00:11:05 · Dan Lifshits
But to me, it's effectively rather just a tactical go to market angle to buy the customer base and go kind of about buying it rather than just acquiring customers organically. Because a lot of traditional business services industries are described by crazy high stickiness of your customer base, making organic growth very, very hard and very, limited. That's why to build something truly meaningful and that scale, effectively acquiring the business and buying primarily the customer base in the virtue of buying the business is the only scalable way to go about it effectively. So that's why I think that between this borderline of payroll up with the technology or AI native kind of business of the new era that tactically grows as acquiring businesses, to me, the second definition will be kind of slightly more correct than than the first one.
00:11:50 · Constantin Schröder, John Reynolds
[00:11:50] S2: I would totally agree to that. Really, really well put. I think if you look at roll ups that have tried to to scale before these AI enabled roll ups, I'm looking at these Amazon ecommerce roll ups, I think that was completely different there. It's also why they failed because they didn't have this customer stickiness. And for them, it really meant taking a PE style approach to a VC kind of market suddenly, and where we are building a product and we have, I think for us, organic growth, if you look into kind of four or five years from now, would be 90% growth driver. Right now it's only to really scale the business quickly to get access to really strict sticky customers, and then over time we we scale our platform very organically. [00:12:30] S0: So it's not a... The AI roll up's not a long term play then, as you say. It's kind of a a short term, and then you revert to organic growth. And can you also... I mean, you've touched on this kind of AI injection. Can you just, each of you, talk about how you're actually injecting generative AI? Because, I mean, there's a big issue, isn't there, about businesses kind of struggling... Enterprises struggling introducing generative AI into...
00:12:52 · Dan Lifshits
[00:12:52] S3: I think that exactly talks about the difference of the definition, right? Because quickly answering your last question, I would say no kind of roll up is not kind of short term angle there. I think it's just one of the channels of acquiring customers. But we at each point of time sitting down reassessing which channel of customer acquisition is just best in terms of the capacity of the channel and customer acquisition cost. As simple as that. So the only moment of time when, for example, organic flips over to be just more efficient than kind of acquiring businesses, we'll start doing more of that. But it's effectively just you have marketing dollars and you're deciding putting them on Google or putting them on kind of Meta. That's exactly kind of for us going organic or going kind of roll up or whatever kind of that is. And I think to your question of the kind of tech adoption, that's partly to me underlines the, I think, philosophical difference between how to look at things Because kind of whenever you're trying to kind of just build a kind of transformation team side by side by your main team and try to adopt some changes into the business, etcetera, etcetera, it doesn't work. I mean, adopting technology is not by having a transformation committee where you meet once a week and just run by the checkbox exercise of like what has been done, what not. I think it's like quite a kind of founder led mindset of like how you can be looking at every process, trying to reengineer the process in the first place and make it as most efficient as you can. And I think that this is working on business services as a great battlefield because most of the businesses that we're discussing, whether it be kind of letting agents as property management or case rentals, accounting firms, law firms, tax advisories, are described by kind of highly labor intensive, very mundane kind of repetitive type kind of jobs that people are doing. Because usually in this industries, labor represents more than kind of usually 50, 60% of costs of the business.
00:14:28 · Dan Lifshits
And that's exactly where by enabling kind of the workflows and kind of the way that people deliver the service in their job, you can then kind of quite radically transform the efficiency and hence kind of for the same size of the team, you can just take on more business, not compromising on the quality of the service delivery that you provide. But I think that that's why it's crucial to kind of to own these businesses, because a lot of these businesses are quite traditional kind of business services type businesses that very rarely would be willing to kind of change its operational processes for the sake of adopting yet another, whatever beauty it looks like with a kind of nice AI and everything, but they would not kind of change its operational process to adopt yet another software. It needs to be other way around. Kind of they would be trying to buy a software that fully, like, plugs and play fits on their operations. And that's exactly why going full stack into owning the operational part and building the technology in house, you can try to merge the best of the two worlds together because you change operational process somewhere slightly, you change kind of technology somewhere slightly to achieve the same kind of common output result that you have. This is the best service delivery that you have to the customer. By trying to sell the services as a just like separate business to this kind of customers, it would be incredibly hard because they wouldn't be willing to change the way that they run things.
00:15:40 · John Reynolds, Dan Lifshits, Din Bisavak
[00:15:40] S0: Okay. Right. Dan, you... You've been... Can can you talk about... Can you kind of give us some color on some of the challenges you faced? And I think the idea of just trying to get to which I took some there was some of the challenges of integrating kinda AI into the... Generative AI into these organizations. And then, Sure. You [00:15:58] S3: And, I mean, I think that you can relate to that yourself. Right? I think [00:16:01] S0: that sorry. Can we... Dan, can we [00:16:04] S1: The the names are too similar. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. [00:16:07] S0: It's my accent.
00:16:08 · Din Bisavak
[00:16:08] S1: Don't worry. I mean, the funny thing is I heard the term roll up for the first time after we bought five or six companies. So to really underline what Dan just said, we started out building kind of the best possible property management system that existed. And the first thing we tried to do was actually to sell it to traditional mom and pop property management businesses. And in kind of that sales process, we learned that doesn't make any sense. Like the owners of those businesses, they won't buy any kind of third party software and then transform their own business. They actually want the opposite. They want the way out. They want to retire and they want to sell that business to someone who will actually do that. And that's what we then started doing. And obviously, you know, the first couple of times when we acquired businesses, we faced a lot of kind of integration challenges. You will face all the challenges that you think you will, from employees in the beginning being sceptic about the new ownership of the company to customers being sceptic about the new ownership of the company to employees being more or less stubborn on, you know, the processes that they have learned over the last fifteen to twenty years. But we have learned that essentially all of that goes away if you do one thing. And that one thing is working on a product that provides a better service to the customers. So if you can give the tools to the employees to provide a better service to the customers, the employees will be happy because all of the sudden, you know, the counterpart, like the customer that they're speaking to is more happy, the customer will be more happy because he receives a better service, and the business will be happy because the business has a better top line and bottom line in the end. So you will face all of the challenges that you can expect, and our main learning was it all can really only be solved through one way, and that's building the best possible product.