Category Archives: FP&A

Why Your CFO Should Be The Customer Testimonial On Your Debt Provider’s Homepage

Posted on November 26, 2024 | Leave a comment

If you’re VC-backed, you might well have taken some venture debt to top up your last financing round. If you’re PE-backed, it’s probable that your PE sponsor took a material amount of debt — e.g., 1-2x ARR — to help finance the acquisition.

Either way, if you’re an enterprise software startup, there’s a good chance there is some debt on your balance sheet.

Debt providers typically aren’t very attention demanding. They don’t require board seats and they usually don’t ask for board observer rights. Sure, they want detailed monthly financial reporting, but your company is producing those reports anyway and it’s easy to add them to the distribution list. So debt providers don’t necessarily get a lot of mindshare from the executive team and board.

If you have debt, here’s my simple advice on managing it:

  • Ensure covenant compliance tests are on featured prominently on your one-page key metrics dashboard that accompanies every draft operating plan and is presented at every QBR. This keeps covenants top-of-mind, where they need to be. Covenants are, simply put, existential.
  • Try to use debt providers who already work with your investors. This will provide your investors with some leverage if things get dicey. Think: “if you call this loan, you will never do business with our portfolio again.” While such words are more impactful from a relatively big customer, they are also not by any means some kind of invincibility shield.
  • Call when you’re in the yellow zone. Don’t wait until you trip covenants to have a conversation with your debt provider. There are a lot of other options besides calling the loan (e.g., refinancing) and it’s best to discuss them while you’re on the warning track, not against the wall.
  • Build a relationship with your debt provider. As the saying goes, “build relationships before you need them, because by the time you do, it’s too late.” Return their calls quickly. Check in when not strictly necessary. Offer to do reference calls on new deals. Or, speak at their executive dinners. Say yes to the invitation to their baseball box. Appear as a guest on their podcast. Show them the respect you should show someone who just might be in a position one day to bankrupt your company. Because they are.

When having conversations with your debt provider, think of covenants in two ways:

  • In the literal sense, they are part of the contract that you made for your debt. If you break one, you’re in breach of that contract, and they can take whatever remedies the contract provides.
  • The intent of most covenants is to ensure the lender gets paid back. They serve as an early warning system to alert the lender of potential trouble. So, e.g., if you had a big deal slip from 9/30 to 10/05 and that threw off your required Q3 liquidity ratios, then you’ve already corrected the problem within two weeks. Hopefully, that calms repayment concerns.

Remember the lender is not only trying to see if you can honor your word, but more importantly, to see if there’s any incremental repayment risk.

Finally, remember that while covenants are black-and-white tests, what to do when they’re breached is not. The debt provider has a lot of different cards to play, and the vast majority of debt providers are not in the “loan to own” business, so they have no desire to take control of your company. The cards they choose to play will be not only a function of the business situation, but of existing relationships and people.

Which is why I always say that your CFO should be the customer testimonial on your debt provider’s homepage. Who wants to call that loan?

(Thanks to Ian Charles for teaching me this principle back in the day.)

Leave a comment

Posted in Finance, FP&A, Private Equity, Startups, VC

Tagged

A Friendly Reminder to Cost-Cutters: Keep the Company a Great Place to Work for Survivors

Posted on November 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s been a tough year. We’re currently in peak planning season for 2024. With capital scarce and expensive, with companies increasingly trapped in Schrödinger’s startup paradox, and with more startups than ever focused on positive cashflow and The Rule of 40, it’s safe to say that Silicon Valley is still very much in a cost-cutting mood.

I’ve done a lot of cost cutting over the course of my career so I thought I’d share one key rule that sometimes gets overlooked when you’re in the thick of this process. Here’s the rule: no matter what you do, no matter how deep the cuts have to be, keep the company a great place to work for those who still work there (aka, the survivors).

