A B2B SaaS coach who has held the seat: founder and CEO to a Nasdaq IPO, then EVP at New Relic from $300M to $500M.

You are the founder or CEO of a B2B SaaS company, or sit on its executive team, somewhere between about $1M ARR and a few hundred million, bootstrapped or venture-backed. Wherever you are on that curve, the constraint moves, and it usually moves before the plan does.

$1M to $10M ARR. The founder is still the best salesperson, there is no head of sales yet, the price was set once and never revisited, and the first executive hires are about to be made. The job is turning founder-led selling into a repeatable sales process without losing the customers who bought because of you.

$10M to $100M ARR. Growth now depends on the customers you already have, not on the founder's network. Net revenue retention, the next segment up, the motion that fits it, and an executive team that runs without you decide whether the company keeps compounding or flattens.

Past $100M ARR. The core product approaches the top of its first S-curve. The second act, the board's Rule of 40 conversation, and the next round or the exit become the job.

If your biggest bottleneck right now is churn, acquisition, pricing, team scaling or strategy, the rest of this page is written for you: what the data says about your stage, six questions that find the constraint, and what to do first. And if you have been offered a community, a marketplace or a franchise program when what you actually want is one operator who has run a SaaS company through your stage, sitting across from you, that is what this is.

A growth rate that looks healthy may not be. Of about 3,000 software and online-services companies McKinsey followed, 28% ever reached $100 million in revenue and 3% reached $1 billion. A software company growing 20% a year has a 92% chance of ceasing to exist within a few years, and 85% of the fastest growers could not hold their rate once they had it.¹ What it means for a founder: at 20% you are not safe, you are slowly losing ground, and the useful question is what would have to be true to add ten points.

Your retention band predicts your growth rate. Across more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies, the median company grew 15% with net revenue retention below 90%, 16% at 90% to 100%, 21% at 100% to 110%, 30% at 110% to 120%, 38% at 120% to 130%, and 50% above 130%.³ The median company grew 22% last year, 25% if equity-backed.⁴ What it means for you: find your band. At 95% net retention, the first 5% of your base you sell each year only replaces what walked out.

Your board is asking about the Rule of 40 for a reason. Across 200 software companies over a decade, growth plus free cash flow cleared 40% only 16% of the time, the median public SaaS company above $100 million grew 22%, and the leaders earned back what they spent to acquire a customer in under 16 months against nearly four years for the bottom quartile. At least one large SaaS company has tied executive incentives to it.² What it means for you: as growth matures, decide which half of the 40 you are buying this year, and say so before the board asks.

In every one of those studies, the distance between the median company and the leaders is retention, pricing, the motion, and the decisions the CEO makes about them.

1. What is your net revenue retention by cohort, and which cohort is dragging it? Below 100%, you have a leak before you have an acquisition problem, and more pipeline makes it worse. The early signs of a stall show up here first: slowing customer acquisition, falling lifetime value of new customers, and key people leaving sales and engineering.¹ First move: sort churned and contracted revenue by the quarter each customer signed and by segment. The worst cohort usually points at a product gap, a pricing mismatch, or a promise sales made that the product never kept.

2. When did you last change pricing or packaging, and who decided? If it has not moved since the company was a third its size, the price is probably funding the wrong customers and the wrong motion. Contract value predicts retention: above $250,000 in ACV the median gross retention is 95%, below it about 91%.³ First move: list what your best-retaining customers use and what they pay, and build the next tier around that.

3. Who closes most of your new revenue today? If the answer is you, the founder, the motion has not become a repeatable sales process yet, and a sales leader hired into it inherits a process that lives in your head. First move: write down the last ten wins, who was in the room, how long each took and why the customer said yes, before you hire anyone.

4. How many months does it take to earn back what you spend to win a customer? The leaders recover it in under 16 months; the bottom quartile takes nearly four years.² First move: compute it by segment. The segment with the fastest payback is where the next dollar of sales and marketing goes.

5. Once growth starts to slow toward the top of your first curve: does growth plus free cash flow reach 40, and does your board know which half you are working on? Most software companies miss it most years.² First move: pick the half, write the plan on one page, and take it to the board before the board brings it to you.

6. What did your executive team escalate to you last week? If the answer is decisions they should own, the constraint is the operating model, and the founder at the center of it. First move: write the decision rights down: which decisions are yours, which are theirs, which go to the board.

