in the right flow. It has to say, I would never actually ask that person because I know that isn't something that's relevant to them.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Back to AI, though. I think there's a second part of the question which is, are there specific bets you'd avoid in early stage growth scenarios because you're seeing this company, they're coming with AI backed and that's, that's the backbone of a business. And then an acquirer gets very excited because they read into the future. AI is everything. That's how we'll be operating. Is it things you look and say? Nah, not so much.

[A]

I, I would oversimplify it. It's really. And if you guys listen to the Allen podcast, Chamath Papatia kind of said this, so I want to make sure I fully disclose. I'm plagiarizing, I'm borrowing from here. I like the way he said it was really, really crisp. If you've got AI in place that's in service of automation and it can really automatically complete a highly dynamic task from end to end without additional prompt and instruction, then you've got some magic. If it's AI in service of workflow, all you've got is you've got a cascade that will eventually fall apart. And so it's really the difference between have you truly built in an automation? Right. So think about like a Salsify catalog. Have you truly built an automation to completely reflavor the entire product catalog for the holiday season and keep it on point? Or have you built a workflow for Sally to spend the next three days going in and kind of identifying the places where she can insert the word, you know, holiday cheer, you know, whatever that's going to be. That, that's really the distinct difference. And so as I look at a lot of early stage businesses and very excited to go down to the, the startup section of the shop talk show floor today and look at those businesses, I'm asking that fundamental question, did you just create a workflow around a much larger problem for which this is going to be a feature, or have you really created an automation that can you have a magnitude of impact which is much higher?

[B]

There's a subtext I want to say to our audience more about something you touched on here, where you made reference to another podcast. We in the podcasting community understand that podcasts are a really great way to learn more about what's going on in the industry. We don't look at you or any other podcast that's out there as a competition. We look, we look at our industry much like craft beer. Like you're going to try lots of different craft beers. We just want to be in your rotation, right? Because if all you ever do is listen to the CPG guys podcast, as much as we think we are smart and Intelligent. You're going to get sick of hearing Peter and Sree talk all the time. So it's good to get other.

[C]

I think you and I have acknowledged we are the greatest. We get the greatest amount of learning here when we have a guest on the show.

[B]

That's why we want.

[C]

I've learned things that I've never thought of from an M and A perspective. Never. Absolutely. And I've been in M and A deals on the brand side, so that's fascinating. But I'm going to get a little tactical back again with you.

[A]

All right, do it.

[C]

We got to jump into value creation, leverage your track and which operational metrics signal early success or love to talk about margin. You mentioned retention unit economics. Like what are those metrics that matter to you most?

[A]

So we'll break it apart into software businesses or services businesses.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

In a software business it is what is your growth rate, what is your net retention, what is your gross retention and what is your profitability metric? Like, what is your ebitda? What is it? Ultimately, the consistency and the stability of those metrics over a trailing two year period are incredibly important to predict what will happen in the future. Okay, you go too far back and you're not going to, you know, like, you go too far back, then you're not going to get as predictable a picture. You will go far that far back. But you're really looking in recent times on that. In a services business, the retention of the client matters, the revenue growth matters, but it is really more about that that customer just keeps coming back. So that the top marker, I would say, is the repeat investment of that client in your services or they're signing up for, you know, a, like a full, full year contract. So it ultimately goes back to like NR and GR in a way. But it's a slightly different metric because what's happening with these clients is they're saying, okay, I'm electing you for these services for this year, but next year it's going to be a different set of services because the market changed. You just want to see consistency in that client. Whereas in a software company and where we were talking about Salsify earlier, yeah, I want a PIM and I need more pimp. Okay, so you want to see that growth in the election of those services in a service election of that software. In a services business, what you want to see is the consistent return of that client, utilizing your team for whatever services are necessary and, and you know, and a coverage of the basket of goods as well. How much of their services, are they, are they utilizing? And at that point it's your ability. One other kind of really key thing for both software and services, very common is is how frequently do you land a customer that's $100,000 a year and turn them into a $500,000 a year customer.

[B]

What's your ability and what's the timeline it takes to get them there?

[A]

Yeah. So land and expand. Land and expand is a very big part of both services.

[B]

I'm going to ask you our last question because this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you for all this. Christian, I want to talk to you about today's market conditions and where deals are headed. Is AI actually messing up some of the very systematic approaches to evaluating and scaling businesses? And for particularly CPG brands or agencies, what practical lessons can you share from the M and A and growth playbook that help them become more attractive to PE backed buyers or to strike better partnerships?

[A]

Wow, that was a loaded question.

[B]

Big, big question.

[A]

You unpack.

[B]

I'll save the best for last.

[A]

At the highest level. Yeah. Market conditions are tough.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Say more. What does stuff mean?

[A]

Dollars. It's hard to get, hard to get a deal done. But the deals that are getting done are much bigger. If you look at overall deal volume, it is down. If you look at overall dollars invested, it's up.