Why do we forget this? As we struggle to hit top-down targets through rounds of cost-cutting, we cut here and squeeze there so much that we can develop a certain myopia. While we eventually congratulate ourselves for building a plan that finally achieves the financial targets, we often forget to sanity check that plan in two ways:

  • Achievability. Is the resultant plan even do-able? Or have incoherent cuts across departments left us close to attaining financial targets, but out of balance across functions? Are the revenue (and ergo cash collection) targets realistic? If not, the consequence is missing those targets, triggering another painful round of cuts. Always make a plan that you can beat.
  • Quality of life. What will it be like to work at the company we just created? Will the people we hope to retain want to keep working for us? Are there still free drinks in the frig? An annual company kickoff? A bonus program with non-zero expected value? More subtly, have we teed up both failure and internal warfare by overcutting marketing relative to sales? Or product relative to engineering? More simply, do we still have travel budget? Do people feel like they have the resources they need to succeed?

While this may sound basic, lots of companies mess it up. Why? Because it’s so hard to build a budget that hits the new targets in the first place, the last thing the executive team wants to do is sanity check that budget and find more problems.

In addition, the management team is likely still wedged in an incremental rather than absolute mentality — meaning that while a given function had $5M last year and needs to cut to “only” $4.5M this year (and yes, that’s after absorbing some naturally inflating costs), that $4.5M is still a heck of a lot of money and, for that matter, a lot more function budget than we had three years ago when we were in the earlier stages of building the company. To solve the latter problem, the executive team needs to first heal itself (by reframing their own thinking) and then get the rest of the management team on board with absolute rather than incremental, year-over-year thinking.

But back to quality of life. Let’s make this concrete by giving several real examples of what people get wrong:

  • No raise policy. You’re better off cutting more people in order to make room for merit increases and promotions — that is, if you really care about keeping the company a great place to work for the survivors.
  • No backfill policy. A mindless policy that basically says the C-suite can’t be bothered with headcount resource allocation and will effectively leave it to chance. And create perverse incentives to not terminate weak employees in the process.
  • Little or no travel budget. I recently spoke with a product leader with a team of about 8 PMs, none of whom were allowed to travel anymore. They’d be better off with 6 PMs and some travel budget. If you believe PMs need to meet customers to do their jobs, that is. Ditto for product marketers. Double ditto for sellers. It’s not about the travel budget per se. It’s about making the people who stay feel they can be successful.
  • Bonus targets in excess of plan targets. This is the old, “well we cut the plan but we didn’t change the bonus targets” trick and it’s simply not credible. In the end, what matters is the expected value of the bonus program to employees, and if that plan has unrealistic targets, that value quickly drops to zero. If that’s 20% of someone’s total compensation, that’s a material pay cut — and that’s certainly not keeping the company a great place for those who stay.
  • Workflation. This is the opposite of shrinkflation (e.g., the constant price for an ever-shrinking candy bar). This is where you get the same pay, but for a much bigger job. For example, if you replace managers with player-coach team leads, or if you blow up your success team and ask sellers to take on post-sales account management.
  • Killing internal events. Like it or not, wiping out the annual company kickoff or the president’s club reduces the expected value of working at the company to the employees. My advice is to cut these back, but don’t kill them.
  • Cutting supporting resources. Whether you’re cutting marketing relative to sales (and thus potentially creating a “baby robin” problem) or cutting SDRs relative to sales (putting more work on sales), or creating an imbalance by cutting product relative to engineering, you must remember that a healthy organization is a dynamic system, with interacting functions and checks and balances. Cut holistically. Instead of reducing SDR and SC support ratios across Europe, cut direct operations in a few smaller countries.

So, when you started reading this post, I’m guessing you were thinking, “oh no, we’d never do that at my company” and by the time you finished the above list you were thinking, “oh no, we did — in like three areas.” That’s why I made the list.

You can use the list to sanity check your plan or you can just derive directly from the core principle. Whenever you are cutting, always, always keep the company a great place to work for those who are going to still work there.

The alternative, frankly, is bleak. Your employees will do the last round of cuts for you — and you may not like what they decide.

