Value Creation Growth Levers: Organic Growth

Andrew Horvath: Hello and welcome to the Alexander Group podcast series on commercial value creation. This is Andrew Horvath. I’m a partner with the Alexander Group working both of our private equity and manufacturing and distribution spaces. And we’ve got a great guest today on the podcast. I’ll let him introduce himself. But today we’ll be talking about organic growth as one of our four main levers for value creation. Before we get into that, I’ll let my guest introduce himself, Mr. Jeff Crane.

Jeff Crane: Thanks, Andrew, very much. My name is Jeff Crane. I’m the CEO of LGG Industrial. We are an industrial distribution organization, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with branch operations throughout North America. I’ve been with the company for a little over three years, spent much of my career here and spent six years in the industrial distribution wire and cable space before returning here to LGG Industrial in 2022. And a large part of our strategy here over the last couple of years and moving forward is driving the organic growth engine as fast as we possibly can. And excited to be invited to be a part of the podcast.

Andrew Horvath: Thank you, Jeff, we’re glad to have you here. And I think extremely relevant for what we’re talking about today. And just for our listeners, we discussed in our intro episode, there’s really four main drivers we’re looking at to be able to add growth to add value to our enterprise. So today’s organic growth. And I think that, you know, it’s something that we do here at the Alexander Group quite a bit thinking about how to grow market share or grow top line with our existing team. So the context of organic growth compared to some of our other levers, you know, there’s a way to use M&A to do things like enter new markets expand the product catalog. Add new customers. We’re not talking about that today. We’re talking more about can you convert new customers? Can you go expand your relationship with existing customers? And can you make sure to to really build a moat and retain our customers strictly by organic means? Right. That’s the team you have right now. That’s the investments you have right now. You’re doing things with that team without adding to it, you know, maybe some headcount adds. But that’s really today’s discussion. And you know, should be a very good discussion with Jeff. So let me start off by just maybe thinking through our concept, how we think about organic growth and bounce it off, Jeff, in terms of any nuance there. But I think I mentioned it earlier, there’s a couple paths to growth, and that is keeping what you have going deeper with existing customers and then getting competitive wins. It sounds really simple, obviously much more difficult to execute in the field. But does that ring true for you, Jeff, or how do you really think about just the the Charter of Organic Growth?

Jeff Crane: I agree completely in our business a lot of which is aftermarket MRO sorts of applications. The first order of business is taking outstanding care of the customers that we have. If we’re churning customers there, that makes the growth story that much more difficult, or the growth goals that much more difficult. So absolutely agree. The foundation is taking care of what we have, but understanding how and where we win, how and why we win, and sharing with the organization, with the sellers how to hunt for new customers, how to think about share of wallet growth and taking share within the customers. Where we have an embedded relationship already, that’s really the low hanging fruit. And then of course the new customers and expanding into new spaces is the next sort of concentric circle of that organic growth journey.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah. You mentioned something important, I think, where we do well with certain customers. You hear a lot of, you know, the alphabet soup of ICP and things like that. But ideal customer profile is a really important thing in a lot of businesses. Maybe talk about how you define that ideal customer in LGG’s world.

Jeff Crane: Our customers and our products are highly technical. They’re very specialized. They are put into a wide range of uses across a very diverse customer base. And so there isn’t sort of an ideal customer. But I think finding those customers that place a value on problem solving customers that understand the cost of poor performance downtime in their own operations are our customers that are eager to listen to a technical solution that understands the fundamentals of the application, the problems those premature failures can cause, the cost of those premature failures and an organization like ours and products and services like we provide that get at the heart of the root cause of those problems.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah, I think that’s it’s an important distinction. It sounds like more, you know, we’re going for more the partner versus vendor approach there.