[B]

Generally. We should go back and we should say for the last couple of years the PE and venture capital markets have been fairly constrained. Like I, my best friend is a venture capitalist. They've been sitting on their latest fund and they use the money basically for follow ups. They have been doing virtually no new investment. Most of the deals that are getting done are companies that are already close to or actually exceeded profitability. So I guess my question is, is a lot of that, is it changing now? Are we starting to see the money appear? Are we still in a place where there's very cautious investment coming from private equity and from venture capital?

[A]

I think across the board everyone's taken a great deal of care. Look lower, look seed early stage venture investment is incredibly thriving. There's a lot of people who are happy to write a quarter million, a half million million dollar check. It is the care with which they source those leads and they vet those founders. There is a much higher order of care and diligence there because again, at the end of the day, it's an LP's money or your own money that's coming through that. And then if you go to the other end, public market IPOs are the way in which investors get liquidity. And so if IPOs slow down, which on a trailing 24 month basis you had a lot of constraint on IPOs, you know, Linacon or whatever the, your belief about why, why that occurred, that impacts the rest of the ecosystem. The ability to exit publicly can have a downstream impact on how investors think about their portfolio and how they run their portfolio. PE investors are a little different, but still sensitive to the same things because it's all kind of a waterfall. So I would say is like as a whole, we are seeing a market where there is still an incredible amount of dry capital and dry powder and capital out there ready for investment. Investors are incredibly concerned about, you know, what are the risks. And we don't know all of the risks. So they're taking care to understand what are the ways that the business could be disrupted. We're in the middle of a SaaS apocalypse right now.

[B]

Sasspocalypse. Yeah, that's a new. That is a term we have never heard uttered, but it's honestly. Sasspocalypse.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And it's essentially describing that tree.

[B]

I think we have a T shirt in the making that will be credited to Christians.

[A]

But it's a bl. It's a. I want to, I want to make sure I'm clear that this is a narrative. It's a narrative that AI is going to eat the world. And if you have a SaaS business, you should just assume that whatever you built is completely indefensible. We're at an extreme right now, but if you actually look at CrowdStrike and Salesforce and a lot of the public SaaS companies, they're off a little bit, but they're not off a lot. There's actually kind of a balance view. So while there's a general sentiment that there's some fear and fud around what AI is going to do to a lot of SaaS companies, there's also the reconciliation. We'll land somewhere in the middle. We might be right about some things, we might be wrong about some things. That just makes investors a little bit more careful. At the end of the day, investors don't get paid unless they invest capital.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

So they have to invest capital. They want to make sure that whatever they're picking, you know, in terms of a horse, a place where they're going to play, where they're going to invest, whether it's a platform or it's an add on, especially for platforms, platforms are really big bets. You make a platform bet, you are making a very big material. 300, 400 million, a billion dollars investment. You are going to put a lot of time and energy and effort and diligence in that. If you're doing an add on, you're still taking care but you just sort of it's going into the platforms. There's a little more cushion and a little more assumption of we're going to do three deals. One might fail but we've built that into the model.

[C]

Totally understood. Let me remind our listeners, you can find all of our content by simply going to a web Browser and typing cpguys.com as the URL. If you or someone you know has something to contribute to this ongoing discussion on the CPG guys, please drop us a [e-mail] that easy to our audience. Thank you for the clicks, likes, comments, direct messages, meeting us at trade shows like Christian has just done, coming to our events, recording episodes with us and our sponsors. We're always grateful for all of you. Doesn't exist without all of you. You work with us all year and Peter and I from the bottom of our heart are deeply grateful to have you as our audience at Partners. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Peter. Always fun doing the episode with you. Give me that one big takeaway.

[B]

Thank you Sree. For me the takeaway is you have to understand who's looking to do the acquisition and what their ultimate objective is. Whether it's they're trying to acquire you as a major platform, whether they are looking at you as an add on and frankly whether it's a strategic investment or it's a PE investment. And if it's a PE investment, what is the role that that PE firm plays in terms of how it positions itself to its investors need to understand where it fits into an individual investor's portfolio. Are all I'm an individual investor, right? I invest in this company because it delivers dividend. I invest in this company because it gives me growth potential. I do. I need to understand all of that. It all plays into thinking about who you approach to invest, who's going to drive the most growth and who's going to give you what you want as a founder of a company to take you to the next level. If I'm a serial entrepreneur, my goal is to build this company to a certain level, sell it off, walk away versus someone else's. We talked some examples. The management team is a core value proposition of a strategic investment. That's what there's so many permutations.

[C]

That's my biggest mine is straightforward Peter. It's one word Apocalypse and that account. I love it. Let me thank Christian for joining us on the CPG Guys here in Las Vegas, here in Shop Talk. Thank you for joining us.

[A]

Thank you for having me. This is a great conversation. Really appreciate it.

[C]

Awesome. And that's a wrap of this episode of the CPG Guys.

[B]

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