We're good? Okay. There we go. Perfect. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us in this next session of the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald. I lead Needham's healthcare IT research efforts here at the firm. And with me in this session is Definitive Healthcare CEO Kevin Coop and CFO Rick Booth. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having us.
For those of you in the audience, thanks for joining us as well. This is a fireside chat session, so we've got about 40 minutes to go through a list of questions for the Definitive management team, but we'll leave the last five to 10 minutes open for some audience Q&A. So if you do have questions for Kevin or Rick, we'll leave some time and make sure to get those asked and answered. With that, let's dive right in. So to start, there's likely some new faces in the crowd here that are probably new to the Definitive story. So how about we start with a brief overview of the business?
I can take that.
There you go.
I've been here the longest. Jason Krantz founded Definitive Healthcare back in 2011, and he's still actively involved as our Executive Chairman. He loves to solve really gnarly problems, and so one of those problems was penetrating the very opaque U.S. healthcare system to try to understand who you need to get to to take a specific type of decision. He realized that this was an intractable problem. It was devastating salespeople's efficiency, and so he set out to build, in effect, a map of the U.S. healthcare system, and like all such things, it evolves over time. Started with reference and affiliation data, mapping each one of the millions of healthcare providers in the U.S. and tying that appropriately to the mapping analogy to their location and the type of practice that they were doing and the technologies that they were using, well, that took off.
He self-funded it from the jump. And over time, we've expanded from that core reference and affiliation data such that now any customer who wants to sell into the U.S. healthcare system or compete within it is a potential customer of ours. We combine that unique and proprietary reference and affiliation data about who does what where with deep insights derived from third-party information like claims through our own unique and proprietary analytics so that when a salesperson gets a moment with a chief medical officer or one of the senior executives, they can speak very specifically to their needs. So that's why we're here. It's a big problem. It's a $10 billion TAM. There's obviously a lot of cross currents right now between biopharma and healthcare, but we're very excited.
That's great background and context, Rick. Thanks. Kevin, you're obviously new to the story or new to the company and joining about six months ago. I think investors would love to hear sort of your perspective of the business and what the company does well as you've evaluated, what needs to be improved, and sort of the processes maybe you're putting into place to sort of reinvigorate growth with Definitive.
Yeah, sure. So over the last couple of decades, I spent most of my time primarily over the last, say, 15 with a gentleman by the name of Bill Foley at Cannae, really looking at distressed businesses that needed to return to growth. Most recently Dun & Bradstreet was one which we privatized. Before that, it was Black Knight, which is now part of ICE, ServiceLink, and a number of others. And there was a large number of companies over those years that we acquired, integrated, and either integrated or spun out. And most of those had characteristics in common that there were certainly distressed aspects to it, like you're losing money or your customers hate you and you have other challenges that, frankly, Definitive didn't have. So we had a solid balance sheet. We have a solid balance sheet.
It's a very profitable business data asset that, through the early stage which I've proven coming in, is very solid, our core data that we've created, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about that and how that's differentiated. I think our people are pretty solid across the board, especially in the customer-facing side, and so a lot of the aspects that you would expect to find when you look at Definitive's performance over the last couple of years really aren't there, and I thought, well, that's interesting, and I think that's a good basis to start from.
It's primarily a product and go-to-market reinvigoration, which sort of lends itself to what I think I was best at and taking this current stage of growth, which has gotten us to $200-250 million in revenue, but really with more sophisticated data delivery methods and with more of a kind of a modern and sophisticated approach around your distribution by bringing partners, co-opetition into play and some more efficient ways there, which are already underway. So it was really a question of looking at a lot of what went well and not having a real good understanding of why isn't the growth there. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that, but I was very optimistic about it and pleased to report back after six months that a lot of my thesis and hypotheses were proven to be correct.
Nice. Maybe starting on the product side, so you've talked about learnings calls as well. One of the learnings since joining is related to sort of Definitive's acquisitions, Monocl, Analytical Wizards, Populi, CareVoyance. These have all brought really exciting data to the platform, but in many cases, it's siloed and there isn't sort of a unified UI/UX for it. You're looking to change this to a common unified platform rather than individual products going forward. So how's development gone on this front? And are there any bogeys to kind of throw out in terms of milestones on this product development journey?
