Ep 4. Rachel Lawler: Founder of Aperture Growth: Commercial Operating Systems

In this episode, Gautam speaks with Rachel Lawler, Founder and Managing Director of Aperture Growth, to discuss the missing layer between operational alpha and commercial execution. Rachel makes a precise and uncomfortable argument: most mid-market businesses don't have an operating system; they have tribal knowledge, disconnected software, manual workarounds, and people filling the gaps between systems. They can tell you how much revenue they generated. Very few can tell you how that revenue was generated. Rachel describes why dashboards report outcomes but can't explain causality, what operational traceability actually means and why it matters and how the infrastructure most mid-market companies are missing isn't another software platform,  it's the context layer that connects decisions, workflows, and financial outcomes. For PE backed operators, ETA searcher CEOs, and investors who want to move beyond dashboards to operational evidence this one is for you.

Show Notes 

Key Themes Covered in the Interview

• Why Operational Alpha Remains Elusive: Most organisations cannot see the operating system they are trying to improve. What mid-market companies typically have is tribal knowledge, spreadsheets, inboxes, manual workarounds, and disconnected systems. Humans fill the integration gaps between those systems, becoming the workflow engine, the source of truth, and the connective tissue. As complexity grows, visibility declines. Operational improvement requires visibility, measurement, repeatability, and intervention. Most organisations struggle to achieve all four consistently.
• Why Dashboards Aren't Enough: Dashboards report outcomes. They don't explain causality, decision paths, or operational lineage. A dashboard tells you what happened — it doesn't tell you where work stalled, where friction emerged, or which decisions produced the result. Finance solved this problem years ago through transaction lineage. Operations largely has not.
• Why Most Companies Cannot Prove How Revenue Is Generated: Revenue appears in financial statements as an outcome. The operating system that produced it often remains invisible. Critical decisions occur across people, systems, workflows, approvals, and handoffs, without a clear operational record. Key people become integration points, creating key man risk. Operational traceability seeks to answer four questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What caused it? Could we reconstruct it?
• The Missing Operational Infrastructure: The missing layer isn't another software platform. Aperture builds what Rachel calls a Digital Net — a digital twin of a business's revenue operations that maps every decision, workflow, dependency, handoff and revenue event across the organisation. The Digital Net feeds an Operational Ledger stored in a read-only warehouse, creating audit-quality transparency and an immutable log of business activity. The result is operational lineage: a clear record of how revenue moved through the organisation.
• Operational Traceability to Operational Alpha: Operational traceability changes the economics of growth. Traditional growth requires multiplying headcount (e.g.) more sales teams, project managers, operational coordinators. Every dollar of revenue introduces additional complexity. With the right infrastructure in place, revenue can scale without a proportional increase in headcount.
• The FedEx Analogy: FedEx can tell you where a package is, where it has been, where it is going, and why it is delayed. Most organisations cannot answer those same questions about revenue. Aperture's Digital Net borrows best practices from environments like FedEx and supply chain control towers and adapts them for mid-market businesses.

About the Guest: 

Rachel Lawler is the Founder and Managing Director of Aperture Growth, a firm that designs and builds bespoke Commercial Operating Systems for mid-market businesses. Prior to Aperture, she has extensive experience in private equity, GTM, and commercial excellence activities. 

Operational Velocity is for education and general information only and is not investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. The views expressed are the host's own, the company and figures discussed are drawn from public sources believed reliable but not guaranteed, and you should do your own research and consult a qualified professional before making any decision.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Great returns aren't luck, they're built on the floor. Operators and investors always pushing for more from the deals deep time to the systems in place. Speed without precision is just running a race. Operational velocity where execution sets the pace.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Welcome to Operational Velocity. Today's guest is Rachel Lawler. She's the founder and managing director of Aperture Growth, a firm that builds Bespoke commercial operating system using AI and automation to help middle market businesses scale revenue more efficiently, reduce operational friction, and gain greater visibility into how revenue is actually generated. Hope you enjoy our conversation. Hi, Rachel. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_02 0:54

I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for having me. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