Jeff Crane: Absolutely. And our relationships tend to be very sticky because those solutions are so expensive. The problems those solutions are solving are so expensive. The switching costs are quite high. And so as long as we’ve solved the problem effectively and we’re doing our job day in and day out to take care of that customer and maintain the relationship be responsive deliver on time. It creates a very sticky relationship. And so those are the ways in which we create that foundation of continuous recurring revenue streams. That’s the foundation upon which we can now go think about growing.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah. That makes sense. I think, you know, if you were to cut the, you know, customer performance by those that we think are really in that more ideal customer range, the ones that get our value prop really well versus those that are more, you know, maybe outside of it, but nice to have because they might be profitable just sort of being a vendor buyer relationship, I’d imagine that, you know, retention is probably a lot better. And that ideal customer group, probably don’t have the analytics to prove that right now, but is that a fair point?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, absolutely. The 80 over 20 rule, 20% of our customers are giving us 80% of our revenue, and those 20 customers are pretty consistent customers year in and year out. There’s always a little bit of ebb and flow based on what’s going on in their business. And, taking units down for repair and maintenance and that sort of thing. But yes, that group tends to be very, very sticky. And they’re the ones that place a high value on the solutions that we’re providing. That doesn’t mean we don’t have opportunities in that other group, but we’ve got to be a little bit more mindful of how do we make money, what solutions are we trying to solve, or are we just playing to, you know, sell product?

Andrew Horvath: Right, right. Do you feel like that? You know, the definition of where we think we play? Well, we have a right to win. Is that relatively commonly held throughout the organization all the way down to the cellar level, or is there some level of, you know, maybe disparity amongst who we’re targeting or where we think we do well?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, I think there’s, as you would find in a lot of organizations of this scale, there’s not one thing that we do well across the board that everybody sort of understands. And in this part of the world, it’s a certain there are some things that we do well, obviously, but it’s the pockets of strength that are the challenge for sharing across the organization. And so, you know, we sell one product very effectively, more consistently across our geography, but another core product category that’s not sold as consistently across that geography. And yet that product is a product that the customer is buying. The other core product would readily buy and are in need of. And so it’s it’s kind of sharing across our geography, across sales organizations the things that other sales organizations are doing effectively, either from a process standpoint or from a product solution standpoint that can be effective. And we’re still trying to get good at how we go about that, sharing and copying and pasting a best practices.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah, I think we’ve talked in the past about revenue operations being sort of the linchpin there. That can certainly help with some of that, but ultimately it’s execution, right? If we know there’s a playbook that works and some customer types across geos, how can we apply it to others? Right?

Jeff Crane: Right. That’s right.

Andrew Horvath: So in thinking about organic growth for those call those core customers the ones that really buy into our value prop. When we think about organic growth there, I can imagine it’s some combination of expanding the product bag. Right. Cross-selling is a pretty hot button issue for everyone. There’s probably an element of pricing in there as well. How do you go about that? How do you set the plan for some of those core accounts for the year? How do we think about organic growth within that group of some of our top accounts?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, we have in some of the industries that we serve and the customers that we serve within those industries, we’ve got a pretty sophisticated idea of what the potential is product by product. And so it’s not difficult for us to look at a seller’s portfolio and say, look, we’ve got a great relationship with these customers, but in only a single product category. And we know from what we’re doing with similar customers in other geographies, X amount in other product categories, those product categories have to be identified as opportunities. They have to be identified in our CRM system so that we’ve got visibility to them. And how do we think about or get very good at deploying the right resources, the right tools, at the right moments to drive those opportunities to close? That’s sort of how we think about quota setting at the beginning of the year. The identification of opportunities where those opportunities are in the opportunity funnel and in the sales process. And are we deploying the right sort of attention and the right sort of resources given where that opportunity is in the process?

Andrew Horvath: Makes sense. When you think about that, you mentioned there’s got to be that sort of heat map with a customer. If they’re a certain type of customer, they might look like another one. And where are the gaps in terms of what one’s buying versus the other one? You know, I imagine it’s a combination here, but when you think about setting that plan for the year and trying to go sell the next category or, you know, a product line expansion. Do you run into mostly awareness gaps, like we didn’t know LG did that. Is it a matter of trying to compete with someone that they use and trust and, you know, maybe have a bit of a risk to go away from? Or is it more of the the seller not seeing the value or seeing the paycheck of selling the whole product line? Maybe some combination of that? What do you think?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, it absolutely is a combination of that. I think from the inside out. I would say we’re we’re still evolving from a culture that was geared more around, let’s take care of what we have, not necessarily go after new to one that is more built around both from a compensation standpoint, tool and a structure and a process standpoint more built around how do we go acquire new whether whether it’s share a wallet with an existing or completely new. We’ve got to be more focused on growth. And the way I sort of think about that is, you know, if we were spending 80 or 90% of our time maintaining, you know, it’s I don’t think we flip that on its head. But if we could get to 50% of our time maintaining and 50% of our time growing, that’s a huge win in terms of the sales organization that we have. So it’s a it’s about an appropriate amount of time taking care of what we have and an appropriate amount of time thinking about and acting on and delivering on the growth promise. Once we get that internal culture reoriented, then it’s okay. How do we get ourselves comfortable with making cold calls? How do we arm them more effectively with information and tools about the kind of customer that they’re targeting, what sorts of products that they buy? Because of the experience we have with similar customers and other geographies, what applications should we be keyed in on? Because you walk into a chemical facility or a refinery or a steel mill.