Yeah, so I think the first thing on the platform, and I mentioned this on an early call, and it was a little more controversial than I thought it was going to be because I was thinking platform with a small P, not platform with a big P. It wasn't building an operating system. It's more around you need to have a way once you've acquired certain assets that your customers can more easily access it through a single sign-on and common UI/UX, which is what we're doing. And some of the acquisitions that we've acquired, for example, Populi, which is the user interface, is already well underway. We've already brought that to providers. It's being deployed right now into diversified. And next up, it'll be areas like life sciences and others. So I think that process isn't really new. It was underway.
The second part of it is we have the capabilities already in the business for things like master data management, digital activation, adjacencies around things that we're going to be doing more. So we don't have to build those. It's just we have to do more of them quicker. So that's sort of what I kind of inherited coming in. The good news is a lot of them are moving forward through the pipeline. We're doing less in a way. We're doing simplification. So we're trying to do fewer things, but better and quicker. And then just simply maximizing some of the opportunities around primarily the go-to-market, API, master data management, and activation.
Now, churn has been an issue which has been somewhat out of Definitive's control given sort of the ongoing macro pressures in the pharma and biotech space. That said, you've had a clear indication from customers that they want to do more with the Definitive data set, and so I'm curious, is a common platform architecture the answer to the problem and sort of making the progress you're making sort of more important or a completion of these initiatives sort of the key to maybe unlocking some of that reduction in churn and expansion within the base?
Yeah, I wish it was a simpler answer, but the answer to that is both. So if you have a common and a single sign-on UI/UX, you need that for mid-market and certain segments that want to consume the data in a curated fashion and a very easy-to-access user interface. And if you have more than one product, it makes sense that you need to be able to access all the products that you're purchasing through a single interface. You don't want to go through multiple user interfaces. So the commonality of bringing that together in the small P platform on the front end is important for those customers. The doing more also extends to the larger enterprise customers that don't necessarily want to access the data through a UI/UX.
They'd rather have it directly with an API into their data lake, and they want to do more insights and building and linking of that data to both first-party and third-party data, which we also provide today. We've got scores of people that help with complex data analytics on the back end with larger, whether biopharma customers or providers, and doing more means helping them to do more around the mastering of their data for better insights.
Yeah. Part of the, I guess you could say the churn issue was there was a lot of competitors trying to cut price probably in an environment where funding was a little bit more fuller. They're privately funded companies. As that started to slow, though, those customers have realized a low-cost alternative isn't, let's say, a good enough option. And you start to see some competitive win-backs there. So I'm curious, are you focusing the sales efforts at all, given some of the early success on competitive win-backs, towards really going back some of the lost customers and trying to bring them back onto the platform? Is there a concerted effort there?
Oh, for sure. I mean, we have a very robust value delivery and customer success organization that's responsible for doing that. But an important part of that is your go-to-market that once you've sold and entitled a new customer, you need to make sure that you're delighting that customer and that you're staying constantly in contact with them as opposed to waiting to go into action, just break glass, I've got a problem. So that's an important part of it. I do think, though, when you think about the competitive market, we've got two different dynamics happening at the same time. You've got larger actual big P platform players that are actually attempting to devalue the data by including it in their platform. And whether that's an IQVIA or a Veeva, which are attacking each other at the top of the market, so to speak.
We like our ability to compete there with better quality data, better quality and service, but there's that pressure and that there's a larger bundling strategy. And then you do have point solution providers at the bottom end, or when I say the bottom end, they're competing on a very narrow product and they're willing to compete on price regardless of whether that's profitable or not because they have their private equity backed and they're smaller vendors. So we're seeing a little bit of that both. But the key to us, I think it's in our ability to control this, is you have to engage with the customers to delight them on the data that they bought in the first place because it is clearly better differentiated data. And so we've got to be engaged with those customers to avoid that in the first place.
The good news is if they have left for price and they don't care about the veracity, often we see them coming back, and we've had several of those this quarter as well.