I'm doing great and welcome to Operational Velocity. And uh maybe Rachel, we can start off uh if you can tell us a little bit about your background and experience to kick it off.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Great. Yeah. So I think just in terms of framing and what has really informed my point of view around this is over my 20-year career, I've been fortunate enough to sit on almost every side of the table, you know, when it comes to, you know, as a founder, as an operator, advisor, uh, part of the investor ecosystem. I grew up in a family-run industrial services business, you know, in my 20s. I founded two startups, both of which I eventually exited to private investors. Following that, I spent more than a decade in top-tier professional services, working in MA and deal origination, primarily servicing private equity clients. During that period, um, I deeply vetted hundreds of companies for potential investment and worked alongside deal teams that deployed more than three billion in capital across a variety of transactions. I later moved in-house to a sponsor side and spent time sitting ringside to restructuring, acquisitions, and value creation initiatives. What I realized fairly quickly was that while restructuring is important, um, my passion has always been about growth and scalability and operational efficiency. So in my 40s, I made a pivot, as you do. Um, and given my background was in deal origination, I initially considered going down the search fund path as a searcher. Um, but having already immigrated halfway across the world from the United States to Australia, I wasn't particularly thrilled about relocating again based on wherever an acquisition happened to be located. Yeah, and so at the same time, um, through my network, I had a number of opportunities to work directly with businesses on their front-end go-to-market systems and commercial operations. And that ultimately became the foundation for Aperture. So what started as a growth and commercial optimization practice has evolved into a firm that designs and builds bespoke commercial operating systems for mid-market businesses. And, you know, today, Aperture Today really creates a digital twin of how businesses generate revenue. You know, we map every decision workflow, dependency, handoff, and revenue event across the organization. And the result is a digital net that captures operational reality as it happens and transforms fragmented activity into a single source of operational truth, right? Long sentence there. A lot going on there, right? But the reason aperture exists really comes back to one observation. And that is after looking at hundreds of companies and billions of dollars of transactions, I kept seeing the same thing, which is most businesses could tell you how much revenue they generated. Very few could reconstruct exactly how that revenue was generated. And across founders, operators, management teams, and investors, I kept seeing the same pattern emerge regardless of industry, business model, or even stage of growth, right? So over the last few years, working directly with these businesses on their commercial operating systems, I've had the opportunity to, you know, explore that problem like much more deeply, you know, and that that's really what brings me to today's conversation with you.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

It's interesting because we share the same path of going from the entrepreneurship through acquisition and into the private equity world. I think they're very, very closely aligned, a lot of the similar processes. So uh welcome. So let's kick it off. So in previous episodes, I discussed about operational alpha. Uh we know alpha in traditional finance terms, but it seems that everything that's going on with the private equity industry, that operational alpha is now the new edge. And so when it comes to improving operational performance, why do you think so few organizations have a system to actually create operational alpha?

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Well, I think, you know, fundamentally it's because most organizations can't see the operating system they're trying to improve, you know. Um most mid-market companies lack an explicit operating system. You know, revenue, you know, exists as a financial outcome, um, but the operating system is, you know, that produces it is often invisible, right? And so what they have is tribal knowledge, oftentimes undocumented business processes. So you're reliant on people that have sat in specific departments for many years at a time to trust that they know what to do with the customer, trust that they know, you know, what need how they need to go to market. You know, they've got disparate spreadsheets that, you know, things live in people's inboxes, you know, they've got a variety of disconnected software platforms.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

And then a lot of tacit knowledge, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:54

So much tacit knowledge, right? And then and then they've got a ton of manual workarounds and everyone kind of does it a little bit differently. Um, but what I think the the fundamental issue is when it comes to that type of growth that you're looking to achieve when you acquire these businesses is that you've got humans that are filling integration gaps between systems, right? So they become the workflow engine, the source of truth and the integration layer. And as complexity grows, like that visibility declines. So you don't know what is actually happening in your business unless you have a really long and extended around the grounds meeting, meetings that, you know what I mean? And and that's time consuming and it kills people's efficiency. And um, you know, I think it's really, it's really hard to achieve operational alpha when the operating system itself is it's invisible, right? If you can't see it, how do you change it?