Jeff Crane: Not every application is has the same criticality. Not every application is going to cost the same when it fails. And so we have the ability with our internal knowledge and our systems to point them to the departments and applications for the most likely problems are going to exist and help educate them so they’re knowledgeable and can speak authoritatively or at least intelligently about the applications and the departments they want to go to and discover what problems might be they might be having there. But, you know, our relationships with customers are sticky. We tend to operate in an environment where our products are a very, you know, low price relative to the, the, the cost to serve, cost to switch and same the same can be true for our competitors. So we’re facing that battle. There’s a bit of inertia we’ve got to overcome. And again you got to get the sellers comfortable with some amount of rejection. Continue to feed them information to help them be knowledgeable about where they’re likely to be most successful. And that’s kind of where we are in this journey. We’re still sort of early days but making good progress.

Andrew Horvath: You mentioned one thing about feeding sellers Intel or data on applications or, you know, cost of failure over your time. I know you kind of went had a break in the middle there from LG, but what have you seen the role of that seller change in terms of I mean, I think probably they were asked to do everything back in the day, and now it’s maybe they have a team supporting them, but maybe talk to how other roles have contributed to that seller in the organic growth context.

Jeff Crane: Yeah. In our world, you know, we got four main product categories. And I think it’s typical in a in a more technical selling environment, you have to accept the fact that it’s hard to stretch those sellers beyond one or 2 or 3 technical products. And so what we tend to find is our sellers are, are competent or very confident in 1 or 2 product categories, but not the other two. And so we do feather in product specialists and other strategic account managers and very technical experienced people within the organization in a particular product category to help those sellers when they’ve got opportunities. And that’s when I talk about deploying the right resources at the right time, depending on where an opportunity is in the process. That’s kind of what I mean. You know, once we’ve identified, hey, there’s a customer there in this business, this is what they do. I, the seller, need a little bit of help getting educated on where I should be going, where I should be looking. That’s where the product specialists and our industry specialists can come in and say, this is the department you want to look at. Think about these products in that application, because that’s probably more often than not where this customer is going to be having problems that we can help them with.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah, I think sounds like more of a team sport than in the past, right?

Jeff Crane: It absolutely is. And I think part of our process is getting really good and systematic about an opportunity has reached this particular point. Now is the time to insert those resources. It’s really a little bit of a the resources are there at a on a on a poll basis. The sellers are told, hey, these resources are available to you. Pull them in when you need them. But some sellers may be pulling them in at an inappropriate point, maybe too early in the process or too late in the process. And so, trying to get a little more systematic about how do we introduce those resources at an appropriate time where we’re more likely to be successful?

Andrew Horvath: Yeah, there’s we’ve heard quite a bit in the past about specialist abuse, where you’re roping them in for every little opportunity. And or there’s some, you know, they’re treated like a superstar when they come to the territory. You take them on a road show for everybody, but you’re not very specific about what opportunities to bring them in. And I think, you know, they’re not a cheap resource for the most part. So being intentional is probably the best way. Yeah. What about so you think about, you know, the current customers that are you know, maybe they’re multi-site or more of a strategic or national account setup. What’s the approach to maybe grow within the footprint there? That’s something we hear a lot from our clients is we have the relationship, we have the approved supplier contract, but they basically give us a license to hunt, and we have to go knock down those sites individually. How do you guys tackle that? Because that’s probably a pretty, I wouldn’t say easy, but more likely approach to organic growth and just turning on the next new big account.

