Short-form thinking from our experience building companies.
Two- to five-minute reads. No newsletter cadence, no SEO keyword stuffing. We write when we have something to say.
Saying 'no' is hard. When is it the right answer?
Our largest customer offered us over a million dollars a year to build a new module. We ran the diligence, found the category had defeated everyone who tried it, and said no while keeping them as our biggest advocate.
Bill Kloza Restoring sanity to your customer contracts
Our largest customer refused to renegotiate a contract tilted entirely in their favor, so we called their bluff and terminated before auto-renewal. Four months later, every bad term was gone, with a 50%+ price increase and a multi-year renewal.
Brendan Ahern Why we treated every customer migration as an opportunity
Customers don't resist change. They resist uncertainty. Handled with a disciplined three-person team, a migration becomes one of the most productive growth activities in the business.
Bill Kloza Are your customer relationships built to last?
A "bad" customer is usually three problems feeding each other — poor product fit, disproportionate support demands, and too little revenue. Fixing it starts with resetting expectations.
Sam Jenks Why we stopped treating price increases as optional
Some customers hadn't seen a price increase in close to a decade while the cost to serve them rose every year. Treating pricing as a normal operating discipline restored the economics without breaking the relationships.
Bill Kloza Do you get paid on time?
We were sitting on over $1M of unbilled revenue and another $1M+ past due. The biggest reason companies don't get paid on time? They don't invoice on time. Rebuilding quote-to-cash cut DSO by 30+ days.
Brendan Ahern Why we built Customer Advisory Boards with our founder
When our founder moved into an innovation role, we built Customer Advisory Boards with him at the center. They became one of the most valuable sources of strategic intelligence we had.
Garrett Levey How we took advantage of M&A
Four add-on acquisitions in eighteen months. Strategy led every deal — we named the specific gap before evaluating any target, and never announced until we knew exactly how the first ninety days would run.
Bill Kloza Is your business set up to scale?
We went from $5M to $22M ARR in two years. Headcount roughly doubled everywhere except finance and accounting, because the right tech stack and process discipline let the back office scale without it.
Brendan Ahern Why we built a people operating system
What worked when we ran a fifty-person company broke at several hundred. A single goal-cascade, standard titles, defined career paths, and one system of record gave us faster decisions and better retention.
Bill Kloza Want to learn more? Start a conversation.
We'd love to meet, trade notes on what we're seeing as the software world goes through a generational evolution, and share more about our philosophy for building great software companies.