SPEAKER_01 6:48

And and this is a pattern that you've probably seen quite a bit with uh lower middle market, middle market firms, right? So there's not this operating system, a lot of tacit knowledge, systems that don't codify a lot of this knowledge. So you probably recognize these patterns early on through your experience.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Oh, countless times, right? And I think oftentimes, especially if it's you know, founders or uh second generation family businesses and things like that, it's just accepted that this is the way business is done. You don't get a lot of um external, like this is best in practice, even if it's outside of the sector, you should look at considering, you know, how to change your operating model for better efficiency. They just think that, you know, we're so busy chasing the revenue as it exists. Why take a step back and figure out how to engineer it, you know, using new technology that we have today to make us more efficient.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

And and do you get a lot of pushback when you kind of go into organizations? Because as you mentioned, a lot of a lot of companies will be founder-led and they've always done it this way. And that becomes a very expensive thing organizationally.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

So do you get a lot of pushback when you're Yeah, no, I think I I think that's a great question. And um aperture is not for everyone, right? The the client really has to be ready to go on a they have to be ready to change and on a transformation journey. And you know, we do our best to make it short and sharp. We build blueprints, we agree on those blueprints, and then we move straight into execution. And then we typically run that, I would say, legacy system alongside the new operating system until we have achieved kind of equal to or better than performance, which usually it's always better than, right? Because you're you're optimizing in some ways. But um, I actually spend a lot of time ahead of deployments to make sure that we're aligned in terms of what needs to happen and um and if they're open. If they're not open, that's that's not the type of client for this because we are so focused on building digital infrastructure, we don't just come in and consult. We don't say you should do it like this. You know, our the output of our very first phase of the engagement are very clear blueprints on you're currently doing this as a human. This is we need to, you know, put some decision logic behind some automation here, and we need to link it to, you know, a digital warehouse that'll show us that kind of visibility. So that is it's a very uh dramatic change. It's not you go in and try to convince Sally in accounting that she should manually go through this 10-stage checklist, right? Like that that's that's not what we're doing here. So um I think on the whole, we have been very lucky because most of the founders I work with understand the type of technology inversion that is happening right now with you know the kind of results that you can get. You don't just get a 10% uplift, you get a 5 or 10x return in a 12 to 24 timeline from reworking your system in such a way, you know, putting automation and AI in intelligent places, that why would you not do it? You know?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Some of these organizations, they have their metrics, they have their own reporting systems, and they also have these dashboards. Um, so how do you how do you actually um know that these uh interventions, whether it's technological or operational, they're actually moving the needle?

SPEAKER_02 10:23

That's a great question as well, right? So I think the the key part is we always get a baseline, right? So what what are the things that move the dial for revenue? In many cases it's bid velocity, right? So how effectively and how quickly you can get out to market. It's um a huge part of that is delivery. Are you delivering in a profitable way? And then it also comes down to that that cash collections piece of, you know, how quickly can you get that money in your account and move on to either the next phase or the next client? And so we establish very clear baselines for how business as usual is functioning. And then we have a very second step, you know, the second step, which is really around okay, we've introduced automation or AI given retrieval for your bid system and profitability analysis on previous matters that you have done to kind of inform how you get a much more um profitable engagement going for, you know, for how that looks. And and oftentimes um the jump post standing up these types of operating systems is so dramatic after you know there's been a business that's going long as usual that it's it's it's pretty undeniable. But we have very clear metrics where we say, okay, it what are our key decision nodes here? Is it bid velocity? Is it profitability analysis? Is it how quickly we can respond? Is it the quality of what's there? How much senior time is being poured into responding to market, right? Like some of the most unprofitable things that can happen are, you know, people don't actually think about how much it costs to acquire new work, you know, and if you've got founders and very senior people that are sitting in on every bid or going after every meeting.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Do you actually go into the organization? Um, do you make any organizational changes or is it just you let it run?

