Every year LLR Partners publishes a growth guide drawn from its portfolio companies and internal Value Creation Team. This year's edition is the ninth. The framing from executive editor Emily Oakes is honest about the moment: AI is no longer arriving; it is embedding, and leaders still have businesses to run while it does. That tension shapes the guide's tone throughout. It does not traffic in aspiration. The contributors are operators writing about problems they actually solved.
Three sections are worth isolating: the AI adoption framework from Wharton professor Ethan Mollick's keynote at LLR's 2025 CEO Collaborate summit, the SaaS contract negotiation playbook from the Operational Excellence team, and the days sales outstanding reduction framework from the Financial Planning and Analysis practice. Each stands alone. Together, they describe what operational discipline actually looks like at a growth-stage company in 2026.
The full guide is a free download at grow.llrpartners.com. What follows is my read of the three sections most relevant to technology and revenue leaders.
Waiting for the Blueprint Is the Strategy Your Competitors Want You to Have
Mollick's central argument is structural, not motivational. AI is already undetectable, ubiquitous, and available to any organization with a laptop and a subscription. The access advantage is gone. What remains is the organizational advantage, and that belongs to whoever builds the internal conditions for learning before their competitors do.
The framework assigns adoption responsibility to three groups simultaneously. Leadership sets vision and risk tolerance. The Crowd, every employee using AI day-to-day, runs experiments and shares what works. The Lab tests, iterates, and scales the findings across the organization. Run one of the three and you have a pilot. Run two and you have pockets of productivity. Run all three together and you build something that compounds. Most organizations are running one.
The question is not which AI platform to select. It is whether the organizational conditions for learning actually exist.
The guide's most usable provocation from this section: every prompt technique learned more than 30 days ago is probably already outdated. AI systems respond more effectively now to principles of human communication than to engineered prompt structures. The skill is not technical fluency. It is the ability to define a problem clearly, give the system enough context to work from, and evaluate what comes back. That is a management skill, and the guide is right to frame it that way.
The productivity trap the guide identifies is worth sitting with. Using AI to accelerate existing workflows without questioning those workflows produces throughput, not advantage. The organizations capturing real margin from AI are redesigning processes around what AI changes, not layering AI on top of what they already do. That distinction determines whether the investment produces returns or just covers the cost of the tools.
Mollick closed his session with five questions worth putting in front of any leadership team. What bold move can you make today that others think is impossible? What are you building that is almost there but not quite? Where in your organization are the three adoption forces operating? What part of your current expertise is losing value in the AI era? The fifth, unstated, is the one the room felt: who in this building is already acting, and what have they learned that you have not?
Your Vendor Already Knows You Won't Ask About List Price
Taylor Koger and Claire King from LLR's Operational Excellence team open their section with a finding from reviewing millions of dollars in software-as-a-service contracts across dozens of portfolio companies. Spend creep is not caused by bad actors or careless procurement teams. It accumulates through good processes that nobody revisited after the company grew past the stage where those processes were designed.
The first of their seven checks is the one most buyers skip: get the list price before the discount conversation starts. Enterprise software list prices carry built-in margins of 75 to 90 percent, according to figures the guide cites from secondary sources and flags as unaudited. A quote described as "highly competitive" that represents a five percent discount off that baseline is not a lie. It is a bet that the buyer does not know the baseline. Most vendors win that bet. The ask that changes the dynamic is simple: what percentage off list does this proposal represent?
When the subscription line holds firm, the one-time fees move. Implementation, setup, and onboarding costs are routinely negotiated down or waived entirely when the recurring price is fixed. The guide recommends locking in a renewal cap, a contractual ceiling on year-over-year increases, before signing. With SaaS pricing up roughly 8.7 percent year-over-year in 2025 per SaaStr data (unaudited), a 5 percent cap clause negotiated at signing compounds in the buyer's favor across every renewal that follows.
On seats: vendors will add them at any point in the contract. Removing them mid-term is a negotiation that usually does not go the buyer's way. The recommendation is to start smaller than feels safe, track actual usage quarterly, and treat expansion as a reward for demonstrated adoption rather than a buffer against possible future need. The Pendo figure on feature utilization, 80 percent rarely or never used, is flagged in the source as unaudited, but the directional truth of it holds across every enterprise software category. Nobody uses everything they buy.
The final check, and the most neglected operationally, is tracking renewal dates 60 to 90 days in advance with a named owner assigned to each major tool. Without it, renewals default to approval-under-time-pressure with no leverage. The guide's observation about the compounding cost is accurate: a pattern of neglected two-week-out renewals across a tool portfolio becomes hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoidable spend. A spreadsheet and a calendar reminder close most of that gap.
High DSO Is an Organizational Problem Wearing a Finance Label
David Ancona-Cole, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis on LLR's Value Creation Team, reframes days sales outstanding in a way that should change where CFOs look first when the number is too high. DSO is a leading indicator of operational maturity. A high number almost never reflects customer intent to delay. It reflects process gaps and ownership ambiguity that the company built in during an earlier stage and never cleaned up.
The guide identifies six root causes. Role confusion leads: customer success and account management teams holding both revenue relationships and collections responsibility face a structural conflict that resolves badly for collections every time. The other five are billing complexity from early custom terms, absence of a regular management cadence, cultural avoidance of difficult payment conversations, wrong or outdated billing contacts, and no enforcement policy. Every one of them is fixable. None require the customer to change behavior.
The three-step framework is sequenced deliberately. Step one is visibility: a dashboard segmenting aging receivables by client, tier, region, and overdue status, paired with a standing weekly cross-functional review the guide calls the "collections hour." Finance and Accounting anchor it. Sales or Customer Success join when their accounts are on the list. The meeting signals internally that collections is a company priority, not a Finance afterthought.
Step two transfers ownership to Finance, with the head of Finance personally driving outreach on top accounts each week. The escalation path the guide recommends is specific: contact accounts payable at the customer organization, be direct about what is needed to release payment, and escalate when confirmation does not follow. The guide surfaces one portfolio company case where the fastest DSO improvement came from the CFO calling the counterpart CFO directly. Peer-to-peer outreach at that level cuts through the organizational noise that email reminders never reach.
Step three is enforcement: clear policies stated upfront, service holds or credit pauses only after explicit communication and internal alignment, legal escalation reserved for persistent or material situations. The guide is careful to frame enforcement not as punishment but as the signal that timely payment is part of the value exchange from day one. Most delays stem from misalignment and process confusion, not bad faith. Enforcement done right resolves the first two without requiring the third.
A CFO who cannot forecast collections accurately cannot confidently authorize growth spending. DSO management is not a defensive activity.
The broader guide covers sales pipeline mechanics, B2B marketing fundamentals, market research as a growth lever, a first-year CFO playbook from Dan Irwin at IntelliShift, employee retention analytics from Quantum Workplace, a disciplined mergers and acquisitions framework from Kevin Jones at Celero Commerce, and an offshoring strategy guide from LLR's product and customer success leadership. The peer reading list at the end is worth a look separately.
