EPISODE
59

#59 How Agicap scaled to €50M ARR while driving efficiency

with

Mickaël Jordan

,

CRO at Agicap

December 16, 2024

·

47

min.

Key Takeaways

  1. The growth-at-all-costs equation has exactly three variables, not one. Agicap's fundamental shift was adding CAC efficiency and cash efficiency alongside revenue growth — if either new parameter is missing, the growth you deliver has no value from a market or investor perspective.
  2. Baking CAC payback into manager compensation changes every resource decision they make. Agicap tied CAC payback performance (benchmarked against a 12–13 month target) to a bonus multiplier for managers and C-levels — suddenly headcount, channel spend, and partner commissions all get evaluated through a unit economics lens, not just a revenue lens.
  3. Multiyear upfront contracts are an equity round you don't have to pitch for. By incentivizing sales reps and CS to close 2–3 year deals with upfront payment, Agicap generated €650K in additional cash per month — the equivalent of roughly an €8M funding round annually, with no dilution.
  4. Expansion revenue is cheap revenue, and five percent is embarrassingly low. During the hyper-growth phase, Agicap's expansion mix sat at just 5% of new revenue. By deliberately shifting focus to upsell, cross-sell, and land-and-expand motions — alongside launching new products like AP automation and spend management — they pushed that figure to 20% within two years.
  5. Going upmarket isn't a sales strategy, it's a unit economics decision. The move away from SMB toward mid-market was driven by LTV:CAC ratio analysis — segments where the ratio fell below 3x were deprioritized. Doubling average basket price over two years was a direct consequence of this framework, not a top-down revenue target.
  6. A monthly all-hands revenue review keeps the efficiency mindset from fading. Agicap runs a "Global Revenue Meeting" every month where CAC payback, cash efficiency, and upfront payment performance are shared company-wide — including rep-led breakdowns of how specific deals were structured. Changing the rules once isn't enough; the cadence is what makes it stick.
  7. The Rule of 40 is now the North Star replacing pure ARR growth. With a new funding round closed, Agicap is orienting toward Rule of 40 (YoY ARR growth % + EBITDA margin % ≥ 40) as the governing metric — a framework that forces explicit trade-offs between growth investment and profitability rather than optimizing each in isolation.
People

Hosts and Guest

HOST

Janis Zech

CEO at Weflow

Janis Zech is the co-founder and CEO of Weflow. He previously scaled a B2B SaaS company from $0 to $76 million ARR as CRO, and in this episode he brings that operator perspective to the conversation on how teams can grow efficiently, stay disciplined, and make better decisions as revenue scales.

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HOST

Philipp Stelzer

CPO at Weflow

Philipp Stelzer is the co-founder and CPO of Weflow. With a background in helping revenue teams capture activity, inspect deals, and forecast inside Salesforce, he adds a product lens to this episode’s discussion on efficient growth, giving teams the tools to understand what drives revenue and where execution breaks down.

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Mickaël Jordan
GUEST

Mickaël Jordan

CRO at Agicap

Mickaël Jordan is the CRO at Agicap. In this episode, he shares Agicap’s journey of scaling from €300,000 ARR to over €50 million, including the transition from growth at all costs to sustainable, efficient revenue growth. He discusses the challenges of hyper-scaling during the 2021 funding boom, the pivot to efficiency in 2022, and the strategic decisions that helped Agicap thrive in uncertain markets.

LinkedIn

Full Transcript

Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. We're here with Mickaël Jordan. I hope I pronounced this correctly. Hey, Mickaël.

Mickaël Jordan: Hi. Hey.

Janis Zech: Great to have you. So today, we're gonna talk about a very practical example of, you know, how do you go from growth at all costs to efficient, sustainable, and predictable revenue growth. I think it's something that is obviously very important for everybody in the industry. And I met you through a pavilion event and saw your talk, and I thought, you know, this is very hands on and very specific. So I absolutely loved it, first and foremost. And so this is gonna be our topic for today. But before we jump in, maybe you can do a brief introduction about you and the company, and then let's focus all of this on this interesting topic.

