Mitigating Churn: A Masterclass in Customer Retention with Will Cureton, CFO of Nitrogen Wealth
Run the Numbers
Navigating Auto-Renewals and Unusual Expenses
This chapter explores the complexities of auto-renewals from the perspectives of both buyers and sellers, highlighting key organizational strategies. The discussion features humorous anecdotes about questionable expense reports, wrapping up with a call to action for listeners to engage further with business metrics and financial insights.
In this episode, CJ has an exceptionally candid conversation with Will Cureton, the CFO of Nitrogen Wealth. Will sheds light on what Nitrogen Wealth does and how it incorporates a tolerance functionality built on the prospect theory into its software platform to better serve wealth management firms. After taking on some private equity backing in 2021, Nitrogen Wealth made a big price increase mistake. Will talks about how the company went about revisiting its growth assumptions. He explains how they assessed the company’s TAM, exited unsustainable business lines, and unbundled some of their products in order to maintain or regain their customers. Will then does a deep dive on mitigating churn, covering which metrics Nitrogen tracks to predict churn, how they formulate a churn score, and other steps they take to support customer retention.
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Preview and Intro
(01:32) Sponsor – Maxio | RemoFirst
(04:03) An Intro to Nitrogen Wealth and Prospect Theory
(07:34) Nitrogen’s Private Equity Backing and Price Increase Mistake
(11:27) Revisiting Growth Assumptions: Assessing TAM
(14:30) Time to Land the Customer Versus the Number of Customers
(16:34) Sponsor – Mercury | NetSuite | Operators Guild
(19:58) Building Test Plans for TAM Expansion
(22:28) Exiting Unsustainable Business Lines
(25:36) Bundling or Unbundling Products
(27:43) Nitrogen’s Price-of-Value Mismatch and Drivers to Mitigate Churn
(28:30) Formulating a Churn Score
(31:47) Why Nitrogen’s RevOps Team Reports to the CFO, Not Sales
(33:31) Learnings on Mitigating Churn
(34:40) Metrics to Track to Predict Churn
(35:40) The Severity of Nitrogen’s Price Increase
(36:58) Long-Ass Lightning Round: A Business Trip to Manitoba
(39:25) A Brown-Nosing Mistake Will Made
(40:52) Advice to Younger Self
(41:51) Finance Software Stack
(43:01) Craziest Expense Story
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