Leave a comment

Posted in Finance, FP&A, Leadership, Management, Startups

Tagged , ,

What Are The Units On Your Lead SaaS Metric — And What Does That Say About Your Culture

Posted on February 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Quick:

  • How big is the Acme deal?  $250K.
  • What’s Joe’s forecast for the quarter?  $500K
  • What’s the number this year?  Duh.  $7,500K.

Awesome.  By the way:  $250K what?  $500K what?  $7,500K what?  ARR, ACV, bookings, TCV, new ARR, net new ARR, committed ARR, contracted ARR, terminal ARR, or something else?

Defining those terms isn’t the point of this post, so see note [1] below if interested.

The point is that these ambiguous, unitless conversations happen all the time in enterprise software companies.  This isn’t a post about confusion; the vast majority of the time, everyone understands exactly what is being said.  What those implicit units really tell you about is culture.

Since there can be only one lead metric, every company, typically silently, decides what it is.  And what you pick says a lot about what you’re focused on.

  • New ARR means you’re focused on sales adding water to the SaaS leaky bucket — regardless of whether it’s from new or existing customers.
  • Net New ARR means you’re focused the change in water level in the SaaS leaky bucket — balancing new sales and churn — and presumably means you hold AEs accountable for both sales and renewals within their patch.
  • New Logo ARR means you’re focused on new ARR from new customers.  That is, you’re focused on “lands” [2].
  • Bookings means you’re focused on cash [3], bringing in dollars regardless of whether they’re from subscription or services, or potentially something else [4].
  • TCV, which became a four-letter word after management teams too often conflated it with ARR, is probably still best avoided in polite company.  Use RPO for a similar, if not identical, concept.
  • Committed ARR usually means somebody important is a fan of Bessemer metrics, and means the company is (as with Net New ARR) focused on new ARR net of actual and projected churn.
  • Terminal ARR means you’re focused on the final-year ARR of multi-year contracts, implying you sign contracts with built-in expansion, not a bad idea in an NDR-focused world, I might add.
  • Contracted ARR can be a synonym for either committed or terminal ARR, so I’d refer to the appropriate bullet above as the case may be.

While your choice of lead metric certainly affects the calculations of other metrics (a bookings CAC or a terminal-ARR CAC) that’s not today’s point, either.  Today’s point is simple.  What you pick says a lot about you and what you want your organization focused on.

  • What number do you celebrate at the all hands meeting?
  • What number do you tell employees is “the number” for the year?

For example, in my opinion:

  • A strong sales culture should focus on New ARR.  Yes, the CFO and CEO care about Ending ARR and thus Net New ARR, but the job of sales is to fill the bucket.  Someone else typically worries about what leaks out.
  • A shareholder value culture would focus on Ending ARR, and ergo Net New ARR.  After all, the company’s value is typically a linear function of its Ending ARR (with slope determined by growth).
  • A strong land-and-expand culture might focus on Terminal ARR, thinking, regardless of precisely when they come in, we have contracts that converge to a given total ARR value over time [5].
  • Conversely, a strong land and expand-through-usage culture might focus on New Logo ARR (i.e., “land”), especially if the downstream, usage-based expansion is seen as somewhat automatic [6].
  • A cash-focused culture (and I hope you’re bootstrapped) would focus on bookings.  Think:  we eat what we kill.

This isn’t about a right or wrong answer [7].  It’s about a choice for your organization, and one that likely changes as you scale.  It’s about mindfulness in making a subtle choice that actually makes a big statement about what you value.