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. Sure. So, yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. So I'm Mickaël. I'm chief revenue and alliance officer of Agicap. So Agicap, in a nutshell, it's a leading cash flow management platform for SMEs and mid market companies in Europe. So we handle, yeah, everything around cash flow, cash management, cash forecasting, accounts payable automation, accounts receivable automation, spend management. So to give great visibility and predictability on the cash. And for myself, I'm French, thirty eight, living in Berlin, and I've been in tech for a while, Agicap for the past five years and before in different fields in augmented reality. So yeah, happy to be here today to talk about this important topic of revenue efficiency.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Awesome. I mean, I think you joined the company really early. Right?

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. Correct. So I joined Agicap in September twenty nineteen, and the company already existed for three years back then. But, like, it took them, like, three years to refine the product market fit. So when I joined, we were, like, ten in the company, in a coworking space in the beautiful city of Lyon in France. And this is where things really started to grow exponentially. So I think we, back then, we were at, like, three hundred thousand euro of annual recurring revenue. And over the past five years, we grew from ten people to six hundred people and past fifty million. So it's been a great ride. Now also operating not only in France, but DACH, Italy, UK, Spain as well. So very exciting ride so far.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, congrats. I mean, these rides, I mean, they're amazing. Right? And it sounds like you were very lucky to join at the time where you really got into the most exciting phase of a company, but also probably a lot of challenging learnings, at least from my experience with Weflow. And I think Philipp had similar experiences at his previous gigs. But so right. To set the scene, right. Like, I mean, let's maybe start off with, like, where were you in kind of May twenty twenty one to December twenty twenty one, right, in terms of headcount growth, CAC payback, how much money did you burn per net new ARR? Right? Like, give us some key metrics, and then, you know, how did they change? And then we wanna dive and dissect how you actually did it.

Mickaël Jordan: Yep. Yeah. So why May twenty twenty one? So this is when things became a bit extreme. We raised a big round of funding in May twenty twenty one. We raised a hundred million euros with an American VC fund called Green Oaks. So it was a lot of money at the time. And this was the time, like, people remember back then, spring twenty twenty one. This is when there were, like, new unicorns popping up every day, and there were tons of growth rounds here and there. And so the rule of the game back then was grow as fast as you can. It's gonna be a winner take all market. There is plenty of money, so just go for it and grow at any cost. So we listened. You should have not listened. Just don't listen. But this was the rule of the game. So you play by it. And so we grew from, like, a hundred fifty people to six hundred people in six months. So this was, like, a time where I spent, like, almost fifty percent of my time in interviews, recruiting people, and same for middle managers. So this was quite intense. And also launching new countries. Of course, it's not just linear. It's like we launch new territories. You hire a lot of people in your team. You build new teams. So a lot of recruitment. And of course, I mean, when you grow so fast, your headcount, but also meaning your cost base, of course revenue grows as well, but not as fast. So meaning that the CAC paybacks, cost of acquisition of new customers, also increased significantly to think, reached, like, about twenty four months in this period. And, of course, you burn a lot of cash as well because you raise a lot of cash. I mean, when you raise a lot of cash, there is an expectation that you're gonna spend it. But, like, this is where the cash efficiency was around, like, three euros burned for one euro of net new ARR generated. And, again, that was okay back then. But then what happened — if again, people remember at the end of twenty twenty one, there was, like, the market downturn with Nasdaq first plunging and then all the VC rounds frozen. Like, there was no more — almost overnight. Right? So there's no more VC money. And the interesting thing is that we got strong signals early on from our VCs that we took seriously, compared to other scale ups, we took seriously quite early on. Like, this is gonna be the new norm. Like, there is no major growth round coming up for an undetermined period of time. So just consider that you won't be able to raise any more money and that now you need to have a super tight control on your cash and you need to get super efficient in the way you grow. And so that was quite going from one extreme to the other almost overnight. And I think for a lot of scale ups in our B2B SaaS world, it took some scale ups three months, six months, some one year, some two years to really digest and take into consideration these new rules of the game. But for us, we took it seriously very fast, overnight. So meaning, like, starting beginning of twenty twenty two, we were into restructuring mode, and we were also changing the way we operate quite drastically. And so overall, if we look at the long term trends, I mean, our headcount has been more or less steady since. So we're still around like six hundred people as we speak three years later. And of course, the CAC payback has drastically decreased. Now we're really like around the B2B SaaS benchmark, around between twelve and fourteen months of CAC payback, which is really good. And also in terms of cash efficiency, it went from three euros to less than one euro burn for every one euro of net new ARR. So we divided by three the cash burn. So, yes, that was quite drastic, but done in a very disciplined way to improve all of these core metrics. And I'm sure we're gonna dig into the topic of how we did it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so first and foremost, obviously a crazy story. What a year. What like, I mean, this all happened in twelve months. So, you know, I mean, let's let's dive in. Right? Like, so what were some of the major levers you took to basically go from twenty four month CAC payback to, you know, thirteen months, three to one euro burn per every net new ARR? Right? Like, what were kind of the main levers? What did you do?