Most founders and CEOs can answer four of the six from memory and find the other two uncomfortable. The uncomfortable two are usually the work.

At Web.com, and again at New Relic pushing 40% growth, I learned that growth without integration creates organizational debt: customer retention slips, productivity drops, and every new initiative takes two or three times longer. I wrote the method up in why integration beats growth speed, and the motion decision in product-led growth: is it right for your company?. For a B2B SaaS company it comes down to four moves.

Pair every growth metric with the capability it depends on. New ARR against onboarding capacity, pipeline against sales capacity, new logos against support and customer success, releases against reliability. The gap between each pair is the early warning, and reading it is the CEO's job, not a report you receive.

Decide the motion on purpose, and re-decide it at each stage. Product-led, sales-led, or the hybrid: a board-level call that changes as the ACV, the segment and the buyer change. Most companies drift into a motion and then wonder why the unit economics stopped working.

A growth council you chair, with real decision rights. Cross-functional, with P&L authority, meeting weekly with one job: find the constraint before it shows up in the board deck. Most SaaS CEOs run growth through the sales forecast and hear about the constraint from the CFO a quarter late.

Rate, direction and method in one room, once a quarter. You, your CFO and your revenue leader on one question: if we hit the number, can we deliver and retain it, and how will we pay for it? What capability do we need to build before we accelerate? One plan goes to the board, not three.

Under all four sits the frame I have used since my first company: the right formula, the right tactics, and repeatable actions.

Interland sold web hosting to small businesses on a monthly subscription, which was recurring revenue before anyone called it SaaS. I founded it in 1997 and ran it as CEO from a startup to a Nasdaq IPO: more than 200,000 small-business customers at 90%-plus retention, $50M-plus raised from Microsoft and Verizon, 650 people, on its way to $200M in revenue. It became Web.com.

At New Relic I was EVP inside a public company as it grew from $300M to $500M, on a platform with 15,000-plus enterprise customers: new products that added $50M-plus in incremental ARR, net revenue retention taken from 95% to 115%, and FedRAMP work that protected $40M of public-sector revenue, while leading a 450-person organization through significant change.

Since then I have held the seats around the CEO's in three more software companies at three ARR stages: Unqork, from $20M toward $100M ARR with Goldman Sachs, Marsh and State Street as customers; Coursedog as CPO, from $4M to $10M ARR in nine months with ACV up 40%, on the way to an $80M acquisition; and Blameless as COO in a VC-backed turnaround, where rebuilding the go-to-market motion took the win rate from near zero to 80%, cut the sales cycle 40% and monthly churn from 3% to 1.5%, and led to the merger with FireHydrant.

I hold two US patents on SaaS infrastructure and user provisioning.

Most executive coaches have been near the room. I was in the room, driving, at every scale a SaaS company passes through: a subscription business from zero to a Nasdaq IPO, growth at a public unicorn, New Relic from $300M to $500M, and transformation inside an 80-year-old enterprise at Cox Automotive, a $3B platform with more than 1,000 engineers. I have held the CEO, COO, CPO and CTO seats at different companies, so I know the dynamics of each role around yours from the inside, and a decade as an investor and board member across 35 deals and 18 exits means I know how the board sees it. And because scaling SaaS usually means selling to a buyer you have never sold to, it matters that I have sold to all three: small business, mid-market and enterprise, and sat on the enterprise buyer's side of the table too.

I am also a certified coach, CEC and ICF certified since 2019, with a psychology degree. We can work on the operating plan and the person carrying it in the same hour.

Discovery call. Forty-five minutes on video, no pitch: what is actually going on, and whether I am the right person for it.

Calibration. We agree what success looks like and how we will both know, before the work starts.

Standing calls. Weekly, every other week or monthly, on video or in person.

Access between calls. The hard things do not wait for the calendar. More on the approach on the executive coaching page, and on choosing any coach in six questions to ask.

What does a B2B SaaS coach do?

A B2B SaaS coach brings pattern recognition from running subscription software businesses to the problems a general business coach cannot see: scaling recurring revenue, fixing unit economics, and getting past a growth plateau. In practice the work falls into four buckets: metrics and growth (ARR, churn, net revenue retention, pricing and packaging); the go-to-market motion (product-led, sales-led or hybrid, and the segment); the leadership transition from doing individual tasks to running the company; and operations, the board, investors and the exit. I have held the seat those problems land on, as founder and CEO through a Nasdaq IPO and as EVP at New Relic as it grew from $300M to $500M.

