The Power of Benchmarks - with Lauren Kelley, Founder and CEO OPEX Engine (Episode 1)

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, I feel so fortunate we're joined by Lauren Kelley, founder and CEO of OPEXEngine. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Lauren. First, the insights that benchmarking provides, go-to-market and senior operating executives, the benchmark trends in the B2B SaaS and Cloud industry, and the untapped potential of using benchmarks for better metrics and form, data-driven decisions. Lauren, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Lauren Kelley** (1:13)
Thanks, Ray. Really appreciate the chance to be here and speak with your audience. I love the podcast that you're doing, and I love the people that you've been bringing on, so I'm a big fan of the program. Thanks for inviting me. This is a particularly interesting week for me to be doing the podcast because we just announced that my company, OPEXEngine, was acquired by bain and Company. I founded OPEXEngine almost 15 years ago, if you can imagine that, and have bootstrapped it and built it up to what seems to be the leading benchmarking platform for software and SaaS companies. I came to this because I'd spent about 20 years before that in software and tech management, and before that as an international economist with the US Department of Commerce, the International Trade Administration, and working with supercomputer industry and doing trade negotiations. It just seemed crazy to me after such a long time in the software industry, and then also spending some time as an executive in residence with a venture firm SoftBank just before I started OPEXEngine, that our industry of all the industries out there had very little contextual information, didn't have benchmarks. Everything we did was based on our own internal data. And I think, you know, 20 years ago, we started developing much better ways to manage ourselves with great applications and systems that were developed. But we never went the next step. And that's what I thought we could do with OPEXEngine.

**Ray Rike** (2:52)
First of all, congratulations on the acquisition by bain. That's wonderful news. Congratulations, especially after 15 years of doing this in a bootstrap manner. We won't go too much into detail on that today. Though I'd love to pick your brains on that. But, you know, you talked about, wow, you were an economist, you were an operating executive, a highly successful kind of early stage B2B software and SaaS companies. But let me ask you a little bit more of a dig down into it. What was your vision for how companies could actually use your benchmarks that you were capturing and calculating? Did you have a vision of how they were going to be used? And then the follow up to that's going to be, and has that vision, have you seen them use that way or has it, is it a little bit different than you thought?

**Lauren Kelley** (3:38)
Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, it's evolved over the years, both in terms of my vision of how companies can use, best use the benchmarking to take action to, you know, ultimately to improve and build enterprise value in the company. And also how I've seen companies using it. I think, you know, first and foremost, just to sort of lay the groundwork, my concept was to build an independent platform and get the critical mass of data that we're participating, that we're willing to contribute financial and operating metrics. And because I'm an operator, I very early on thought that the operating metrics were so key. It's much easier to get financial benchmarks. It's much harder to get good operating metrics. And I think we all in management, we've all had the experience of, you know, you're trying to figure out the budget, you're trying to figure out some specific management decision, and you just desperately want to know what other companies are doing. And in the best of all possible worlds, you go out and you call your 10 or 15 people in your network, or you ask someone that you're working with to go out and call 10 or 15 people in your network, or you go to your investor and say, do you have any information on this? And it's just, you know, anecdotal information. Nobody has a network of 10 people doing the exact same thing at the same stage, even if all your friends out in the industry were doing, developing the same products, selling in the same markets, they wouldn't necessarily all be your same size with your same sort of conditions. So it just seemed crazy to me that in this day and age, and this is what I thought 15 years ago and 10 years ago, and I think it's now really finally coming to fruition, it's crazy in this digital age to be doing these things manually.