# # #

Notes
[1] For clarity’s sake, ARR is annual recurring revenue, the annual subscription value.  ACV is annual contract value which, while some treat as identical to ARR, others treat as first-year total contract value, i.e., first-year ARR plus year-one services.  Bookings is usually used as a proxy for cash and ergo would include any effects of multi-year prepayments, e.g., a two-year, prepaid, $100K/year ARR contract would be $200K in bookings.  TCV is total contract value which is typically the total (subscription) value of the contract, e.g., a 3-year deal with an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K would have a $600K, regardless of when the cash payments occurred.  New ARR is new ARR from either new customers (often called New Logo ARR) or existing customers (often called Upsell ARR).  Net New ARR is new ARR minus churn ARR, e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, adds $2,000K in new ARR and churns $500K, then net new ARR is $1,500K.  Committed ARR (as defined by Bessemer who defined the term) is “contracted, but not yet live ARR, plus live ARR netted against known projected ARR churn” (e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, has signed contracts that start within an acceptable time period of $2,000K, takes $200K of expected churn in the period, and knows of $500K of new projected churn upcoming, then their ending committed is ARR is $11,500K.  (Why not $11,300K?  Because the $200K of expected churn was presumably already in the starting figure.)  Terminal ARR the ARR in the last year of the contract, e.g., say a contract has an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K, the terminal ARR is $300K [1A].  Contracted ARR is for companies that have hybrid models (e.g., annual subscription plus usage fee) and includes only the contractually committed recurring revenues and not usage fees.

[1A] Note that it’s not yet clear to me how far Bessemer goes out with “contracted” ARR in their committed ARR definition, but I’m currently guessing they don’t mean three years.  Watch this space as I get clarification from them on this issue.

[2] In the sense of land-and-expand.

[3] On the assumptions that bookings is being used as a proxy for cash, which I recommend, but which is not always the case.

[4] e.g., non-recurring engineering; a bad thing to be focused on.

[5] Although if they all do so in different timeframes it becomes less meaningful.  Also unless the company has a track record of actually achieving the contractually committed growth figures, it becomes less credible.

[6] Which it never actually is in my experience, but it is a matter of degree.

[7] Though your investors will definitely like some of these choices better than others.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Culture, FP&A, SaaS, Sales, Startups

Tagged ,

The Strategy Compiler: How To Avoid the “Great” Strategy You Couldn’t Execute

Posted on June 22, 2017 | 11 comments

Few phrases bother me more than this one:

“I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy.  We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.”

Huh.  Wait minute.  If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy.  Maybe it was a great strategy for some other company that could have applied the appropriate resources.  But it wasn’t a great strategy for you.  Ergo, it wasn’t a great strategy.  QED.

I learned my favorite definition of strategy at a Stanford executive program I attended a few years back.  Per Professor Robert Burgelman, author of Strategy is Destiny, strategy is simply “the plan to win.”  Which begets an important conversation about the definition of winning.  In my experience, defining winning is more important than making the plan, because if everyone is focused on taking different hills, any resultant strategy will be a mishmash of plans to support different objectives.

But, regardless of your company’s definition of winning, I can say that any strategy you can’t execute definitionally won’t succeed and is ergo a bad strategy.

It sounds obvious, but nevertheless a lot of companies fall into this trap.  Why?

  • A lack of focus.
  • A failure to “compile” strategy before executing it.

Focus:  Think Small to Grow Big

Big companies that compete in lots of broad markets almost invariably didn’t start out that way.

BusinessObjects started out focused on the Oracle financials installed base.  Facebook started out on Harvard students, then Ivy league students.  Amazon, it’s almost hard to remember at this point, started out in books.  Salesforce started out in SMB salesforce automation.  ServiceNow on IT ticket management.  This list goes on and on.

Despite the evidence and despite the fame Geoffrey Moore earned with Crossing the Chasm, focus just doesn’t come naturally to people.  The “if I could get 1% share of a $10B market, I’d be a $100M company” thought pattern is just far too common. (And investors often accidentally reinforce this.)

The fact is you will be more dominant, harder to dislodge, and probably more profitable if, as a $100M company, you control 30% of a $300M target as opposed to 1% of a $10B target.

So the first reason startups make strategies they can’t execute is because they forget to focus.  They aim too broadly. They sign up for too much.  The forget that strategy should be sequence of actions over time.  Let’s start with Harvard. Then go Ivy League.  Then go Universities in general.  Then go everyone.

Former big company executives often compound the problem.  They’re not used to working with scarce resources and are more accustomed to making “laundry list” strategies that check all the boxes than making focused strategies that achieve victory step by step.