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. Right. So I mean, first of all, just in terms of the equation, like, before, the only objective, like, at every stage of the company — company goal, manager goal, individual contributor goal — it was just revenue growth. That's it. And then suddenly, there are two new parameters in the equation: you need growth, but growth matters only if you have CAC efficiency and you have cash efficiency as well. If you are missing one of these two other parameters, the growth you deliver has basically no value, also from a VC perspective, from a market perspective. So the equation fundamentally changed. And so what we did is just to include these parameters in everything we do. But first of all, before getting into some of the tactics around this equation, first of all, it's a people game. So, of course, the paradigm and the way we approached recruitment and training, we had to shift our focus from recruiting nonstop to refocusing on high performers, refocusing on ramping up our people, of course letting go as well of people who did not perform well or that we did not count on for the future. But it was also like a drastic refocus on hiring freeze, capitalize on the existing team and make sure that they can all push their individual contribution so that everyone can be on quota or even exceed quota. And so, of course, to do this efficiently, we need to rethink a lot of ground rules. So rethink the career path, first of all, to make sure that all your top performers have visibility on how they will evolve. Because it might sound obvious, but when you have, like, crazy growth and you're spending crazy, people don't even think about this. Everyone has this excitement of, wow, everything's crazy, we're growing so fast, we have people coming every day. And then when you are in hiring freeze, people start thinking differently, and then they're like, wow, things are gonna be more challenging. What am I gonna do? How am I going to evolve? So that's why you need to keep your head cool, and again, take a break and give people some perspective on — this is where you are, this is how now you're going to evolve from here, we're going to invest in you, this is how you're going to level up and progress. And so these were the times when we built all these career paths for our key positions. We also revamped our compensation plans, especially for salespeople, to be more demanding. Like, introduced some thresholds to unlock your variable — before, there was a variable from the first euro you generated. We introduced some thresholds, so there was a minimum monthly performance you needed to achieve to get your variable compensation. We also introduced accelerators to encourage over performance and beating quota. We distributed stock options to top performers to really get them on this at least four year vesting plan and commitment. And also on a more macro basis, we also reevaluated our different territories to refocus on the markets that worked well, and we downsized or stopped some geographies. For example, we downsized significantly in Spain. It was a bit more challenging market. And we really pushed hard in France, DACH and Italy that had literally solid foundations. So yeah. So first, there was this focus on people, recruitment, training, career path, compensation plan, because this also drives behavior of the people you have in your team to make these changes happen.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I think this makes so much sense. It must have been, like, super stressful times for everyone. But also, I cannot imagine, like, the number of meetings that the leadership team had with the various teams, traveling from location to location, explaining the changes and then getting commitment from the people in the company to stick with it and work through it together. That must have been super intense. Roughly, how long in your mind did this take to really turn the company and the people around, changing this mindset? Like, it's easier if you're a small leadership team group — then probably the switch happened quite fast. But then the rest of the company, like, how long did this roughly take?