Jeff Crane: Yeah. And if you’re not careful, you’ve got a team of hunters in the, in these strategic account roles that land that contract, throw it over the wall and they’re on to the next thing. And that’s where the execution breaks down. And we’re in the midst of talking about that as a part of making this more systematic. So because of our scale strategic account initiatives are really important to us. We think we’ve got a real competitive advantage when it comes to approaching those multi-location customers that you know, could cut across all of North America and being able to tell them a story about being a technical problem solver, not just at one location, but at all of your locations, that’s a that’s a key area of focus for us. But that license to hunt is, is an opportunity. The question is what do you do with that. And so as a part of maybe getting very granular about that process, we’re working with the strategic account team to identify or write a white paper about that account. Here’s what this account is. Here’s what they do. Here are the products that this this agreement or hunting license. License includes. Here are their locations. The corporate office has given us all of these contacts at these locations. And then personal outreach to each one of the AMS and their district sales manager with, okay, guys, here’s the contract, here’s your location. These are the key contacts you need to get in touch with within 30 days. We want to have calls and call reports from all of those contacts, and we want to be able to pull back and say, okay, where are we getting pushback or are we seeing competitive obstacles? Where are we getting buy in? What can we do to help? Because once you get that hunting license, the iron is hot.

Jeff Crane: If you wait 3 or 4 months, you’ve just you’ve lost the opportunity. So getting very good at getting that corporate buy in striking while the, the corporate folks that give us those hunting licenses, they’re moving on to the next contract as well. So their attention is on it for maybe you know, 2 to 4 weeks. And after that, they’ve moved on to. So trying to get really, really good at how we do that. And it should be easy, but it’s also easy to get distracted and not remain focused on getting the execution right. And so that’s what we’re really trying to we’re sitting down with our strategic account teams and some of our we’re using a few of these hunting licenses as case studies. All right. How do we need to do this so that we’re maximizing the opportunity. Because ultimately, we’ve made this investment in a strategic account team. We need to get value out of that. But we need to hold the sellers accountable to execute well. We need to also give the sellers what they need to be able to execute. And that’s where we’ve got to hold the strategic account team accountable for giving them the tools, give them the information that they need to go make the calls. Then I can hold the sales organization accountable for doing what we need them to do to make contact and try and get some momentum with those accounts.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah. And I mean, not a cheap role either. That strategic account manager can be maybe the most expensive salesperson in the organization. Right.

Jeff Crane: Yeah. These are its significant investment that we’ve made in a, in a team of more than a dozen people. It’s a significant part of our business, the fastest-growing part of our business. So these are the right investments to make. But and that’s the story for the sales organization as well. These are customers that grow faster in their own markets. They’re consolidating their own markets. They’re going to grow fast. We’ve got a proven track record of decades of faster than market growth with these particular types of customers. This is why we do this. This is why we do this, and it’s why we need to do it better than we did it a year ago, or two years ago, or three years ago.

Andrew Horvath: That makes sense. Do you? I mean, we hear sometimes mixed reactions about we did a case study. We solved the problem for a plant manager in, you know, upper upstate New York. We want to have that pier in Texas, look at that and say, I’m going to do the same exact thing. And some of our clients do really well. Others maybe don’t have that. Can’t nail it. But do you feel like that whole connecting what you did for one pier to another pier, does that work pretty well? Or what’s the secret sauce there?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, we made the transition a long time ago from, you know, these very large, sophisticated customers are the ones that are on sort of the cutting edge of total cost of ownership and knowledgeable about, hey, we know that downtime at this plant costs us $50,000 an hour or whatever it is. So those are the customers that are driving us and sometimes contractually obligating us to document total cost of ownership savings. And so, you know, when we first began responding to those demands from the customer base. It became a, hey, we’ve got to do this. We got to do this because we’re contractually obligated. Well, it didn’t take us very long to realize that each one of these total cost of ownership documents that we give to the customer have them sign off on that. Saving them six and seven figures is a sales tool for us. And so we’ve got a repository of all of those TCO documents across all those customers over the last 20 years. That is a repository for our sales force to you know, if I’ve got a seller that’s going to go to a pulp and paper processing facility, they can go into that database and look at all of the total cost of ownership reports that we’ve done in the last 12 months for wood pulp and paper processing facilities and begin to, you know, help them hone their point of attack at that, at that target customer.

Andrew Horvath: Okay. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good foundation for any good account plan or any good pitch, I imagine. Yeah. Okay. So I mean that all makes sense in terms of I think we talked earlier about how we sort of build a moat around these more important core customers, how we look to expand the relationship. Maybe switching gears a little bit to looking at brand new prospects. I think we talked a little bit about awareness. And, you know, this is it rings true for me as a, you know, one of the consulting firm that tends to punch above its weight but is not in the top ten in the industry in size. We always suffer from a bit of an awareness gap and understand how hard it is to break through there, but is that an issue for breaking into new customers? Is it a matter of the value prop to displace the current incumbent? What do you guys feel like is the biggest hurdle there for bringing net new to the business?