Have you run a B2B SaaS company yourself?

Yes, from the first hire to the IPO. I founded Interland, the company that became Web.com, and ran it as CEO from a startup to a Nasdaq IPO with more than 200,000 small businesses on a monthly subscription. Since then I have been EVP at New Relic as it grew from $300M to $500M, CPO at Coursedog through $4M to $10M ARR and an $80M acquisition, COO at Blameless through a turnaround to its merger, and VP at Unqork from $20M toward $100M ARR. I also spent a decade as a venture managing partner investing in and operating SaaS businesses.

Do you focus on companies at a certain stage?

Usually from about $1M ARR, once product-market fit is in hand, to a few hundred million. At $1M to $10M the work is the repeatable sales process, pricing and the first executive hires. At $10M to $100M it is the motion, the segment, net retention and an executive team that runs without you. Past that it is the second act, the board and the exit. Earlier than $1M a coach is mostly a sounding board, and there are good communities for that.

Does it matter whether we are bootstrapped or venture-backed?

It changes the board and the burn, not the physics. A bootstrapped SaaS company answers to its own cash flow and can choose its growth rate; a venture-backed one has a board that funded a rate and expects it. I have run a venture-funded company through an IPO and a Series B company through a turnaround where the runway was the whole conversation. For a bootstrapped company the retention, pricing and motion problems are the same, and the cash constraint is sharper.

What are the bottlenecks you see most in B2B SaaS?

Five come up again and again: churn, acquisition, pricing, team scaling and strategy. Underneath them are usually two: a motion that stopped fitting the stage, and a CEO still doing a job that should have been handed off two hires ago. We find which one is yours in the first session and work on it, not on a curriculum.

Do you work with SaaS executives who are not the CEO?

Yes. The COO, the CPO, the CRO and the CTO each own a piece of the recurring-revenue machine, and I have held three of those seats myself. There are separate pages for the COO seat and the chief product officer seat; for a revenue or technology leader in a SaaS company, this page is the right place to start.

Does my coach need experience in my specific industry?

They need experience in your business model more than your vertical. A SaaS company selling to hospitals and one selling to logistics companies share the same economics: recurring revenue, churn, expansion, ACV and a motion that has to fit the buyer. I have sold software to small businesses, to enterprises, to banks, insurers and government agencies, and the pattern that transfers is the model, not the industry.

How much does SaaS coaching cost?

At this level retainers run $1,000 to $10,000 a month; the ranges, who pays, and how I price are in my guide to what executive coaching costs. You get a scope and a number on the discovery call. For scale, at $10M ARR one point of net revenue retention is worth $100,000 a year.

Who is the best SaaS CEO coach?

The one who has run a SaaS company through your stage and can prove it with names, numbers and recency. The seven tests to run on any coach, me included, are in my guide to how to find the best B2B SaaS coach.

How often do we meet, and how do I know it is working?

Standing calls weekly, every other week or monthly, on video or in person, with access between them when the hard thing does not wait. We agree what success looks like before the work starts, in writing, in your numbers: net retention, win rate, sales cycle, the executive hires made, the board meeting that went the way you planned it. The early signs are faster decisions and a company that needs you less.

What counts as B2B SaaS here?

Software sold to businesses on a subscription: per-seat, usage-based or platform licensing, from a $20-a-month small-business tool to a seven-figure enterprise contract. Vertical SaaS, horizontal SaaS, infrastructure and developer tools all count. Consumer subscription businesses share some of the economics but not the buyer, and I say so on the first call if the fit is wrong.

Do you work outside Atlanta?

Yes. Standing calls run on video with SaaS CEOs and executives anywhere, and I work in person when the engagement calls for it. I am based in Alpharetta, Georgia, and for years commuted weekly to the West Coast while running national roles from here.

Start with a short note.

A short note is enough: your ARR, the motion, and the bottleneck. Churn, pricing, the sales team, the board. I read every note myself. If you would rather talk, book a discovery call.

Or reach me directly:
(629) 304-8755
ken@kengavranovic.com