Mickaël Jordan: Actually, it was quite smooth and fast. I mean, to really see the result and that things were going in the right direction, I mean, it took a year for different reasons. Because when you are in just high growth mode, there is always some latency. Right? There are people that you already recruited that arrived, and then there are some costs that kind of stay there before your cost base starts dropping, and you see really all the unit economics getting better. So first quarter of twenty twenty two was more like — even if some decisions had already been made, Q1 was already aligned with the growth at any cost equation. And then it's really starting, like, from Q2, Q3, Q4 that we really saw the improvement in the numbers and showing that we were going in the right direction. So I think it really took a year to consolidate and see, wow, okay, we've made the shift, and now we are operating on sound foundation and rules.

Janis Zech: I think, I mean, I think it's a huge achievement, very hard to do. So I think that part alone, right, congratulations. The other part that I really like is also how you talked about it — starting with the people first, because that drives behavior. So you mentioned the changes to the compensation plans. And I think this is probably like a good segue into the next topic here, which is CAC efficiency. Because I think if you create compensation plans that really drive a certain behavior, obviously it has also a huge impact on what kind of customers you acquire, how you work with them, how you manage them, and what the focus of the company is. So yeah, curious, like, in terms of CAC efficiency, how you saw the impact of the compensation planning there.

Mickaël Jordan: Right. Yeah. So the goal was really to have this — so it's harder to have a CAC efficiency target for individual contributors, but still it's important for them to understand how it works. And it's like when you set targets for salespeople and you say, for example, okay, your quota as an account executive is six thousand euros of new MRR per month — and say, like, why six thousand and why not five thousand, why not seven thousand? So it's because if you take all the costs of marketing, your outbound SDRs, G&A, onboarding, etcetera, this is what you need to deliver to, at your individual level, have a CAC payback of twelve months. So the individual contributor at least needs to understand it. But then for the managers and the C levels, this became an essential part of their annual bonus. Okay? So meaning that for salespeople, for onboarders, they understood the equation. But for them, the compensation was just purely based on revenue numbers, how much they actually sell. But for the managers and the C levels, they had a grid based on CAC performance, which were between ten and thirteen — you get one hundred percent of your bonus. If you are between thirteen and fourteen, you get eighty percent, etcetera, etcetera. And it was like a multiplier of your revenue achievement.

Janis Zech: Sorry. Just a question here. So basically, you had revenue goals as a leader, right, like, for your specific territory or team or so on. And then essentially, the CAC efficiency was like almost like an accelerator, decelerator.

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Janis Zech: Okay. Interesting.

Mickaël Jordan: Yep. Yep. Exactly. And so meaning that they really had to think about their complete equation to balance how many resources — I mean, how you optimize your resources and your cost base. So, of course, it encourages you to be very demanding in terms of the people you will keep in your team or how you want to rethink your compensation plan or where you want to invest, not invest. Now all of a sudden, you think in a completely different way, and you have this obsession of a CAC payback and getting this balance between revenue delivered, but also the cost equation in front of it.

Janis Zech: Sorry. Just a quick question here because I think it's super interesting. Like, so out of the six hundred people, how many people were in the sales team? Like, how many quota carrying people have you had?

Mickaël Jordan: So even like right now, we have about forty account executives and we have about one hundred ish SDRs.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So basically, I assume that the managers also then took the CAC efficiency and the revenue growth metrics to make decisions on, you know, can I continue working with that person? Right? Like, do I need to hire more people? Because that is essentially always like a contradiction. Right? Like, you basically run a P&L instead of just a revenue growth target. Right?

Mickaël Jordan: Exactly. And, I mean, before in the old world, like, it was kind of okay — this individual contributor is performing so so, but fair enough, better than nothing. Now it's like, okay, now it's just payback, so I need to cut and move on. So yeah. It just changes the way you think. But not only in terms of people, but also in all the marketing campaigns and for every channel — from, of course, your paid marketing campaigns. There was a strong focus also on CAC payback and cutting the campaigns that are not a good enough CAC payback for Google Ads, Facebook Ads, so forth. But also, of course, for our partner program and for outbound, we just look at the CAC payback per channel and really identifying the levers on how you can improve it. So on the partner program, for example, the level of commission you will give away to your partner has a big impact. On outbound, same. You have to be very demanding with the performance of your outbound SDR and the cost of the fixed salary and your variable comp to make sure that all of this is properly adjusted so you can deliver a good CAC at scale. And all of this happened — also what helped to improve the CAC payback as well — was that we were also going upmarket, and we are still going upmarket aggressively at this time. Meaning we historically were working mostly with small companies, and we pushed hard to increase the basket price by both working with bigger companies. So we doubled the basket price in a couple of years, so it was quite significant. So working with bigger companies, but also pushing hard on upsell and cross sell because, like, during the times of growth at any cost, we were very much focused on new logos, acquisition of new customers. And then because upsell and cross sell is also much cheaper revenue growth, we really refocused as well on this. So during this period, like in two years, we went from five percent of our new revenue coming from expansion to twenty percent.

