Professional Services

“The typical way that SaaS-type businesses, like software-style businesses, were built, scaled, and sold in the past 10 years was not going to be the same formula that was going to work in this new age because AI requires a ton more professional services, almos…”

“Ultimately, I think legal is a precursor to AI swallowing professional services as an industry, and it's a bumpy road, but you know, lawyers do their homework, and I think that they'll net out looking pretty smart for doing so.”

“And I think to your point, the scope of this, like legal is a trillion professional services is something like three to five trillion.”

“Selling them as service, even though the technology is powering it on the back end, is the fastest way to get your foot in the door. It's what they know how to buy.”

“You will find that high performing salespeople will also add on professional services, but it's not just because they're selling more, which they are because they're high performing salespeople. It's the way they position that they usually position it as an in…”

“Historically as well, professional services used to be sold on a revenue multiple. And there was a lot of M and A in that space in the UK at the moment in, in, you know, lawyers, financial advisors and accountants. And they used to be bought on a multiple of r…”

“I think that I've seen actually, as I've kind of gained experience and worked in professional services for longer and worked with lots of different businesses over the years, the deadlines often are nonsense, right? And it's a, you know, best endeavors type si…”

“So our professional services organization is a single digit profit margin business. It is not something wall street cares about in terms of our services revenue. It's an enablement function. It remains profitable, but at a low margin. So we're not losing money…”

“My strongest piece of advice, try to delay venture capital or any kind of capital raise money as far as you can. Sometimes it's hard. One way to mitigate that temporarily is, is by selling PS, right?”

“Companies put money in and that sort of creates skin in the game. They're really paying you less for the professional services and more for the accountability and the access to the expertise.”

“If you look at UiPath, UiPath, when they went public, they had 47% in professional services of their recurring revenue.”

“This kind of attention to detail is what separates juniors in the mid-level from the senior people, because it says, I take my craft really seriously, and people put a value on this. People out there are selling their services to other people on an hourly basi…”

“My learning on professional services is you're an idiot if you don't charge for professional services. You know why? As long as it's 20% or less of your revenue, you get full credit for it, and all the customers will pay it.”

“Client services, professional services is always the easiest business to get into and the hardest business to get out of.”

“Oh no, wait, wait. Less than five percent.”

“25% of our business is in In professional services, and the 75% is in pure SaaS, so.”

“No, we do not do professional services. We are against this model. We think it's not good.”

“The risk adjust returns to being in professional service is like, Managing consulting or banking or private equity are great. But you know, because they're great, I view them as like temporary. And so, you know, I'm looking at it and I'm like, in the long run,…”

“We found the right balance was about 10 to 15%. So like if we, if in our products, if like, you know, people are buying, let's say they're spending a million dollars with us on the software and they spend like, you know, a 100,000 dollars or 10 to 15% on it, o…”

“While services from a unit economic standpoint may be, you know, a little more expensive from a margin standpoint, if it drives very large deals with software margins, you come out way ahead.”

“Now, professional services isn't the type of business any vendor wants to be in. It's just very low margin, right? For every dollar that, you know, the customer buys, you've got to put a body there and you've got to pay for that body.”

“So, if you come from a services background, you treat services as a revenue stream. You start building products that require lots of services, and that's a bad product. Like, it turns out that that's almost the definition of a bad product, is it's really heavy…”

“The reason we do professional services is, frankly, not to make money, but to ensure that our customers get to value faster. And that's that helps tremendously.”

“Professional services are dangerous for sort of two different reasons. I think one side, as you put it, is that, you know, have this margin issue, right, which is the margin you're going to generate on professional services is not great, and that business does…”

“Quite frankly, we see professional services revenue as a fail.”

“The pro services side of our business is relatively small, because our software actually is pretty, pretty robust in terms of its the resources it has and the ability for people to figure out how to use it. Probably only 10 to 15%.”