Jeff Crane: I honestly think the biggest hurdle is ourselves. It’s identifying those right opportunities because we’ve got we know we’ve got the right and the opportunity to win there and then getting out of our own way to go make those calls and get over this. I’m used to spending 80 to 90% of my time maintaining I’m not comfortable doing that. So we’re in the process of getting over that hurdle. I think once we get over that hurdle it’s not so much awareness because we were one of the larger players in our space, these customers, you know, if they’re of any size, they’ve heard of us. We’ve called on them before. But it’s inertia. It’s getting their attention. And that’s where, you know, these TCO documents, knowing applications and problem areas inside of plant become so important because it allows our, our, our sellers very early on to begin to focus on areas that may or may not be a problem. And, you know, if those aren’t a problem and they’re not having, you know, maybe then we can move on very quickly to the next. And it doesn’t mean we ignore that customer. But, you know, maybe once every six months we come back. And any problems in this department? Anything we can help with over here? I think it ought to help with the speed to revenue. And sometimes speed to revenue means not grinding our gears at an account. That doesn’t. It doesn’t present an opportunity today.

Andrew Horvath: Right. Yeah. No one to fail fast, right? Yep.

Jeff Crane: Yep.

Andrew Horvath: How do you see some of the other, maybe complementary roles? And it could be marketing? I imagine we’re not using, like, AI outbound SDRs in this space yet or ever. But what’s your take on, you know, some sort of a business development associate to help out with that, that top of the funnel?

Jeff Crane: Yeah. So our, our our first step, as you know, was to invest in an inside sales organization, which is a capability that we did not have. So we’re, you know, a year and a half, two years into that part of our journey trying to learn as much as we can. There’s a little bit of going after dormant accounts, a little bit of going into new markets and certainly into new geographies where we don’t have, you know, branches or our sellers are too remote. We are just now in our 2026 budget, investing in business development resources in a couple of markets to test how that works, how we develop KPIs monitor the leads that are handed off. How do we, you know, not only monitor. You know, if you think about handing off a strategic account opportunity, it’s something else to hand off. Just a random opportunity. We want to make sure that those are warm leads. We want to make sure that they’re worthwhile and that they’re going to the right resource. So, you know, it’s got to be sizable enough to go to a field salesperson. If not, maybe it’s appropriate for an inside seller. So we’re just making those investments today but think it’s a great way to extend our reach. And, you know, as we think about investments in inside sales, we’ve made the initial investment and we plan to build on that initial investment and this investment that we’re undertaking in these business development resources is just an initial investment. And we expect to make much more in the future. I think we’re at a point where we want to start slow, but then scale fast as we get smart and we learn how to do it the right way.

Andrew Horvath: Is that effort, that BD effort, do you feel it’s going to be targeted to a particular segment? Geo I mean, you guys are nationwide, so it’s not like you’re shut out of any particular geographies. But do you see that BD or pointed at any particular cut of the business?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, we’re doing it in a particular region of the business as a pilot and pointing them at a, a particular industry or 2 or 3 where we’ve identified pockets where there’s 150 locations that we do business with. Well, there’s another 900 locations in those same industries that we aren’t doing any business with or doing. We’re underrepresented. And so that 900 becomes this, this feeding ground of, okay, let’s make some phone calls, see if we can’t elicit some response and then hand it off to the appropriate resource to try and close some sales.

Andrew Horvath: Okay. So that’s I mean, if you think about that compared to M&A, sort of the alternative would be go in there and spend a bunch of money to buy a provider that hits on some of these big sectors in a particular region. This might not have the same immediacy, but the cost profile is a lot more attractive. And it sounds like we think we can get some good, you know, really expand the top of the funnel with this joint effort.

Jeff Crane: Agreed. Agreed. Okay.

Andrew Horvath: How about, you know, obviously organic growth. We can sell more stuff. We can bring on more customers. There’s also the pricing angle. Interested in how you guys wrap the pricing strategy into the whole organic growth story?