Janis Zech: I think one thing I really like about this is — so basically you have a formula, right? Or you have an equation and you explain this equation to everyone in the company. And by doing so, you create transparency about what is going on, what the focus of the company is. But at the same time, you also create a constraint and a framework to think about things. So how do I operate? What is the best way to operate? What are the levers I have in order to maximize outcome for myself, but also for the organization? And I think it's just like a masterclass example in trusting the people that work in your business, in your company, to explain to them how things work and why decisions are being made in order to enable them to do the right thing for themselves and for the business. So this is why I really like this. Right? And I think sometimes it happens maybe too rarely. I remember this when, like at Weflow, you know, performance marketing was super big. And I think at some point, like one person on stage, our CMO, just put up the equation like LTV needs to be higher than CPI. Right? I mean, obviously it needs to be that. Right? Like, but back then, that wasn't so clear. Like, in some cases, right? That was like the moment where LTV came up and LTV calculations and so on. And it created like a whole concept to think about stuff, particularly marketing, obviously, but also how you design games and what kind of systems you put in place to improve the lifetime value. And so yeah, I just want to say, I think this is really good and a great example for improving CAC efficiency in a large organization. I wonder how did this also impact then the leadership team and sort of like the budgets that were assigned and how you talked about budgets? So sort of like the whole cash efficiency topic.

Mickaël Jordan: So CAC is one thing, but there is also, yeah, the cash efficiency topic because the idea was to burn less and to also step by step build the path towards becoming cash positive in the foreseeable future. And so this became like the third parameter of the equation. So growth, CAC efficiency, cash efficiency. And so yes, same — cash efficiency became a part of the equation for the annual bonus, but only for C levels, not at the manager level. So CAC efficiency was for managers and C level. Cash efficiency was really just a C level parameter in terms of the bonus. However, we made a big shift with the individual contributors, so both on the sales side, but also on the customer success side, because we pushed hard to collect as much cash as possible upfront from our new customers and from our existing customers. So basically, what we did is we created a strong incentive scheme for salespeople to close two year, three year contracts with upfront payment. So we will cash in for two or three years of licenses from day one. Of course, that will come with a significant discount for the client and that will come with also a significant booster for the sales guy, and this worked really well. And we did the same on our renewals. So when the time came for our customers to renew their annual license, we also pushed for multiyear renewal with upfront payments — like, you've been a happy customer for the past one or two years. If you renew now for the next two or three years and pay upfront, same, you will get either a small discount or you will get free upsells or no increase or whatever, but there was also a compensation. And this has a massive impact. I mean, we cashed in just based on this extra cash from the multiyear. We generated six hundred fifty thousand euros of additional cash per month — per month, six hundred fifty thousand. So that was massive. So, of course, it's cash that you get now and that you will not get the next years. Right? But under the circumstances when you needed to improve your cash performance and make sure you will have enough cash in the next twelve months before seeing how the market evolves, this was, of course, a massive shift.

Janis Zech: It's basically an eight million equity round every year. Right?

Mickaël Jordan: Right. Basically, what — but paid without interest.

Janis Zech: Exactly. And then, obviously, you reduced churn. Right? So the GRR and NRR numbers look a lot better. It's so obvious, but it's actually yeah. I mean, it's something that's so pretty. We've changed this trade off a bit because we recently raised a new round of funding last October.