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Uh yeah. So in the blueprint phase, yeah. So there's two stages. First, we document um and create a blueprint of what is happening today. So um that usually typically happens in we use Figma, right? So it's very much like you would look at um the building plans for a house and would say, okay, um, you have this, this is your key target market, this is how you're currently going to market, this is the number of leads that you're engaging with, and then we step all the way through the go-to-market life cycle to say, okay, well, how quickly are you converting those leads? How effective is that? And so we we give them a picture of what happens today. And at each one of those decision nodes, we've got either a human that is currently at that decision node, or if they're using a software platform that they need to go in and okay, we need to construct a bid. All right, well, how long does it take us to construct a bid? And are we using other software platforms that are inputs into that? And so once we've got this is what it looks like today, then that second stage is okay, well, this is your future state operating model. And then we take that same plan, but in every possible place that has that human-level friction, we see if we can put either automated decision logic behind that or um any this is very basic, but you know, um, if you're on a sales call, are you scraping the transcript and having not auto-populate the CRM so that people aren't spending 30 minutes trying to, you know, dump everything that was in their mind back into a CRM system, right? So you do every um information capture point in the operating system and make sure that you know it's as frictionless as it can be and that the human itself is not spending time like feeding the beast. It's it's being captured through phone calls, emails, calendars, shared documents, um, voice notes for areas that you know there are things happening that you know you don't you can't typically create a digital footprint for. Great, create a foot, you know, a voice note, upload it into the warehouse. The warehouse has instructions on what to do with that kind of information.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

When you come into an organization, many of these organizations they typically have some sort of metrics or KPIs, uh reporting systems and dashboards. So do you look at those existing, let's say, reporting systems or even dashboards and go deeper? Uh or do you make any kind of prescriptive advice?

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Always, right? And I think the important thing is you always use as much of what is excellent as you possibly can so that you are building and enhancing. I think, you know, sometimes you'll go into an organization and they'll have 12 pages of a dashboard that no one reads and that they haven't appropriately audited what actually feeds into that, right? And so you always pause and take a look to say, okay, well, what what kind of things are feeding into this? Are these the appropriate metrics? Are they being captured like in the clearest, most straightforward way? Um, and then we go from there. But I always think short and sharp. I think you know, you need one master page to tell you if the act, you know, if if if the activity is there, if the conversion is there, if the delivery is is where it needs to be. And then again, are you collecting that cash in the time that manner, you know, that really matters, right? So I think when it comes to dashboards, though, like they are history. They don't necessarily give you the causation of why those numbers exist. And so that's really what we we seek to answer when we start, you know, working on things like operational lineage and making sure that every decision node along the journey to converting revenue is is captured, you know, with a digital footprint in some way.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Yeah. If dashboards aren't really enough, then can you go into the concept of this operational traceability and why does it matter?

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Yeah, so as we've just said, right, like a dashboard tells you what's happened, um, but it doesn't actually explain where work is stalled, where friction has emerged, or um which decisions really created that outcome, right? Um I think that finance has really solved this problem years ago through transaction lineage, um, but operations is largely has not. So, you know, we we've maybe touched on this a bit earlier, but the key points are, you know, you you can't improve what you can't see, you can't scale what you can't explain, you cannot automate what you cannot define or delegate something in someone's head. So, you know, when we're looking at why operational lineage is so important, it's it's because it basically provides the nuts and bolts of how things are getting done, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

When you look at like most investors, like they think they're buying customers, revenue, systems, processes, right? But what I have seen, especially, you know, when I come in on kind of day zero to help a new CEO, is what they've often bought is undocumented decisions and manual workarounds and invisible dependencies that were not clear during diligence. Um, and you know, that's very fragile. It's a fragile operating system. Um and so I think at the end of the day, right, that the challenge is really moving beyond dashboards to reconstruct why those operational outcomes occur. And I think let me just go back for a second. When we think about operational traceability, right, it really is that ability to reconstruct how business outcome was created, right? It's not just the outcome, but it's the sequence of decisions, workflows, approvals, handoffs, and actions that that really produced it. So that's what we're looking to do, is how how can we tell the story in a clear and definitive way that we haven't been able to in the past, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:18

