Adam Sand breaks down Verisk's acquisition of AccuLynx, arguing the real prize is the data, not the software. He warns roofers that a major firm now controls their pricing information and insurance relationships, and urges them to organize their data so they can extract insights or leave the platform if needed.
So the recent acquisition of Accu Lynx by Verisk has the whole roofing industry up in a tizzy. And I want to talk a little bit about what it means. So it'll be interesting to see when the SEC filings come out as to what the multiple was, if it was a like, because nobody can know the like. There's no public record of what ACCU Link's revenue was. So we don't know what multiple it was purchased at. But when we do find out the next quarterly filing, it will be interesting to see if it got the typical aging SaaS multiple. And you can kind of look at that and compare it to something like Service Titan to see like what is its revenue and its profit relative to the multiple it got at the sale. Because the value of data is worth a lot more than the value of an aging SaaS product. Because Acculinx is getting old, right? There's, you look at other companies out there that have a newer product that have evolved a little bit more, right? They would get a higher multiple than an aging sas. And this complaint or concern has always been there with Accu Links because accuinx was originally owned by a roofing company. Like a lot of other CRMs, job progress was the same thing. But when you look at it, if you know these $30 billion worth of insurance claims are being paid out every year. If you knock that price down by 10%, that's 3 billion right. A year. All because you have better access to knowing what the like actual contractor pricing is. I mean, because they instantly have all the data like that. A company of that size can instantly pull all that data out in from that database and pump it into a machine learning algorithm within 12 hours. They have an insane amount of knowledge on the roofing industry. They that they're armed with massive. And that like that nail is already set in the coffin. So you will see that make its way through the roofing industry in the next 12 months. You're going to see that happen. But it, it really highlights this new value of your own data that you, that as a roofing industry and I say you but like the roofing industry didn't have before because that data, they don't have a great way for you to look at that data. Like if you look at the HubSpot reporting, I talk to roofers every day on all kinds of different CRMs and the number one concern is like they don't have great reporting. Now to get great reporting you have to have a very solid data model. Like you have to have a contact and a building and a deal and a ticket and a bill and expense and a deposit and an engagement and an activity. Activity being like work people do on the file. Engagement meaning like a contact with the, with the customer, right? And then being able to like look at like, well, how many engagements does it typically take to get a sale? And then all of those notes, right? Being able to like crush all of those notes to see all the things that insure, like all the things the roofers have said internally on their notes, like I don't want to know what that's going to look like. It's to going to be fun. But all of a sudden it makes you suddenly look at your data in a different way. The lesson in this is the power of data. Like look at how much someone else placed in terms of value on your data. How much value are you putting into your data? Because inside of your ACCU link, so your HubSpot or your job Nimbus, you can create these custom fields with enumerative data like so, meaning like a drop down with a number of values or, or an open text field with a bunch of open text junk dumped in it. There's more value in enumerated data. And by keeping a good data hygiene and a good adherence to collecting good data, that data can be valuable to you. And so I will also point out that if you look at like the market cap of HubSpot today, they're at a $30 billion valuation, so 10 times that of Acculinx. And you can build and construct your own data model to reflect data any which way you want, and you can analyze that data. You can go into ChatGPT today, connect your HubSpot to it with like a click, like two clicks and then basically say, study all my deals, look at all my zip codes and then look at the amount of engagements and activities per deal. Show me the zip codes that have the highest gross profit and the highest close rate with the least amount of engagements and sort that by zip code and spit out a report. And in about six minutes ChatGPT will give you that. And then you say, go put all my Facebook ads and all my direct mail into that, those top three zip codes. Like you could even ask it, how should I look at my data, right? Show me my data model and tell me and try and infer what my data could tell me and then learn from it. So the power of data is the lesson that we all need to learn coming out of this. Because you can turn so much right and create so much enterprise value in your company by learning how to collect, disseminate and use your data. And I'll tell you another thing. HubSpot serves all industries, right? Like they serve you. B2B, SAS, marketing agencies, engineering firms, schools, software companies, like, whatever. So to be able to build your own data model and collect your own data in a place that is likely not to get bought by your competitor or by another industry element that could potentially value the collective value of all your data, like, that's probably something that's pretty good for you and the ability to get your data out. It's very difficult to get your data out of ACCU Links. So. And then to at least get it out into a usable form and then into another software. We do data migrations every day where we migrate people off of ACCU Links and we have to like, there's like an automated part and then there's like a manual part and AI helps and we have tools to do it. But it's. Now's a really good time to be thinking about what is the value of your data. How do you make even better, higher quality, more hygienic data and how do you translate that into value for your business?