A Failure to Compile Strategy Before Execution

The second reason companies make strategies they can’t execute is that they forget a critical step in the planning process that I call the strategy compiler.  Here’s what I think a good strategic planning process looks like.

  • Strategy offsite. The executive team spends a week offsite focused on situation assessment and strategy.  The output of this meeting should be (1) a list of strategic goals for the company for the following year and (2) a high-level financial model that concretizes what the team is trying to accomplish over the next three years.  (With an eye, at a startup, towards cash.)
  • First round budgeting. Finance issues top-down financial targets.  Executives who own the various objectives make strategic plans for how to attain them.  The output of this phase is (1) first-draft consolidated financials, (2) a set of written strategies along with proposed organizational structures and budgets for attaining each of the company’s ten strategic objectives.
  • Strategy compilation, resources. The team meets for a day to review the consolidated plans and financials. Invariably there are too many objectives, too much operating expense, and too many new hires. The right answer here is to start cutting strategic goals.  The wrong answer is to keep the original set of goals and slash the budget 20% across the board.  It’s better to do 100% of 8 strategic initiatives than do 80% of 10.
  • Strategy compilation, skills. The more subtle assessment that must happen is a sanity check on skills and talent.  Do your organization have the competencies and do your people have the skills to execute the strategic plans?  If a new engineering project requires the skills of 5 founder-level, Stanford computer science PHDs who each would want 5% of a company, you are simply not going to be able to hire that kind of talent as regular employees. (This is one reason companies do “acquihires”).  The output of this phase is a presumably-reduced set of strategic goals.
  • Second round budgeting. Executives to build new or revised plans to support the now-reduced set of strategic goals.
  • Strategy compilation. You run the strategy compiler again on the revised plan — and iterate until the strategic goals match the resources and the skills of the proposed organization.
  • Board socialization. As you start converging via the strategy compiler you need to start working with the board to socialize and eventually sell the proposed operating plan.  (This process could easily be the subject of another post.)

If you view strategy as the plan to win, then successful strategies include only those strategies that your organization can realistically execute from both a resources and skills perspective.  Instead of doing a single-pass process that moves from strategic objectives to budgets, use an iterative approach with a strategy compiler to ensure your strategic code compiles before you try to execute it.

If you do this, you’ll increase your odds of success and decrease the odds ending up in the crowded section of the corporate graveyard where the epitaphs all read:

Here Lies a Company that Had a “Great” Strategy  It Had No Chance of Executing

11 Comments

Posted in Entrepreneurship, FP&A, Silicon Valley, Startups, Strategy, VC

CAC Payback Period:  The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric

Posted on March 17, 2016 | 22 comments

The single most misunderstood software-as-a-service (SaaS) metric I’ve encountered is the CAC Payback Period (CPP), a compound metric that is generally defined as the months of contribution margin to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer.   Bessemer defines the CPP as:

bess cac

I quibble with some of the Bessemerisms in the definition.  For example, (1) most enterprise SaaS companies should use annual recurring revenue (ARR), not monthly recurring revenue (MRR), because most enterprise companies are doing annual, not monthly, contracts, (2) the “committed” MRR concept is an overreach because it includes “anticipated” churn which is basically impossible to measure and often unknown, and (3) I don’t know why they use the prior period for both S&M costs and new ARR – almost everybody else uses prior-period S&M divided by current-period ARR in customer acquisition cost (CAC) calculations on the theory that last quarter’s S&M generated this quarter’s new ARR.

Switching to ARR nomenclature, and with a quick sleight of mathematical hand for simplification, I define the CAC Payback Period (CPP) as follows:

kell cac

Let’s run some numbers.

  • If your company has a CAC ratio of 1.5 and subscription gross margins of 75%, then your CPP = 24 months.
  • If your company has a CAC ratio of 1.2 and subscription gross margins of 80%, then your CPP = 18 months.
  • If you company has a CAC ratio of 0.8 and subscription gross margins of 80%, then your CPP = 12 months.

