Announcing Benchmarks for Operators

👋 Hi, it’s CJ Gustafson and welcome to Mostly Metrics, my weekly newsletter where I unpack how the world’s best CFOs and business experts use metrics to make better decisions.

Bold claim (screw it, wish me luck!) - I’m pioneering a new category - Operator Equity Research.

My goal is to create the best performance benchmarking and valuation resources specifically for tech operators. If you are in Finance, Strategy, or Operations, this will help you translate what the outside world values to your target operating model.

Will the charts change? Probably. But updates will always be in the spirit of explaining benchmarks for Operators to use when running companies. Metrics are great - but they don’t do you much good if you can’t identify the levers to move within your business to achieve a desired outcome.

I’ve long looked up to the likes of Jamin Ball, Alex Clayton, and Tomasz Tonguz. Their musings on SaaS metrics were my inspiration to put myself out there and start writing this newsletter in the first place.

In the process of studying their works, and applying their insights to my own practice as an Operator, I eventually noticed a gap - I was not an investor.

We were speaking the same language, but using a different accent. And sometimes this slight difference made it hard for me to apply in my role as the train conductor, trying to make sure things stay on time, rather than making a binary go / no go investment decision.

In addition to the benchmarking cuts below, which we’ll update on a weekly basis, I will also provide a take on:

My hope is that there is a CFO, FP&A Director, or Investor Relations pro out there who reads this and finally says:

Or,

And even,

This new weekly report is an admittedly selfish pursuit. I’m scratching my own itch and producing the dataset I want - as someone who’s worked for companies across Infra & Security, Marketplaces, and Vertical Software, and wondered what “good” looked like in each scenario.