How are you helping solution providers evolve and grow their business?

There are no more excuses. It used to be the excuse: “The cash flow doesn't work for me, I need top line revenue, I get paid up front. That’s how I pay my employees.” All those excuses are out the window because organizations like ours and our competitors have financial resources for them. We can front-load commission, we can take care of their compensation, we can do all those things. The only thing holding them back is a decision. And what we find is, some principals of these smaller organization make the decision, but the reason for failure is once they make the decision, they don't adjust their compensation plan. Or they don’t make sure that the entire organization is quota-based and they truly shift it. So that's where I think is the holdup. Some people simply not making the decision, or if they do make the decision, not implementing the right plan. But the resources are there. [During a recession,] people lose their jobs, and they look to start a business, but back then, we didn’t have the financial resources to help. Today we do. And so, a recession or change in business model from a VAR, is something that we can help augment and help them through a tough transition.

Our whole purpose for being is helping a partner grow their business and be successful. We started just lending to partners because building up recurring revenue takes years. And that means to build up the revenue to be able to hire someone to help grow faster and compound your growth, it takes a lot of time. But if we could accelerate that by getting money into their hands, so they can invest it, that was good for them and good for us. That lending program has been in place for quite a while. And then there became an interest for partners to buy down some of their commission or sell off some of their revenue, because they saw some of these transactions going on in the industry — and there's a lot going on. Agents have become very smart about that very quickly. Just in the last year and a half, they talk about multiples now. Whereas, I would say a year and a half ago, most of them didn’t know what a multiple was. What we find [is] the partners we want to engage with are not the partners that want to sell their business and be done. We think there's a place for them to go and we’re happy to refer them to partners who are buying other partners because we want them to grow. What we're interested in is the partners who want to keep growing their business, but look over and say: “Hey, I want to cash out, or I want to reinvest in my business; I want to take some off the table and keep running.” Those are the ones we want to transact with and enable that transaction so they can do whatever they want to do with that capital — reinvest it, deploy it somewhere else — but keep growing their business. And that’s what we've been doing a lot of for last year and a half — a lot of those transactions.