Mickaël Jordan: We raised a new round. So big round, May twenty twenty one, was a hundred million, and we announced a new round of forty five million one month ago with AXA Venture Partners. And because of this new round, now we're also not pushing as hard on the upfront payment, and we are more optimizing for MRR growth than upfront collection.

Janis Zech: Yep. Yep. Yes. I'm curious. So you mentioned that you grew the expansions from five percent to twenty percent. Has that had any impact on your product strategy? I mean, did you consolidate to have more products so you can upsell them better or anything on that front?

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So during this period, we switched from a mono product to multi product platform. So like, initially, Agicap is really all about cash flow management. So, you know, how much cash you have, and you can do cash forecasting. And this is when we launched our accounts payable automation solution, accounts receivable automation, spend management. And so, of course, this helped to increase the basket price with new customers, but also with existing customers that adopted these new features. But also, we started working with bigger companies through land and expand strategies. So sometimes you would start with a mid market company that will start with only one pilot entity, and then you have a huge opportunity for upsells to all the entities of the group, like we go from one entity to fourteen entities. So this is also the time when we got better into this kind of land and expand motions — start small, and create an expansion path with your new client with new features, but also larger parameters and entities and users on their side. And yeah, this helped a lot to grow the expansion revenue. But we can go much further into the share of expansion. I think some of the great B2B SaaS companies that work on mid market companies, they usually bring expansion to forty, fifty percent of revenue growth. So we still have a lot of room to push this rate up.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's obviously a very important topic for all your core metrics. And then, you know, especially when pipe gen has become a lot harder, and I think it's still hard. Right? Kind of unit economics often look a lot better. And we see this a lot that now you start with CS qualified opportunities that then basically become like expansion pipelines that you basically run like a sales process, but obviously a bit different with some characteristics, I'd say. But I'm curious — this is really more like a personal interest question. Like, what drives pipeline on the new logo side right now? I mean, like, what's the split between channel, outbound, and then paid? Or I don't know if you have any other channels.

Mickaël Jordan: Now? Yeah. Sure. So as we went upmarket quite aggressively the past years, the mix is different now than what it was two years ago. But now the majority of new logos are coming from outbound. So it's roughly fifty percent, sixty percent coming from outbound, and we have, like, about twenty percent coming from partners, channel partners, and then the rest coming from inbound, referrals, and so forth. So yeah, major outbound.

Janis Zech: So much about the LinkedIn discussion — outbound is dead? Yeah. Not in your case.

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. But we'll never die. I mean, especially for a topic like ours because, I mean, cash flow management — the status quo is that most companies manage their cash on Excel sheets. And so it's an equipment market. You need to generate awareness because they're not searching for it. Right? But once you bring the opportunities in, they're like, wow, I was not aware that this kind of capability existed. So we have to be proactive. So it's yeah. For us, it's definitely an outbound game. Of course, we'd like to go more towards PLG and this kind of stuff, but we haven't found the right path yet to go from outbound to PLG.

Janis Zech: And maybe one other just open question. I mean, other tips that you would share — were there things that were especially impactful or any things you didn't mention to go through in this transition?

Mickaël Jordan: I would say, I mean, one of the things we did as well — I mean, like, we talked about communicating to the team, getting the involvement from the team. Of course, you do it initially when you engage into this shift. But then what's also very important is to find your cadence and be transparent about performance review. So it was also already the case before, but at Agicap, every month, we have this all hands called the global revenue meeting, where we share the revenue performance of the company to everyone. I mean, we work with monthly sprints, right? So every month, you have the monthly target. And then at the beginning of the month, we will look at how we performed the past month in terms of revenue growth. But again, around the how — how was the CAC, how was the cash efficiency, how did we generate from our upfront payments, etcetera, etcetera. So there is a lot of transparency, and it's ongoing. And every month, we will look at the numbers, and we will share some success stories about it. So this is how we managed to get this three year upfront payment with this great German company, and we will have the account executive explain how we did it and share some tips with the rest of the guys. So yeah. So it's not only about changing the rules of the game and saying it once and you're good to go, but you need to get also into this cadence and this transparency so that you can start to push for it, iterate, share success stories, review the numbers every month.