Given those dynamics you just called out, sort of bundling at the high end from some of the larger providers, a part of this, let's call it data-informed CRM movement, low-cost alternatives at the point solution. How important is value-based selling to Definitive now? And do you feel like the sales team has done a good job of that, or do you need to sort of continue to refine that process? Because it doesn't seem like simply competing on price with what's going on around you is an effective solution.
No, I mean, it's really not a great long-term plan if you're trying to build a generational business, right? You're just simply winning on price. But the notion there is you've got the two entities that I mentioned. One has an integrated CRM, which they're selling as a closed system in essence in Veeva. And then you've got IQVIA that's partnering with Salesforce. We actually are agnostic and we're interoperable with anybody's platform. And the strategy that we are articulating, though, is because we offer much deeper healthcare domain expertise to help our customers master extremely complex problems, not only linking our data with their own data, first-party data, but third-party data to create more valuable insights.
We believe and we're seeing that that is a way to provide, to your point, value-based selling that's above and beyond just the fact that it's integrated into a platform, which we can actually handle as well. But it's incumbent on us. That's why we think we have the control over that.
Given that there's this now we're on a multi-year transition, highly competitive transition between Veeva and CRM/IQVIA, obviously the buyers tend to be very similar of a buyer of Definitive's platform versus broader CRM. Is this creating distraction in the marketplace at all as you try to go out and sell the solution? Because a CRM transition obviously is not something that you do lightly. It's a multi-year process. What kind of feedback are you hearing right now?
Yeah, I mean, well, I certainly think that you have a couple of dynamics. One is if you're selling into a major platform migration, that's going to be distracting. If you're selling at a higher level of now merging and helping people to using something that we have at Definitive, it's called the Definitive ID, Definitive Healthcare ID. And so it's a unique identifier that we've rationalized our data elements to, which are hundreds of different data fields to a single unit identifier, which can be linked to another unit identifier, whether it's like a DUNS number or a Social Security number for that. If you're doing that, you're now dealing with other departments that historically you might not need to. It could be risk and compliance. It could be the CFOs involved. You've got other factors, which elongates the sales cycle a bit.
But I think the upside of that is that you're going to have a much stickier solution. And so the question, though, really comes back to how mission-critical is your data and what is it being used for? If it's being used for sales, targeting, and mission-critical applications, you can't stop that while you're actually doing a multi-year migration. You still need that data. So I think, again, it's not simple. It's complicating it. We are seeing the sales cycles elongated by several weeks to a couple of months. And we're seeing more buying influences involved, like risk and compliance that we would have seen a couple of years ago. But the good news is the deals would then theoretically be bigger and stickier.
Yeah, you mentioned so the three to six months was typically what the sales cycle over the past year or so. It's two- to three-month elongation. Do you think that remains consistent as we think about 2025, relatively speaking?
That's a good question. Hopefully, we're going to be able to bring that back in, but we're assuming that it remains elevated for the time being.
Okay. The macro environment, obviously, over the last year to a couple of years has had plenty of noise, but obviously we now have changing leadership in D.C., which is, let's call it some interesting takes on the healthcare ecosystem and pharma ecosystem broadly. Just curious how your customers are kind of entering 2025, what they think of the sort of the potential changes and how that's sort of impacting their budgetary decisions, given that there is uncertainty about who comes and leads HHS or the FDA. There's been outspoken commentary around against pharma marketing and TV and sort of wanting more structural changes there. As you talk to customers and prospects, is this factoring into their sort of budgetary plans for the year?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think in a way, we're smaller, but we also are more diverse. So we not only have life science customers, med device, we're also diversified, which is everybody we talk about, for example, Smucker's, jelly that wants to sell into cafeterias, to manufacturers that want to sell curtains into the OR. And then we have obviously our healthcare and hospital-type customers as well. So I think we've got a little less exposure than potentially some that are much, much heavier in that biopharma space. I personally haven't had a lot of folks talking about the administration change as being an issue. I think it's probably more in the interest rate environment, people trying to stretch budgets to do more with less. You've got consolidation of vendor relationships.