All seems pretty simple, right?  Not so fast.  There are two things that constantly confound people when looking at CAC Payback Period (CPP).

  • They forget payback metrics are risk metrics, not return metrics
  • They fail to correctly interpret the impact of annual or multi-year contracts

Payback Metrics are for Risk, Not Return

Quick, basic MBA question:  you have two projects, both require an investment of 100 units, and you have only 100 units to invest.  Which do you pick?

  • Project A: which has a payback period of 12 months
  • Project B: which has a payback period of 6 months

Quick, which do you pick?  Well, project B.  Duh.  But wait — now I tell you this:

  • Project A has a net present value (NPV) of 500 units
  • Project B has an NPV of 110 units

Well, don’t you feel silly for picking project B?

Payback is all about how long your money is committed (so it can’t be used for other projects) and at risk (meaning you might not get it back).  Payback doesn’t tell you anything about return.  In capital budgeting, NPV tells you about return.  In a SaaS business, customer lifetime value (LTV) tells you about return.

There are situations where it makes a lot of sense to look at CPP.  For example, if you’re running a monthly SaaS service with a high churn rate then you need to look closely how long you’re putting your money at risk because there is a very real chance you won’t recoup your CAC investment, let alone get any return on it.  Consider a monthly SaaS company with a $3500 customer acquisition cost, subscription gross margin of 70%, a monthly fee of $150, and 3% monthly churn.  I’ll calculate the ratios and examine the CAC recovery of a 100 customer cohort.

saas fail

While the CPP formula outputs a long 33.3 month CAC Payback Period, reality is far, far worse.  One problem with the CPP formula is that it does not factor in churn and how exposed a cohort is to it — the more chances customers have to not renew during the payback period, the more you need to consider the possibility of non-renewal in your math [1].  In this example, when you properly account for churn, you still have $6 worth of CAC to recover after 30 years!  You literally never get back your CAC.

Soapbox:  this is another case where using a model is infinitely preferable to back-of-the-envelope (BOTE) analysis using SaaS metrics.  If you want to understand the financials of a SaaS company, then build a driver-based model and vary the drivers.  In this case and many others, BOTE analysis fails due to subtle complexity, whereas a well-built model will always produce correct answers, even if they are counter-intuitive.

Such cases aside, the real problem with being too focused on CAC Payback Period is that CPP is a risk metric that tells you nothing about returns.  Companies are in business to get returns, not simply to minimize risk, so to properly analyze a SaaS business we need to look at both.

The Impact of Annual and Multi-Year Prepaid Contracts on CAC Payback Period

The CPP formula outputs a payback period in months, but most enterprise SaaS businesses today run on an annual rhythm.  Despite pricing that is sometimes still stated per-user, per-month, SaaS companies realized years ago that enterprise customers preferred annual contracts and actually disliked monthly invoicing.  Just as MRR is a bit of a relic from the old SaaS days, so is a CAC Payback Period stated in months.

In a one-hundred-percent annual prepaid contract world, the CPP formula should output in multiples of 12, rounding up for all values greater than 12.  For example, if a company’s CAC Payback Period is notionally 13 months, in reality it is 24 months because the leftover 1/13 of the cost isn’t collected until the a customer’s second payment at month 24.  (And that’s only if the customer chooses to renew — see above discussion of churn.)

In an annual prepaid world, if your CAC Payback Period is less than or equal to 12 months, then it should be rounded down to one day because you are invoicing the entire year up-front and at-once.  Even if the formula says the CPP is notionally 12.0 months, in an annual prepaid world your CAC investment money is at risk for just one day.

So, wait a minute.  What is the actual CAC Payback Period in this case?  12.0 months or 1 day?  It’s 1 day.

Anyone who argues 12.0 months is forgetting the point of the metric.  Payback periods are risk metrics and measured by the amount of time it takes to get your investment back [2].  If you want to look at S&M efficiency, look at the CAC ratio.  If you want to know about the efficiency of running the SaaS service, look at subscription gross margins.  If you want to talk about lifetime value, then look at LTV/CAC.  CAC Payback Period is a risk metric that measures how long your CAC investment is “on the table” before getting paid back.  In this instance the 12 months generated by the standard formula is incorrect because the formula misses the prepayment and the correct answer is 1 day.