What percentage of these companies actually have their processes formally documented? And do you go into the, let's say, uh process side? Because it sounds like when you're talking about workflows and traceability, uh, I would imagine that the process is very important in that, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Yeah, I love that you asked that question. Um, so we have Aperture has a diagnostic, it's a 22-question diagnostic that we we use um upon entry to get a very quick benchmark around things around uh enterprise value creation, is that being tracked? Is it visible operating workflows? What kind of rigor is currently there, what the existing tech stack looks like, and then how you're bringing all of that together. And so one of the questions we always have is um is you know, do you document your workflows? What does that look like? We've had about 50 companies, just over 50 companies in the last 12 months or so take this. Um and I would say, just off the top of my head, the last time I looked at it, it's less than 20%.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

And and those are with revenues between kind of um 20 to 200 million, somewhere in between those two, but yeah, less than 20%. And many of them don't see it as a problem because in these mid-market businesses, they have been there for a very long time, right? So they just think, why would we document this? Everybody knows what needs to happen. This is a waste of time. And so they kind of they bypass that. But what happens is you then then they want to introduce things like AI and automation.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:51

And then you're automating chaos because essentially you don't have a definitive what happened, why did it happen, what caused it, and can we can we reconstruct it, right? And those are the things that you need to have in place to get that kind of leverage from technology today.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

Absolutely. And that goes to the kind of the next question. So when you're looking at these these companies in the diagnostic or blueprint phase, what infrastructure is typically missing inside these uh companies?

SPEAKER_02 20:21

All of it.

unknown 20:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

And when we say all of it, right? I think it goes back to you know that operational traceability standpoint. And, you know, they are missing what is effectively a context layer, right? So they've all got a variety of software systems running inside of the business. You know, they're all disconnected, they've got CRMs, inboxes, proposal systems, right? The list goes on and on, right? I think the majority of businesses I work with have anywhere between eight and twenty different software platforms that they're running, anywhere from how we put a bid together, what our accounting software looks like, how we put our proposals together, you know, all of that, right? It's all disconnected. And so you you really need you need a context layer. And I think I think you and I have talked about this previously, but what I think is a great example of a business that has just really maximized that that context layer is are things people like FedEx, right? They have the operational discipline that gives you that kind of transparency, right? Like we can learn a lot by looking at organizations that have solved that operational traceability decades ago, right? You know, FedEx can tell you where a package is, where it's been, where it's going, why it's delayed, and and that level of visibility, it's not accidental, right? It's it's the result of a purpose built operational infrastructure designed to capture, track, and verify every movement through the system. And so that's what we're looking to build. For mid-market companies, right? It's it, if if you can apply the same principles to organizations like FedEx, you know, that they use every day and have for decades, right? You can apply how that works in terms of how revenue moves through business, you know, and that's really about how do we build that context layer, right? And I think we talked a little bit about this in the beginning, which is, you know, Aperture's digital net, which is that phase two of the blueprint, right? What where are we going for the future? Um, and Aperture's net really borrows many of these concepts from I think people like FedEx or supply, you know, chain control towers and adapts them for mid-market organizations, right? So we're not reinventing the wheel, we are just looking at other sectors and thinking, if they can do it, we can do it. And and that, I guess, with how inexpensive some of these automation softwares have become, some of the AI, right? Like if you're, you know, as long as you're not burning tokens for burning tokens' sake, like there are some really effective things that you can do today that will give you that kind of context layer that is bespoke, that can be owned by the company, um, and that will give you that visibility.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

And I'm a big fan of that, you know, it's it's like why reinvent the wheel? If there are supply chain control towers or digital twins, they've been around for quite a quite a long time. And I think what you mentioned something interesting now with the the technology cost uh essentially dropping and the availability to middle market, lower middle market companies to adopt this technology, why not? I mean, you could take the same concepts and the same principles and apply them to smaller uh companies. So it makes complete sense.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

It it's it's I think in the next three to five years that the businesses that are going to win are the ones that build these types of digital twins that are, you know, had that build their bespoke digital nets and have that activity available in a read-only warehouse, right? It it makes the whole it creates audit-level transparency. Um, you know, the infrastructure enables external parties to verify revenue generation systemically, um, and it basically eliminates the need for tribal knowledge in so many ways. Um I I'm this this is what Aperture is here for, right? To to ride that wave and build that bridge for companies that are really interested in doing that, you know, changing their operating models in such a way. And our primary focus is always on revenue, right? Like you could do this with costs, you could do this with HR, you could do it for any number of um facets of the business, but when it comes to valuation and quality of earnings audits, right, like revenue is where it's at in terms of my point of view.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