You're seeing more CFO and procurement involved in buying decisions than you would have seen two years ago, which might have been driven simply by the revenue team, for example. So that's sort of the general. I don't know, Rick, if you would want to add any color to that.
Yeah, I would say we have not seen a dramatic change in industry conditions since the election.
Yeah, that makes sense. We have seen this week and probably every year with the start of the year with the big healthcare conference, a slew of M&A announcements. Historically, how has M&A impacted your customer relationships, if at all?
It comes both ways. It creates the opportunity to have a foothold in a larger organization, but you do occasionally then get rationalization of vendor components. So depending on the philosophy of the organizations involved, it can go either way.
Interesting. Okay. Maybe shifting to sort of the initial outlook for 2025, given CRPO as of the third quarter was about 4% year-over-year decrease in sort of informing your initial view that revenue will fall at a similar 4% rate in 2025. Q4 is an important sales and renewal quarter. So there was possibly some movement off of that sort of 4% disclosure. Just curious, qualitatively, how have sales renewals sort of trended relative to maybe your expectations as you thought about the assumptions or the early assumptions?
Yeah, let me just step back and explain a little bit about why we focused so much on the fourth quarter. The third quarter, we always provide some directional commentary. And then in our fourth quarter earnings call, we go into more detail because the fourth quarter is a very important quarter both for renewals and upsells. So you can have up to 40% of our customers going through a transaction during that time period. So at the end of February in our fourth quarter call, I'll get into a lot more detail. But meanwhile, one of the nice things about our business model is it's predictable in the short term. So current revenue performance obligations or CRPO has been over time the best leading indicator of where revenue is going. That's most powerful in the short term, and then it goes out through one year.
As we're exiting 2024 and we're looking into 2025, we can see that, hey, ships don't turn on a dime. We had been under pressure. We will likely continue to be under pressure. But what we're aiming at is with some of the strategic changes that Kevin's talked about in terms of execution, partnering, and master data management to begin to bend that curve. We hope to do that in 2025. In order to help you monitor that, we'll be doing a full refresh of our KPIs. Everything from NDRs to the % revenue by various customer types, etc. The fourth quarter call, there's a lot of fresh faces in the room that are looking at it. That will be a very valuable call for all of us.
Absolutely. And I think even built in the initial expectations for next year for the full year, there's still some confidence that you could potentially return to growth in the second half of the year. Can you just talk about maybe some of the factors that were kind of informing that view? And what do you think are the key catalysts as we go into 2025 to be able to return to that in the second half?
Yeah, let me step back and talk about the business model in general, just so that my general counsel business starts texting me about reiterating guidance or anything like that. One of the most important things is how the fourth quarter goes, which of course we can't update on. But then it's about we've simplified our sales force, really organizing around jobs to be done. Kevin, you may want to say a few words in a moment about mapping the customer journey, that kind of day or two downstairs with the sales leaders going through what all is involved in transacting. So we've taken our sales force, we've made it more direct, we've made it simpler with fewer handoffs. And that starts to drive your ARR, which shows up in CRPO.
As you're moving through the first half of the year, you should see, you would be looking for a change in the trajectory of CRPO growth. That would be the leading indicator that would confirm the ability to move first towards sequential growth and ultimately toward year-over-year growth. Do you want to talk about what you're doing from a go-to-market perspective?
Yeah, I mean, it's a relatively simple approach. And I think one of the advantages and what attracted me to this is that one aspect of this was a go-to-market we hired go-to-market focus. I've done every job, right? I've done all of it. I started off with that. I've done whether it's door-to-door, creating leads to SDR-type activities and ultimately field sales and the whole shebang. And then acquiring and integrating go-to-market organizations over 40 years, you see it repeatedly, right? As companies grow, especially early stage, they just add more processes and people and overlays. And it looks really good on a PowerPoint. And over time, it becomes rather unwieldy.
One of the first things that we did, and I had what turned out to be a benefit that within a few weeks of joining, the chief revenue officer resigned, which at first I thought, this is not great. And then it turned out it was a blessing in disguise because I got to get directly involved with the sales organization. And so we had everybody in the room and we did literally on a wall. I said, let's map this out with Post-Its on everything that happens, kind of the old Schoolhouse Rock, how a bill goes up a hill. And let's see what happens. And in that room with a couple of dozen leaders, you start to see the really unwieldy and things that had been built up over the course of the years, which you should stop doing.
