A NRR growth mandate

A PE-backed B2B information business had been through a pricing consultancy exercise under its first owner, done to prime the business for sale. By the time it changed hands to a second owner, every number PE cares about looked strong. New business was up. AOV was up. NRR was high. Margins looked healthy too, partly because investment in customer success and product had been held back to protect them. On paper, this was a business firing on all cylinders.

But on the Substribe performance grid, the business sat top left. High NRR, but GRR slipping below where it needed to be. High NRR with low GRR is a warning sign, not a win. New business and AOV can paper over a GRR problem for a while. Margins can too, right up until the underinvestment they were funded by catches up with you.

One person looked past the dashboard and called Andy Burden in for fresh eyes.

They had a data analyst. A good one. When Andy Burden shared what the segmented data showed, the analyst didn’t push back. “We know this,” they said. The split was already sitting in their reports.

What they didn’t know was what it meant. They hadn’t worked out why a high performing NRR team and a low performing NRR team could clash violently, one quietly killing the business, the other quietly saving it. They tested the data like it was an inspection to pass, not a decision to make. One person had called it in. Nobody else had explained the impact to the business, because nobody else had understood it themselves.

The team celebrated for its high NRR was the one killing the business, growth built on borrowed revenue with GRR sliding underneath it. The team with the lower, less celebrated NRR was the one creating sustainable, predictable revenue, high GRR doing the quiet work nobody was rewarding. Blended NRR was hiding exactly the problem it should have revealed.

Anyone can have a GRR number. Anyone can have an NRR number. What nobody in that business had done was put the two together to read revenue quality, not just revenue size. That’s the whole difference between a metric and a diagnosis.

At the wrap up, Andy Burden said what NRR and GRR would look like next cycle. He got it right. Not because the numbers were predictable. Because the quality of the revenue underneath them was already visible to anyone reading GRR and NRR together instead of one at a time.

Anyone can look at that grid and copy the shape of it. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is knowing which segment to cut, which team to protect, and which time bomb is already ticking in your data, unnamed.

PE circles trust their own. Same pricing consultancy, every time, quality depending entirely on which partner picks up the phone and who they farm the work to. Same product builders who call themselves designers but have never sat with a customer or an operator. Same GTM experts who turbo the go to market engine without ever checking it’s connected to a problem the product actually solves. No one ever got fired for using them. Three blind spots, all trusted, all ticking on the same two year fuse.

That’s not an operator’s eye. That’s a rolodex.

I get cross functional teams talking outside their swim lanes, pricing, product and GTM looking at the same customer instead of three different ones. When PE stays inside its own circle, it’s making the same objection every team I work with makes when I ask them to change. This is the way we do things.

30 minutes, no pitch. If this sounds familiar, let’s talk it through.