One of the most common questions I hear from investors is, "How do we drive or impact value creation?" CEOs might not think about value creation, but that's the game.
Ultimately, value creation for CEOs is a good exit strategy driven by growth—value creation equals growth. The upside is that it benefits everyone.
Although the CEO might not think of value creation in the same context as investors, they should, in some ways, stay aligned with the end goal for all parties.
Maintaining growth and building value in a business is like eating glass at times. Investors can think about value creation more strategically because they're not "in the business" and see different patterns, challenges, and opportunities. When a CEO is in the business, it's super hard to take this lens on driving growth — but I'd suggest that if you can remove yourself from the day-to-day and identify high-leverage levers for value creation, it would benefit the business and help with focus.
Here's the thing most people miss: value creation isn't about doing more — it's about doing the right things better, or something insanely unique that you can win in the marketplace far quicker.
After working with dozens of SaaS companies with ARRs between $2M and $20M, I've found that most upside hides in plain sight. It's not in some secret playbook. It's how you focus, execute, and align your team around what matters.
Here's how I'd approach it instead — 7 specific levers that unlock value and momentum when pulled well:
It's incredible how many companies say they're customer-first but don't invest in understanding or deepening those relationships. Customer focus gets talked about, but it is rarely executed with intent.
You can narrow and deep into one segment, solve real problems, and build trust. In that case, everything gets easier: referrals increase, your messaging sharpens, pricing conversations get simpler, and your brand grows without a massive budget. he fastest way to create value in B2B? Get laser-focused on your real buyer.
And that depth creates something valuable: advocacy.
Peter Thiel talks about strong brands being a durable moat. That's what customer depth gives you — a base of people who talk about you when you're not in the room. It makes your position in the market harder to displace — and your valuation easier to defend.
Example:
Take Jobber, a vertical SaaS company serving home service businesses like landscapers, cleaners, and HVAC technicians.
They didn't try to be a generic small business CRM in the early days. They focused tightly on one type of customer—solo and small team operators in home services. That meant building features that actually fit their day-to-day needs: quoting on the fly, route planning, and payments in the field.
They wrote content specifically for those trades, offered live support during business hours, and priced it affordably for solo operators and small crews. The result? Extremely high adoption, strong word of mouth, and a base of loyal customers who stuck around.
That depth gave them predictable retention and strong margins, and helped them scale past $20M ARR without constantly needing to acquire new customer types. They didn't try to be for everyone. They became the best tool in one niche and grew from there.
2. Differentiate the Offer
If you're serious about driving value creation, you must think hard about how your company is meaningfully different. You don't want to be incrementally better; it is structurally different in a way that creates leverage.
Differentiation isn't a brand exercise. It's a strategic decision. It starts with defining where you'll play, how you'll win, and what constraints you're willing to embrace. That clarity forces tradeoffs — and those tradeoffs are what make you stand out.
It could be your pricing model, operating model, vertical focus, or underlying Tech. You don't need to be different everywhere. But you need to be different somewhere, and different enough that people remember it, talk about it, and pay more for it.
Example:
Veeva Systems is a great example of differentiated value creation. They didn't just build CRM for everyone. They built CRM only for life sciences and built it on top of Salesforce, not from scratch. That constraint (no horizontal markets, no platform wars) became their edge.
They went all-in on one vertical. That meant deep industry knowledge, faster onboarding, built-in compliance, and stronger retention. While generic SaaS companies were fighting for land, Veeva became the record system for a heavily regulated, high-spend industry.
That focus—and the resulting differentiation—is a big part of why they IPO'd and now sit at a $20 B+ valuation. It wasn't a feature race. It was clarity, discipline, and owning a market.
Top-line growth doesn't always equal value creation. What matters is how efficiently that revenue is generated.
Adding more salespeople or pushing harder on outbound might grow ARR, but you're just stretching if the cost base grows faster. The real value comes when the model itself becomes more efficient. That could mean tightening pricing, reducing sales cycles, improving conversion, or designing the product to drive expansion revenue without extra people.
More companies should be asking:
Where are we burning effort to earn revenue that could be earned more efficiently, or not at all?
AI is creating new opportunities in marketing, support, ops, and onboarding. But the point isn't just to "use AI"—it's to rethink the cost of every revenue motion.
Example:
Loveable, an AI company, passed $30M+ ARR with fewer than 20 employees. There was no sales team, and there was no complex onboarding. They didn't just layer in automation—they designed the business to avoid human cost wherever possible.
Revenue came from a low-friction product experience, automated conversion, and self-serve upgrades. That efficiency didn't just protect margin — it made the business structurally more valuable.
Value leaks fastest in go—to—market, not because the strategy is wrong, but because execution isn't aligned across the business.
The GTM plan sounds clear in the board deck. But in reality, marketing targets one segment, sales is chasing another, and product prioritizes things that don't support either. Everyone's busy, but momentum is tough.
I heard a great quote after watching an NBA game (sorry for the sports analogy again)
"The game plan isn't complicated — but can you execute it?"
That's GTM in a nutshell. The better you execute, the faster you grow. Strategy only creates value if it's applied consistently across the organization.
Example:
I worked with a company whose growth had stalled after hitting $5M ARR. On the surface, it looked like a demand issue, but the root problem was fractured GTM execution.
Marketing generated content for enterprise accounts, sales chased mid-market deals, and the SDRs had no ICP clarity. Activation time was increasing, and everyone was working hard, just not together.