Our go-to-market had been significantly overcomplicated. We had handoffs with no continuity between very critical points. Then you could see even something as simple as whoever sold the account at the point of transition to onboarding; they went away and have no compensation related at all to the go-forward portion of it. Then someone who has no relationship with that customer over the past nine months now is somehow going to manage that business through the renewal, often with too many accounts to cover and maybe not even talk to that customer for a year. So you just start to make some very simple adjustments to how people get paid, how people are going to be onboarded, when and what point do these handoffs start to be more collaborative, and you start to see some immediate impacts, which we're already seeing today.
So the good news with compensation, it's a complex adaptive system of people, and you can typically address that with the right compensation. You pay people the right way and you get the type of activities that you're expecting. And so once we mapped it out, kind of got to the root cause of where we thought the breakpoints were, we then applied the appropriate compensation structure, books of business, mapping, propensity analysis, capacity management for the CRMs, and that's all been done. Last year, we completed it in April. We've already completed it this year in December, and we've launched it in the month of January.
Excellent, and anytime you go through, let's call it wholesale changes there, especially around the go-to-market, you obviously talked about the benefit of maybe already having the CRO exit the room so you could kind of take a fresh look and clean look at it, but you obviously have individuals that might have thrived in that former structure, whether it's from a territorial perspective or process perspective. That tends to create some turnover, so I mean, how long does it take to work through some of those changes, and do you need to continue to invest in to ramp sort of new sales talent, I guess, now that you've kind of changed the structure a bit?
Yeah, it's a great question. Now, it takes a little bit more time to do it the way we did it, but it's more effective. So I kind of use it as a metaphor. It's like for those of you or whoever here has kids, right? If you have a 15-year-old that doesn't make their bed, it's a lot easier to just make it than to force them to make the bed. But if you do that, you're going to have a 16-year-old that doesn't make their bed. So here, instead of coming in and being a top-down founder-led, this is what we're going to do and here's Kevin's plan. That's why we needed 25 people in the room. They came back, diagnosed the problem, and then you've syndicated it now to 25 people and it's their plan.
So the GTM change this year was not, hey, I showed up and then distributed manna from heaven. It was built by the people that have been there in many cases for a decade that saw the fundamental problems with it and actually recognized it by uncovering the issue, which I already knew was there. And then they're now the ones that are replicating this out there as evangelical people into the organization. So it takes a little longer, but you get a much better product out of it. And I'm not even in the room.
Yeah. I'm looking forward this weekend to my arguments with my six-year-olds trying to tell them to make their own bed instead of me doing it.
Six years is a little harder than sixteen though.
That's right. That's right. Internally then, what kind of KPI? Obviously, not things you're going to disclose to investors, but what are some of the KPIs you're looking at to sort of make sure you're progressing on the sales side the right way and sort of ensuring that you know you've got the right people in place now that you've got the new process in place?
Yeah, so we're going to talk about that a little bit in our next, we're going to unveil this, but the key is you need to have. It's like the whole point of it being called a dashboard is you don't have to open the hood and check the oil. You know that the oil is properly working, so having the right KPIs that you're managing at the summary level that if you need to peel it back and get down to what's wrong with the oil, you can do so, so one of the fundamental premises that we've instituted is that even at the board level, we do not use any reports that are not actually used to manage the business. We don't create reports for me or the board or anybody else. We're adapting the tools that we use to actually operate the business.
Excellent.
And some of those will look very familiar in terms of understanding your chain of activity and create leads, tracking them through the pipeline, using predictive analytics to ensure that we've got a good sense of where we're going to close the quarter, etc., etc. And there's been a lot of progress on the predictability of the business over the last year, which has been great because we started with a fairly predictable business as well.