Jeff Crane: We have been invested in sort of bolt on pricing tools for a long time. So we’re pushing price guidance to our sellers and our customer service people on a, on a frequent basis. And so, you know, when we think about organic growth or we talk to our sellers about organic growth and quota, we make clear that that we’re talking about price as a part of that price is a part of how they’re going to achieve an above-market growth rate, right? So if they aren’t taking advantage of the tools that we’ve invested in, then their hurdle becomes that much higher for true unit growth, share, wallet growth, new customers, prices got to be a part of that equation if we’re going to consistently drive above market growth rates. So our message to the sales organization over the last couple of years, we didn’t really have there wasn’t a ton of transformation. We’d already done a lot of segmentation work. We’d already done some pricing work. This was more about orienting the team around growth. And our message to them was, look, we’re going to demand different things of you. And in return for that, we’re going to give you different tools to be successful. And so our investment in CRM, our investment in these BD resources in the pricing tools is all an effort. Or, you know, us keeping our end of that promise that we’re going to ask you to think differently about how you do your job, how we measure your effectiveness in your role. But we’re going to invest significant money in tools to help you be more successful in that endeavor.

Andrew Horvath: Is that I mean, not everyone’s growth-oriented. I think some people are maybe happy to do what they’ve done in the past just sort of managed to a level of income there. But how is that change in culture received by the team? And it can be of different levels, different roles. But, you know, what’s the vibe you’re getting from making that big change?

Jeff Crane: Yeah. I mean, I think on the surface they understand it and they accept it. The turnover rate has been very low in the, in the process of implementing this change. But now we’re moving into a, into a phase where we’ve got to begin to hold people accountable. Look, we’ve given you these tools. You need to use these tools. Other sellers and other districts are more compliant to the price recommendations than the sellers in this district. Why is that? What can we do to get the compliance level up? And beginning to just share across districts and across sellers what are the best practices. And there’s always going to be deviation. And you know, our pricing authority resides very close to the customer. And we’re okay with that. But now the impetus is not is on us to hold people accountable and drive the sharing of best practices and try and move that center of the normal distribution curve to the right. The teams embracing it, I think are our challenge is, as you and I have discussed, is really in the management and the accountability of it. And that’s kind of where we are. And how do we drive that forward. We’re making great progress. But there’s still work to do. And that’s, that’s where the, the next level gains are going to come from.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah I think we have talked about this. And it’s one of those where things like pricing strategy are I wouldn’t say easy, but they make sense mathematically. They’re taking input costs and adjusting how much margin we’re taking. But it’s the execution of a lot of those programs that is a little bit more hairy because it’s all about people and it’s, you know, sales managers making sure that that’s distilled to the frontline sellers. It’s, you know, having our sellers be better advocates for ourselves versus negotiating price on the behalf of the customer, which happens a lot. That’s where it’s sort of either made or broken, right?

Jeff Crane: Yeah. It comes down to trust. I mean, we’re asking them to trust a system, telling them that the price that they’ve been charging their customer may not be right. And that’s, that’s, you know, we’ve got to prove to them that they can trust the system. And, you know, as is often the case, we’re you know, we don’t place as high a value on the value of our products and services as we should oftentimes. And so it’s helping them trust. And again, through sharing, you know, we’re not giving you some random market-based feedback on what the price ought to be. We’re telling you what our team members and other districts are selling these products for, and so that ought to give you confidence and help build trust in the system that, you know, you can comply with it more often.

Andrew Horvath: Yep. On that note, you mentioned providing some help for the sellers. There’s always a question about what’s the best investment allocation to drive organic growth. I know I started off by saying we’re doing this with a team that we have obviously year to year, we add budget to go either hire new salespeople or try to enter new markets, you know, hire a new marketer. How do you think about when you’re looking at the budget for next year where some of those additional or incremental investments in the I’ll say, go-to-market team. Right. Sales. Marketing. Service. Revenue. Operations. What’s your thought process about how to best allocate those investments?