Janis Zech: So I think this is so important because, I mean, you mentioned this earlier that, right, like you basically incentivize everybody and everybody's excited when everything is growing and exploding. Right. But once they start realizing that it's actually not about that, but it's actually about building a sustainable, predictable, great company. Right. And that a great company looks like what you just described and doesn't look like a CAC payback where you basically just burn through money. Right. Like, you have to reinforce that message again and again and again so that people become really proud of basically showing that they have achievement, because this is a huge achievement you guys have done. Right. This is really something that builds lasting companies. And so everybody should be really proud of that. And then they look back and they say, well, I totally believe in that game because there's so many examples where this isn't the case. Right. And you guys did it. And so it reinforces this message. I think it makes everybody probably more engaged, aware and motivated to continue that path. And so I absolutely love this final tip. And also, I think it just fits really well to a cash flow company, right? I mean, it's literally the business. And, you know, you lead with example. So, I mean, it's just a good story to tell also. Right? Quite frankly. So one last question — just what's the next goal? So you improved CAC payback. I'm assuming you're super cash efficient. So what's the next goal there?

Mickaël Jordan: Yeah. So, yeah, a couple of things that changed now in the way we think about the company and kind of North Star metrics. So I mean, you mentioned LTV before. So also what drove our change to go from small companies and really go upmarket and now refocus more on mid market companies is driven by the LTV CAC ratio. I mean, the benchmark is that you need to have a good segment if your LTV CAC ratio is above three. So meaning that a customer should at least generate three times the amount of revenue compared to what you initially invest to acquire this customer. And so this is what drove us to really go upmarket, to kind of give away the smaller segments for which the LTV CAC ratio was not good enough, and really push harder on the right ones. So this is one thing. And also, in terms of the overall rule of the game in VC — again, this is not something that we made up on our own. We stay close to our investors. And when some of them are in Europe, some of them are in Silicon Valley, they tell us, like, guys, these are the new rules of the game you need to play by. And now the new rule of the game is the rule of forty. And so I don't know if the audience has already heard about it, but it's a rule that allows you to compare companies that are at different stages of growth. And basically, you look at your growth rate on one side — so how much your ARR is growing year over year on percentage, ten percent, twenty percent, sixty percent. Then you look at your profit margin, so meaning your EBITDA as a percentage of revenue, that can be negative as well, right? And if you sum the two, the goal is to be above forty percent. So for example, if you have a thirty percent year on year growth with ten percent profit margin, you're good. You're at forty percent. If you're at fifty percent growth but minus fifty percent profit margin, then you're only at ten percent, you're not good, etcetera, etcetera. This is also like a balance between growth on one side, profit margin on the other, and finding the right balance. So now we have a trajectory to get towards forty and beyond in the coming years.

Janis Zech: Great. Perfect. Mickaël, one final final question. Sorry, I should have worded this differently before. But what kind of book would you recommend to our listeners that they should definitely put on their reading list for twenty twenty five?

Mickaël Jordan: Well, I mean, around this B2B SaaS game, honestly, I'm not so much into books, but more into carefully selected benchmarks and some well picked articles around those topics than actual books. I mean, of course, there are some classic books around predictable revenue and all of those things that now are being a bit dated. But what I would more monitor is some really good B2B SaaS benchmarks that really allow you to understand where you stand, where your company stands compared to your peers based on where you're at in ARR stage. If you are a ten million ARR company, fifteen million ARR company, a hundred million ARR company. And if you focus more on SMB, mid market or enterprise, there are these great benchmarks that allow you to understand how you perform, where you have to improve on growth, on cash efficiency, on expansion, on all of this stuff. So I'm more into these benchmarks, and I'm just trying to remember some of them.

Janis Zech: So I can help you here because I — we didn't script this, but, like, I actually just released a video today on LinkedIn because I absolutely love SaaS benchmark reports. There's great ones from Iconiq. There's great ones from Lightspeed. There's also great ones from Bessemer Venture Partners. And so, you know, I think what you should do is send me all your top recommendations and we'll add them to — I created kind of an ultimate SaaS resource list, a spreadsheet that is on our getweflow dot com slash revops as a resource. So if you want to check out some cool resources, they're

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