We ran a full GTM audit: tightened ICP, killed low-conversion segments, refocused positioning, rebuilt the sales story, and aligned the funnel around one clear customer path. Within 60 days, pipeline velocity picked up. Within two quarters, the company was growing faster—and more importantly, in a repeatable and measurable way. That shift didn't just improve performance—it unlocked confidence from the board and opened the door to strategic interest.
Peter Thiel suggests building something 10x better than what already exists, not incrementally better. That's what creates real defensibility.
Most early-stage SaaS companies don't think of product development as a value creation lever, but it is. Proprietary technology isn't just about having engineers — it's about solving a valuable problem in a way others can't easily copy.
That could be a unique data model, internal tooling, machine learning loops, or a proprietary integration layer. It can also show up through vertical integration, which controls more of the workflow and makes switching painful. The more embedded your product is, the more valuable it becomes, especially to strategic buyers.
Mark Zuckerberg said it best: “Product strategy is about learning and iterating as fast as possible… If we can learn faster than everyone else, we’ll win.”
In today’s environment, velocity isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the competitive edge.
Example:
Latana, a Berlin-based SaaS company, built a proprietary data model for brand tracking that combined mobile panel data with statistical modeling to deliver insights for hard-to-reach audiences.
Unlike generic survey tools or brand trackers, Latana owned the end-to-end infrastructure — from mobile panel acquisition to analysis. That gave them unique data, stronger accuracy, and recurring demand from high-spend marketing teams in consumer tech and D2C industries.
Because they controlled the data pipeline and built defensibility into the tech layer, their valuation wasn't based on top-line revenue alone—it reflected the system's proprietary nature. That IP—not just the UI—made them strategically valuable.
People are often the biggest drag on value creation — or the biggest driver. Every underperformer, unclear role, or misalignment adds drag.
Talent is often referred to as culture, but companies that create real value treat it as an operating discipline.
The ones that scale well treat talent development as a system: who you hire, what you expect, how you coach, and when you upgrade. They don't just hire great people—they create an environment where high performance is expected, measured, and supported.
AI makes this even more important. If leveraged properly, AI can amplify output per person. But if the wrong people are in the wrong roles — or no one's thinking critically about how roles evolve — it just adds more noise.
The opportunity now is to rethink how your team works:
What should humans own? Where can AI support? And are your best people spending time on the right things?
This is where real value is created — when high-calibre people, working in the right roles, are supported by systems that increase leverage, not complexity.
Example:
Several years ago, I worked with a CEO who treated talent density as the core strategy, not a side priority. They were maniacal about it. Every new hire was held to a high bar. They spent a significant amount of time in interviews. They benchmarked roles. And they regularly made upgrades — even when uncomfortable — because they believed average performance was a drag the business couldn't afford.
In one GTM review, we flagged a senior hire who looked busy but wasn't moving the metrics. The CEO didn't wait it out. They made the change quickly, brought in someone sharper, and within a quarter saw CAC drop and deal velocity improve — not from more effort, but from better decisions.
One of the most counterintuitive value creation levers is doing less, longer.
Everyone's in a rush—launch faster, ship more, scale now. However, the most meaningful value is created over time, not through urgency but through compounding focus. Strategic Patience is about resisting the temptation to pivot too soon, change the plan, or chase short-term wins at the expense of long-term payoff.
It means sticking with the right positioning long enough to dominate a niche, letting one product get boringly good, and running the same go-to-market playbook long enough to truly optimise it. Most teams never get there—they change lanes too early.
This kind of Patience isn't passive. It's an active discipline. It creates a different type of value — depth, not just speed. Brand strength. Segment dominance. Higher retention. Predictability. That's what investors pay for. A good example? Partnerships.
Most teams treat partnerships as a channel to test, not a capability to build. But when treated with strategic patience, building the right integrations, co-selling process, and joint value story over time, it becomes one of the most defensible and compounding growth levers a company can have.
Example:
Squire, a vertical SaaS platform for barbershops, spent years building deep product-market fit in one niche. Scheduling, payments, inventory, staff management — all tailored to how barbers actually run their businesses.
They didn’t rush to serve salons, spas, or beauty chains. They stayed focused. Obsessed over product quality. Built trust in a tight-knit market. That discipline helped them grow steadily — with strong retention, organic adoption, and increasing NRR from upsell.
Instead of chasing adjacent markets, they went deeper. More features for the same customer. More value per location. That patience paid off. By the time they expanded, they had a dominant position — and a brand the market trusted.
What we’re saying is simple: move fast—but in a clear direction. Strategic patience doesn’t mean slowing down. It means choosing the right course, then sticking to it long enough to let it work. Yes, this runs counter to the usual startup advice: ship fast, break things, pivot. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s strategic view is often misunderstood. He said, “Product strategy is about learning and iterating as fast as possible… If we can learn faster than everyone else, we’ll win.” But that’s not an argument for chaos. It’s about focused iteration—eliminating noise, committing to what matters, and moving quickly in service of a long-term play. Strategic patience is speed with direction. Not just motion, but momentum.
Pick one of these and take action this week:
Ask this:
"Which lever, if we fixed it now, and focused on it, would create the most value over the next 6 months?"
Then help the leadership teams focus.
The best companies don't move fastest because they pull seven levers. They move faster because they choose the right constraint and clear it.
That's where value gets created.
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