Jeff Crane: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, over the course of the last couple of years, that investment has been far more heavily weighted toward tools CRM pricing tools. Now we’re moving into the phase of introducing new functions to the team, revops, this business development resource I’ve talked about contract management and pricing teams to help us with, you know, that that big part of our business that is multi-location contracts and sophisticated RFQs so it’s more around people and I would say not necessarily expanding the frontline seller organization in 2026 so much as investing in additional support resources to drive extend our reach and drive leads to that organization.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of what I’ve seen resonates. It’s not, you know, maybe ten years ago. You’re saying we’re going to if we have a couple million bucks, we’re going to go add 5 or 10 new sellers. And for some organizations that are more in that fast growth, low revenue baseline approach, maybe that does make sense. But I think for a more mature organization like yourselves, it tends to ring true. It’s, you know, invest in tools, maybe not go crazy with AI just yet, but maybe invest in some automation. But you guys do a lot with revenue operations too. Maybe link the RevOps function with your plan for organic growth. How much does that contribute to it?

Jeff Crane: I think the revops function for us because we are so decentralized. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s making sure that as we adopt a new sales process, as we adopt these tools, as we begin to look at the utilization of those tools, what you know, what behaviors and activities are more directly correlated to successful Full outcomes you don’t want. Your district managers and our region are all discovering that on their own. So the rev ops organization is that one source of truth, that one source of us consolidated KPIs, consolidated tracking of the sorts of behaviors and activities, and we’re not we’re trying very hard from a DevOps standpoint, not to be prescriptive in terms of how many calls that we expect to see. How big does your funnel need to be? We’re and we’ve purposefully and deliberately held back from being prescriptive so that we could take the time to develop our own baselines and our own success factors. And now, rather than sharing some forgive me for the consultancy speak, but if it’s not a number that a consultant consulting firm gave us, it’s our company. These are the funnel sizes that are appropriate for our top quartile performers. This is the call activity that our top performers exhibit that I think is going to resonate really, really well with the organization. And that’s where our rev ops is living and breathing today is how do we understand those best practices and share them with the organization. That’s kind of how we’re thinking about that tool today.

Andrew Horvath: It makes sense. I mean, if you’re there’s only so much that a seller is going to take from industry best practices. And I say that and we cite that a lot, right. That’s sort of the foundation of a lot of our work. But when you get to the point of where it actually means something to the seller, it’s got to be from an allergy perspective, who are the best? What are the activities, the behaviors they’re exhibiting? And can we sort of cut and copy or copy paste that to somebody else? Yeah, I think it’s I mean, it also kind of underscores the idea that the rev ops team probably has a better handle on ROI of the next higher in a certain group or department or team than, you know, the average person on the street does.

Jeff Crane: That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Andrew Horvath: Well, certainly covered quite a bit in a, in a pretty fast-paced approach here. So you know, talking to Jeff about, you know, the elements of organic growth, you know, hitting on things like protecting our core accounts, the strategic account play. Certainly, bringing the team sell. We talked a lot about the new business function of maybe increasing funnel size with other marketing or BDR resources pricing as a lever and organic growth, revenue, operations, sort of keeping score, but also advising on investments. But as Jeff, before we break here, anything that we didn’t mention, that’s a plank in the platform of organic growth for LRG.

Jeff Crane: I don’t think so. The one that is somewhat unique to organizations that are in the M&A space is that this touches on M&A, but it’s really not it’s how do you grow that organization in that business? Post-acquisition. And what I mean by that is we’re acquiring businesses that are bringing something to us in terms of capability vendor relationship, a new product category. And our intent isn’t just to have that business do that in their existing space. Right. We’re doing that to expand that throughout the organization. And so, not unlike our industry or application knowledge within a particular plant where we’re trying to use these tools to take the particular capabilities, industry knowledge, solutions that these acquisitions provide and grow those organically within the company as well. And lots of challenges with that. There’s lots of education and training and awareness that we’re trying to drive just internally. But those are huge levers for us to pull and very successful ones.

Andrew Horvath: Yeah, it’s a good point because I think at some point it where you draw the chalk line is does it qualify as organic growth or M&A. Once you acquire that business, be it, you know, for their customers, for their product, for their geographies they serve, at some point you have to grow that organically as well. So I think the integration, you know, taking what works for them and sort of mainlining it, that’s all I think really helpful to especially in acquisitive companies.

Jeff Crane: Yep, yep.

Andrew Horvath: Well, good. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today. Like I said, learned a lot from you. I think it’s good to bounce some of these theories and concepts off someone who runs the business on a day-to-day basis and runs it quite successfully, I might add. But, folks listening, thank you very much for your time. We will be back with our next installment. But until then, thank you very much and talk to you soon.

Jeff Crane: Thanks, Andrew. Bye.