And I I think that the time is right for this type of thing because when you look at these companies of this size, um you mentioned it earlier that there's the tribal knowledge, a lot of tacit, tacit knowledge, and and that creates a key man risk, putting it in some sort of operating system and codifying the system. So if somebody leaves the organization or the founder is not there anymore, you can't rely on it, but the system is still there. In a way, it's the right time for organizations of this size, and the technology is becoming more uh available for companies this side. So maybe shifting gears, what are some of the operational and financial outcomes that are possible when organizations uh can see how value is being created?

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Operational traceability changes the economics of growth full stop, right? Traditional growth requires multiplying sales teams, finance teams, project managers, operational coordinators. Every dollar of growth introduces additional complexity. So operational infrastructure really changes that equation in many ways, and you get revenue that can scale without proportional increase in headcount, right? So, what does that actually look like from an operational outcome, right? It's increased operational visibility. You don't need to have X amount of meetings a week to talk to the team to hear what's going on. You get earlier identification of bottlenecks and friction points, faster decision making, reduced manual handoffs, um, improved bid velocity, greater forecasting confidence, faster onboarding for new staff around revenue generating activities, and this key point that you've raised uh many times, which is reduced key person dependency. So that's that's just one kind of view on operational outcomes. But when we think about those financial outcomes, that's where it really starts to matter, right? Because you have improved revenue throughput, you've got stronger EBITDA margins, you've got reduced revenue leakage, improved quality of earnings, more predictable growth, greater scalability, you know, that I think the list really goes on, right? You got high, and as a result, you get higher enterprise value. Yeah, for sure. And for me, that the bigger shift, right, that conversation moves from what happened to why did it happen, and eventually to how do we improve it? Because once a business can reconstruct how value is created, it can systemically improve how value is created.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

And and when you deploy this type of digital twin, who actually gets access to it? Is it the operating partners? Is it the is it the C-suite within the organization?

SPEAKER_02 27:43

Do So it depends on the business, right? So it depends on the business. Um, I I have like a construction business that I worked with where there's literally 12 people in the in in the office, and everyone can have a view of it, right? That that digital twin, the digital net that we build as a result, right? There I use them kind of interchangeably. Each one of those um decision node activities is logged into a read-only warehouse. And so we create a reporting layer that is fed by this read-only warehouse. You cannot edit it, and basically every day can tell you, okay, um, what were the sales outreach methods, what you know, what happened in delivery, what happened in cash, and everyone can see what those key activities are. Um, some of some of them, you know, the CEO is the only one who wants access, right? Because he himself is measuring, okay, in his mind, how effective the sales team is when it comes to execution-wise. Um, so I think it just depends on the culture of the company, how big the company is. Um, but most importantly, when you go to sell or you're preparing for sale, it's a really great um so Aperture's just uh created a partnership with a really wonderful mid-market accounting firm over here. And we actually now have a view that are specific for accountants and valuation people that come in to have a look at what those logs look like. And so that that's been a really great um outcome in terms of the development of what our read-only warehouse looks like, is we build it according to what those valuation metrics are going to look like.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

And what is the typical uh time frame that you start to see these benefits in value?

SPEAKER_02 29:25

It depends. So I would say in terms of the uplift of valuations. So, for example, my my my best case study at the moment is a construction company where it was about 17 million in revenue, and as a result of building this digital net and improving their bid velocity, improving the project delivery profitability in terms of making sure that we aren't wearing those expenses and that we can adequately communicate back to the buyer what's happening and why. For example, we thought the rock would be softer, you know, than it was, and instead it's incredibly hard. So we're deploying more labor and more materials to you know get to where we need to go for X, right? We're not gonna wear that estimate. We communicate it in real time, get them to sign off, so that kind of thing. So over an 18-month period, we took it from 17 million to well over $40 million in revenue by pulling those levers. Um, and so it's you know, it's a 3x improvement, yeah. In that revenue uplift, and that was without an increase in headcount.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