A lot of very smart people get stuck here.  They say, “yes, sure, it’s 1 day – but really, it’s not.  It’s 12 months.”  No.  It’s 1 day.

If you want to look at something other than payback, then pick another metric.  But the CPP is 1 day.  You asked how long it takes for the company to recoup the money it spends to acquire a customer.  For CPPs less than or equal to 12 in a one-hundred percent annual prepaid world, the answer is one day.

It gets harder.  Imagine a company that sells in a sticky category (e.g., where typical lifetimes may be 10 years) and thus is a high-consideration purchase where prospective customers do deep evaluations before making a decision (e.g., ERP).  As a result of all that homework, customers are happy to sign long contracts and thus the company does only 3-year prepaid contracts.  Now, let’s look at CAC Payback Period.  Adapting our rules above, any output from the formula greater than 36 months should be rounded up in multiples of 36 months and, similarly, any output less than or equal to 36 months should be rounded down to 1 day.

Here we go again.  Say the CAC Payback Period formula outputs 33 months.  Is the real CPP 33 months or 1 day?  Same argument.  It’s 1 day.  But the formula outputs 33 months.  Yes, but the CAC recovery time is 1 day.  If you want to look at something else, then pick another metric.

It gets even harder.  Now imagine a company that does half 1-year deals and half 3-year deals (on an ARR-weighted basis).  Let’s assume it has a CAC ratio of 1.5, 75% subscription gross margins, and thus a notional CAC Payback Period of 24 months.  Let’s see what really happens using a model:

50-50

Using this model, you can see that the actual CAC Payback Period is 1 day. Why?  We need to recoup $1.5M in CAC.  On day 1 we invoice $2.0M, resulting in $1.5M in contribution margin, and thus leaving $0 in CAC that needs to be recovered.

While I have not yet devised general rounding rules for this situation, the model again demonstrates the key point – that the mix of 1-year and 3-year payment structure confounds the CPP formula resulting in a notional CPP of 24 months, when in reality it is again 1 day.  If you want to make rounding rules beware the temptation to treat the average contract duration (ACD) as a rounding multiple because it’s incorrect — while the ACD is 2 years in the above example, not a single customer is paying you at two-year intervals:  half are paying you every year while half are paying you every three.  That complexity, combined with the reality that the mix is pretty unlikely to be 50/50, suggests it’s just easier to use a model than devise a generalized rounding formula.

But pulling back up, let’s make sure we drive the key point home.  The CAC Payback Period is the single most often misunderstood SaaS metric because people forget that payback metrics are about risk, not return, and because the basic formulas – like those for many SaaS metrics – assume a monthly model that simply does not apply in today’s enterprise SaaS world, and fail to handle common cases like annual or multi-year prepaid contracts.

# # #

Notes

[1] This is a huge omission for a metric that was defined in terms of MRR and which thus assumes a monthly business model.  As the example shows, the formula (which fails to account for churn) outputs a CAC payback of 33 months, but in reality it’s never.  Quite a difference!

[2] If I wanted to be even more rigorous, I would argue that you should not include subscription gross margin in the calculation of CAC Payback Period.  If your CAC ratio is 1.0 and you do annual prepaid contracts, then you immediately recoup 100% of your CAC investment on day 1.  Yes, a new customer comes with a future liability attached (you need to bear the costs of running the service for them for one year), but if you’re looking at a payback metric that shouldn’t matter.  You got your money back.  Yes, going forward, you need to spend about 30% (a typical subscription COGS figure) of that money over the next year to pay for operating the service, but you got your money back in one day.  Payback is 1 day, not 1/0.7 = 17 months as the formula calculates.

22 Comments

Posted in Enterprise, Entrepreneurship, Finance, FP&A, Metrics, SaaS, Silicon Valley, Startups, VC