Burning the Boats:

A Services-to-SaaS Transformation

After 12 years, things at Revenue Analytics had gotten harder than ever. It was a successful consulting firm that was widely respected, growing, and profitable. We built custom pricing software for Fortune 1000 clients like Marriott, IHG, iHeartRadio and Kimberly Clark. It was a solid business with marquee clients. But we were stuck. We were so dependent on great people that we knew that the business would struggle to scale. And we believed that the software we designed could help far more companies than we could reach in a services model focused on custom development. The value we were creating for clients was not commensurate with the value we were creating for our people and our shareholders.

So we decided to pivot the business. We were going to burn the boats—there was no turning back.

The Starting Point

For 12 years, Revenue Analytics was a tech-enabled consulting firm. Our teams of data engineers, PhD scientists, and management consultants built custom pricing and revenue management software for enterprise clients. In the later years, every project leveraged our proprietary platform of analytical modules. The model worked. But it was not going to scale. We could see the ceiling.

The challenges were structural. Growth was linear and people-dependent. Revenue had reached $20 million annually. Gross margins hovered around 60%. But we knew that scaling further required finding, developing, and retaining exceptional talent. And, as always, exceptional talent was in limited supply. There had to be a better way to scale.

Making the Call to Pivot

We faced a choice: keep grinding out 10-15% annual growth, or package our experience and expertise into a scalable SaaS platform. Pivoting the business meant shifting the entire business model on the fly – we joked that it would be like changing an airplane engine in flight. But we decided that the upside of greater scalability and valuation multiples was worth the work… and the risk.

The decision meant conducting a Series A capital raise to build a product organization. In our consulting model, the top consultants were our primary sellers. We had a marketing person, not a marketing team. And while we had many capable software engineers, we lacked other product development resources like QA and DevOps.

More importantly, it meant bringing on operators who had scaled SaaS businesses before. A colleague told us, “You guys are smart, and you’ll eventually figure everything out. But people who have been there and done that can get you there much faster.”

Our Series A investors, Noro-Moseley Partners, helped us find operators who had scaled previously. Rodney Rogers had built two different software firms into billion-dollar unicorns. Alex Estevez had been CFO of Atlassian. Those operators introduced us to the SaaS metrics that matter: ARR growth, net retention, gross margins above 75%. Those metrics became our targets. We tracked progress against them through dashboards that our leadership team reviewed weekly.

Then came the hard work of outlining the transformational plan—new org structure, culture shift, brand repositioning, new skillsets, reimagined processes. Everything had to change.

Burning the Boats

The pivot moved slower than we hoped. Consulting projects competed with product development for resources. Classic innovator's dilemma. Then COVID-19 hit. Travel and hospitality—our core markets—collapsed overnight. Customers cancelled projects in waves.

Crisis became catalyst. We made the call to accelerate the pivot with a RIF focused on our consulting resources—painful, necessary—while simultaneously doubling down on building the product organization across every function. Ben Horowitz would call it a “burn the boats” moment. There was no going back to the old model. SaaS or bust.

Transparency was non-negotiable. The team needed to understand what we were doing and why. We called our vision The Flywheel: Sales, Marketing, Product, and Customer Success would work together to make it easier to sell new business, retain customers, and improve the product based on feedback. Each improvement would build momentum until the Flywheel began creating more of its own momentum. That's scaling.

Building SaaS Capabilities

The transformation touched everything. But it wasn't a checklist—it was a system. We launched a brand refresh that positioned us as a SaaS company. Product marketing shifted from custom solutions to outcomes-focused messaging. We built out a sales team and partnered them with subject matter experts. That helped us maintain the trusted advisor approach that had driven our previous success, while adding discipline around key metrics like engagement, pipeline targets, and coverage ratios. Customer Success developed the metrics, support processes, and QBR frameworks to drive retention. We brought in a new head of Technology who built scrum teams and expanded our capabilities with Product Management, DevOps, and QA.

The culture shift was the most critical piece. If we were going to be a SaaS company, we had to walk like one and talk like one. Roles and titles changed—no more 'strategy consultants.' The nomenclature shifted—'customers,' not 'clients.' Individual performance goals and comp plans all tied back to ARR, retention, and improved gross margins. We adopted 'the Duck Test' as our rallying cry: 'If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.' The duck was a SaaS company. We got everybody quacking together.

The key was adapting proven SaaS playbooks to our unique DNA rather than following them blindly. We honored the strengths that made us successful—deep domain expertise, trusted advisor relationships—while building the new capabilities required to scale. That's the pivot most companies miss. They either cling entirely to what worked before or abandon it completely. We kept what worked before as the foundation for a new model.

The Exit

By the end of 2021, the pivot was complete. We were growing at over 40% annually, and 100% of new revenue was SaaS recurring revenue. We crossed the $10 million ARR threshold—widely seen as the benchmark of a thriving SaaS company focused on scaling. Our gross margins had climbed above 75%, exactly where we needed them to be.

Capital was low after the investment in building a product organization. With SaaS valuations still strong but off their peak, the timing felt right to find a new investor. We launched a process exploring strategic acquirers, minority VC investments, and growth equity recapitalizations. Growth equity won—the structure would provide much-needed liquidity for founders and key team members who led the pivot while bringing on a partner with the right experience to accelerate scaling.

We chose Lead Edge Capital. Smart people, high integrity, and perfect experience scaling companies at our stage. Two years later, we crossed $20 million in ARR.

It was a new business. Pure SaaS. Burning the boats wasn't just a metaphor—it was the only way to ensure everyone on the team was committed to the same future. Looking back, the lesson is clear: transformation requires total commitment, experienced operators, and a relentless focus on execution.