It it's it's incredible, right? Because when you look, they had one person sitting in accounting that did their bids, right, had been with the company for 15 years, everything was manual, everything was reconstructing, you know, the wheel from scratch every time, and then we got that bid velocity up to you know anywhere from five to eight responses to bids at local, federal, and state level to, you know, over an eight-week period, right? So again, the faster you can get out, you know, and be profitable, you know, instead of just being like, we're not gonna do a race to the bottom here, we're not gonna take on profitable work. We need to be able to communicate with the buyer in such a way that shows we understand what we're doing, but there is some variance, and and it's you know, we're gonna just be, you know, doing materials and plus cost and margin, and and and that's it, right? And so it really put them in a good spot um and actually really strengthened a lot of their client relationships because of that transparency that this operational traceability gave at both the delivery, you know, level, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Sure. And is this solution is it uh industry agnostic?

SPEAKER_02 31:36

It's industry agnostic, right? Because at the core of it, it's around um every company has got to find revenue, they've got to convert revenue, they've got to deliver, and they've got to collect cash, right? And manufacturing will be very different than um construction, it will be very different from professional services, but using that framework across those four categories is something that everyone has to do, right? And so it's it's once you get into the way the company currently goes to market and executes against each of that, right? It does become quite bespoke, but many law firms are similar in the way that they go to market, many construction companies are similar, right? So once you have the blueprint for how a specific industry looks, like it's become quite efficient.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

I think you answered some of these questions, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. So why should operators, entrepreneurship through acquisition searchers, private equity investors care about this space?

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Well, I think fundamentally revenue inconsistencies remain one of the biggest pain points in mid-market acquisitions, right? And investors increasingly want to understand how revenue is generated, whether it's repeatable, whether it's scalable, um, and whether it's dependent on key individuals, right? Like when we think about what people are selling or acquiring, you know what I mean? Everyone wants to know, okay, well, who wins the business, who executes the business, who keeps the lights on. And, you know, many times you have founders or people that have been with companies for a long time that are that are wearing multiple hats, right? Because a lot of these businesses don't have really substantial management teams that are built out behind them, right? Like everyone just pitch pitches in and you get that you get that momentum and hold on, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Yeah, yeah. Um and when you when you look at this uh in terms of the revenue and the nature of revenue, have you had any examples where you've taken, let's say, a project type of business, because you mentioned construction, that's a primarily a project revenue type of business. Um, have you touched the business model, like i.e. taking a project or repeatable revenue type of business and moved it towards recurring?

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Yeah, that's it. I love that you asked that because that is one of the things that we talk about, right? So um because you have because projects become more profitable, there is more appetite to stay with the client and then position for those ongoing maintenance contracts, right? So, you know, so just depending on like if you're building a parking garage or a sewer system or something like that, right? Like those are typically quite quite light maintenance projects that you would need for those sorts of things. But you know, if you're dealing with parks or other more like more community-driven things, um, you do see a lot of of follow-on. But you have to be, you have to set up that initial entry point so it's profitable in such a way so that when you have these small mid-market companies, they have appetite to stay with the client. Because a lot of them sometimes are just like, oh, this is this has been really hard. We've lost a lot of money, we need to plug the gap, and we can't do it with this client, so we need to go find a more profitable project.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Yeah, that's a that's a tremendous value. I mean, if you can also touch the business model and make the revenue more predictable, predictable cash flow, predictable revenue. I think that's a big, that's a big win.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

100%.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Well, this is this is uh fascinating, Rachel. And uh if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about your solution at Aperture, how would they uh get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_02 35:14

Well, I think first and foremost, if they feel that they are um, you know, they know there's friction in the business and they can't quite see where it is, I would recommend taking our aperture diagnostic. And so that's at aperture growthinc.com. Um, and so they can take the diagnostic or they can just drop me a line uh at my email, which is rachel at aperturegrowthinc.com.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

Well, thank you so much, Rachel, for your time and uh these valuable insights for for participating in Operational Velocity.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

I love it. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

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