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. That's helpful. Maybe switching to sort of the cost side of the equation in the P&L. Obviously, you have a fixed cost base within the model. So if you have got declining revenues, you're going to see some margin compression there. You've noted that as you go through product and go-to-market changes, that you're going to prioritize clients with the best return on the investment. Maybe talk about how you're evaluating who those clients are today and then how you've sort of reallocated resources in this area.
Yeah. I'll just again do a little bit of a history thing. I feel like a history professor.
History is good. It's good.
I'm channeling my energy.
Educational.
We have organized a lot of our information and the way in which we go to market around verticals. So the needs of a biopharma customer are a little different from the needs of a med device customer, which are related but slightly different to the needs of a provider and to some of the other diversified segments. And so as we look at the ROI of our various initiatives in those, although there's a lot of shared resources, especially data, we're evaluating what the incremental return is in terms of gross margin, what the sales and marketing costs are, etc., etc., to help us steer that spend. And one of the great things, given where we are in terms of some of the industry trends, is the fact that we do compete across those various verticals.
And the churn problem that we talked about earlier, that's primarily a life sciences challenge, whereas we see more opportunity in some of the other areas. So that's how we look at it internally. And all of those other leading indicators, KPIs that I talked about, are tracked at that same level as well.
Yeah. Absolutely. And as you think about sort of the reallocation of resources there, cleaning up the go-to-market, getting more refined in the process, how should we think about sales and marketing as a percent of revenue kind of going forward? It's typically trended north of 30%, but do you think as these changes bear fruit that we could start to see that come down below 30% longer term?
I think over time we will see leverage in sales and marketing. Meanwhile, we're not micro-focused on that as a line item, nor am I ready to get into line item guidance. But one of the things that was really appealing about Kevin, in addition to his background in data ecosystems, is the depth of his go-to-market experience. So I think we'll see that play out over time.
As the market, obviously, there's a lot of variables to make sure that the sales team is being as productive as you're hoping and trending in the right direction. As the market sort of opens up again, do you feel like, at least from a capacity perspective, that you're sort of well-suited to address that return of demand? How are you, outside of the internal sort of go-to-market motion, how are you supplementing this with partnerships and other channel opportunities?
Yeah. Well, we're going to talk a little bit more about that soon. But the indirect and distribution and co-opetition, leveraging larger partners, is something that has, I think, been relatively under-leveraged. We are admittedly a small business that has a relatively, even with our current sales and marketing footprint, limited reach, right? You're only going to see so many people when you think about the literally millions of businesses that potentially want to reach into healthcare. And so leveraging larger players in the space and working with them, bringing what we have as a very helpful competitive advantage around healthcare domain expertise, which they lack, is an underdeveloped asset. So we think we can do that in a way that is mutually beneficial to both companies and also propel more growth.
As far as the cost of sales goes in the short term, I think, yeah, we should be able to handle that capacity. We really don't have a situation. I don't think our profitability is the challenge.
No, not at all.
It's the revenue growth. And so you can't save your way to prosperity. So we're really trying to focus on using those resources more wisely and more effectively in the short term.
Yeah. Makes sense.
And one of the great things, Kevin's a highly entrepreneurial guy, and he's fully caffeinated all the time. And so sometimes someone comes in and they look at an old object and they see it needed used. So in terms of going through that mapping of the customer journey, at the end of that customer journey, we might have been able to provide a fully detailed profile of Dr. Smith and everything you need to know to talk about him. And then we would hand it over to the client and say, "Why don't you call him?" So tracking the results, not easily done. Within Populi, we have this nascent little capability that we call activations, where instead of completely handing that off, they can facilitate the interaction to a marketing platform, which enables you to then measure performance. And over in the legacy Analytical Wizards business.
Hey, Rick, before you move on, just to kind of really, it's just such a simple concept, right? People, at root, need data. They want to build lists, which we do very well. We help them segment those cohorts. But then there was a here be dragons, and they went off and did something with it. We already have the capability to help them activate on that programmatically. We can help them track what the outcome was, which then builds a next best action database that helps us then inform what they do with the next list. That's it, and we just simply didn't take the next step to say, "Why are we stopping?", and we have people to do this today.
Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.
Connection and execution are two things that we talk about at the museum.
Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe we want to give some time for the audience if there's any questions. Does anyone have anything for the Definitive team? Yep. Go ahead.
I think the boss, I myself at the time. Much harder to get people to buy, and she had enough to say that that would argue for someone similar to have the benefit of having the packages and other things.
I think we're moving from a world where you've got really walled gardens, where IQVIA needs to control everything themselves, to one in which there's more interoperability, and so there's certainly incumbency advantages to the scale, and you see Veeva, for example, trying to leverage strength in CRM to move over, but at the same time, there are specialist data providers that do things that they're uniquely good at, so for us, I would think about rare drugs and hospital-administered drugs, where we have an unfair competitive advantage because we have all of this deep information about physicians and where they practice. That's distinct from the way IQVIA approaches the world, which is primarily through retail pharma, so I think we're going to see big players and small players with more mixing and matching.
Makes sense. You clearly, obviously, have the pieces and the processes it seems like that you're getting into place now, where you start to kind of move on this path to recovery. But often, there tends to be knock-on effects from sort of the, let's call it, previous bad habits. How long do you think it takes to kind of work through that in the numbers before you can start to sort of be on the upswing again, if you will?
I would always go back and focus on the customer journey and how it operates. So if you think about the customer journey, you need to create awareness of their situation. You need to nurture that through your pipeline, as we've mentioned before. That's getting longer. Then you need to strike the initial contract. You need to recognize it through. So I think the opportunities that we're beginning to execute on now are very promising. I think you look for the early leading indicators as we move through 2025. But kind of hitting the full tailwind, I think, is more of a late 2025 to 2026 activity. Just knowing how these things work out.
Yeah. Yeah. And Kevin, so Definitive's historically, obviously, been very acquisitive in looking at new functionality. You're obviously going through that process and investment and trying to unify a lot of that infrastructure. Do we need to kind of complete that unification and that sort of integration before we look at additional M&A? Or what's your view on M&A, I guess, kind of moving forward?
I mean, I would say technically, no. You don't have to. I think ideally you should, right? It's building off of the foundation. You need the foundation to be solid. And we haven't completed even ingesting some of the things that we've already done. But I don't think it's if the right thing came up. I think if it was truly transformative, I think you could do it. But you'd really have to believe in that pretty strongly until we make a little more progress on our current task.
As a founder-led company, we used to have a more old-guard approach. If we need a capability, then we must own that capability, and then we must maintain it ourselves. I think at D&B and other larger infrastructure players, there's more co-opetition, where it's like, "Hey, we're uniquely good at this. You've already done that. Why reinvent it?" I think we have some different tools in our toolkit that don't require as much deployment of capital. That's one of the reasons why we're comfortable increasing the efficiency of our balance sheet by looking to buy back some shares during a time in which we feel like at nine times EBITDA, we are very, very fairly priced.
Yeah. So near-term use of the cash really just, obviously, organic investment in the business, repurchase of shares.
And we're strongly free cash flow positive. We have a fortress balance sheet.
Plenty of cash to cover the debt and.
It doesn't wear out at the M&A, but it means we don't feel like our growth depends on that.
Excellent. All right. One more?
There are no preferreds. There are two classes of shares, Class A and Class B. They have equal voting rights, so there's no super votes. Pre-IPO investors tend to hold their interests or have the option of holding their interests in Class B, which means it doesn't get taxed at the corporate level, so they avoid one layer of taxation. Shares that you buy in the public markets are Class A. But no special voting rights. And to provide complete transparency within our investor deck, we provide an analysis of our equity funding because sometimes when you look in an online database, they'll be pulling just the info in Class A. So it's like page 13 of our deck. Correct. Yep. Advent is just another shareholder. So we're not a controlled company. They own, I think, a little less than 40% of us.
But we have a fully arm's-length relationship outside of our formal board. So they don't talk to us about what their future intentions are. They invested in 2019 out of a relatively young fund, so I have no reason to believe that they're hitting the end of a fund life or anything like that.
Awesome. With that, we're out of time. Kevin, Rick, thanks so much for taking the time today. Thanks, everyone, for joining us.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Thank you.