Analyst: Can I go back to something you said before we started recording. You said the ceiling was the thing nobody modelled.
Expert: Right. So the pitch for vertical software, for about a decade, was pick an industry, build the system of record, own it. And it works. We did own it. That isn't the problem. The problem is the morning after you own it.
Analyst: Meaning share.
Expert: Meaning the market's smaller than the deck. Every one of these companies has a slide built top down off industry spend. Ours said forty-one thousand target accounts globally and I never once saw the workings behind it. Early 2022, February I want to say, we did it bottoms-up properly. Wasn't us, it was the CFO's team, we supplied the qualification criteria. Question was, how many firms on earth can carry a six figure annual contract, have somebody in the building who owns that decision, and won't churn inside two years. Eighteen months, sorry. Eighteen months was the window we used. Anyway, it came back between seven and eleven thousand. Worldwide.
Analyst: Seven to eleven is a wide band.
Expert: It's wide because the middle of it is judgement. The bottom end is firms we could name, we had them in a spreadsheet. The top assumed emerging market conversion at a pace that hasn't happened. Pick one number today, I'd say nine two. Nine thousand two hundred. Don't hold me to that.
Analyst: And where were you in that pool?
Expert: Depends how you count. Call it a third by logo. Higher by revenue, we skewed heavy. Home region was over half, closer to sixty. Sounds like a triumph until somebody in a planning session asks where next year's thirty per cent comes from and the room goes quiet.
Analyst: What did the board do with the number?
Expert: Nothing, for the best part of a year. It's not that anybody disbelieved it. Nobody wants to be the person who says the market's finished. Then in the March meeting the chair asked a version of it out loud, and after that corp dev went from one person to three and the roadmap got about a third shorter.
Analyst: Who was in the room for that?
Expert: Five of us. One had been there six weeks.
Analyst: So if the core is saturated at that share, what does the growth story become?
Expert: Adjacency. Sell them something else. That's the whole second act and it's where most of these companies quietly fell over.
Analyst: Fell over how? You kept printing growth.
Expert: We printed growth. We didn't print the growth we'd told people we'd print, and the gap got filled with M&A. Which is the honest description of half this category. I can take you through the sequence, but going in you should know it isn't one decision. It's four, maybe five, over three years, and every one looked sensible on the day.