Let's Get Specific: How Exactly Does Quadshift Help?

Maybe you've already read about What it's Like Being a Quadshift Company, which is a discussion about the relationship between our portfolio companies and Quadshift. We review how other successful companies that acquire software businesses have done it, and how we generally think about how much we can and should be involved with our portfolio companies. In this article, we get a little more specific.

Certain aspects of our approach will differ if your company is similar to one of our existing ones (we can do a lot more) or if you are retiring or transitioning out of the business. However, this article will address how we assist all our companies, especially in areas consistent across B2B software entities.

For every company we acquire, we ensure strategic alignment from the start. We wouldn't have invested in your company if we didn't like what you built, but where we go from here often requires fruitful discussion and review of our research and your unique and seasoned insights.

We put our heads together, get alignment, and devise a vision for where we are going, then we get to work. We create a master project list, align Quadshift and your team with set objectives, and conduct weekly meetings to ensure steady progress.
‍

How We Help All Our Companies

At Quadshift, we acquire and support small software companies. While every company’s strengths and needs are unique, most are still developing professionalized functions, and managers often wear many hats.

Here’s a typical org chart of a small B2B software company:
‍

At this stage, it’s often difficult — and unnecessary — for companies to attract top-tier senior talent across every functional area. Even great companies usually rely on key staff to cover multiple roles. For most of our businesses, it doesn't yet make sense to hire a dedicated CFO or controller, a creative director, a Google Ads or SEO expert (especially with B2B SaaS experience), an AI product manager, or a chief security officer. These roles only become practical once a company reaches greater scale.

This is where Quadshift can help.

In many ways, Quadshift acts as a pattern-recognition engine — identifying the common challenges and high-leverage opportunities that arise in scaling B2B software companies. Over time, we've built a team and a proven "menu" of specialized services that companies in our portfolio can access, including:

1. Marketing & Sales
2. Administration & Bookkeeping (Finance Back Office)
3. IT Management and Cybersecurity
4. AI Enablement

Below, I dive deeper into how we support companies in each of these areas (and more), with links to more detailed resources throughout.
‍

Marketing & Sales

Branding

Before we dive into supporting the marketing function, we start from the ground up. If you need a brand refresh, which is often the case, we have a talented, in-house ad-agency-trained team that, with your guidance (or the guidance of the business lead), builds a comprehensive brand guide that includes logos, fonts, and colors. We've never had a company turn away from these services: they are top-notch and lay the foundation.

Marketing assets, sales collateral, and other customer-facing materials

With your new brand, Quadshift's team can build out the entire spectrum of collateral needed to support sales, operations, and marketing. We usually don't take on 100% of the regular creative work needed in the ordinary course of business, but we can contribute and get the ball rolling, like creating the social media accounts and loading them with your brand assets, building email templates to be re-used, or creating conference materials. In the eyes of your customers, you will look sharp and professional, improving the customer experience and the odds you are selected over your competitors. Good design is good business.
‍

Generating sales opportunities

All B2B vertical market software companies typically grow through one of two primary approaches: direct outreach (often via business development reps booking demos) or inbound lead generation (where prospects discover you and reach out directly). The right approach depends largely on your revenue per customer and the size of your addressable market. For a deeper look at how to prioritize your growth efforts on these two dimensions, check out Quadshift's B2B Growth Grid.

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive growth strategy. There are other “go-to-market motions,” including product-led, partnership-led, event-led, and community-led growth. But for most companies, inbound and outbound remain the most important, if not the primary, drivers of growth.
‍

In either case, Quadshift supports our companies:
‍

Direct Outreach (Outbound)

Direct outreach for B2B software companies is cold calling, emailing, texting, LinkedIn connection requests, InMail messaging, or some combination of these, to book demos. When selling to a niche vertical market, this is probably the most common and often most effective way to generate sales opportunities. There are a few ways we are very helpful in supporting these efforts.

Obtaining comprehensive customer details

We have a data team that we leverage for all our customer contact detail information gathering. Our team is well-trained and affordable. All our companies leverage this team.
‍

Developing a business development cadence

We've developed our own process for outbound lead generation efforts. Each company can modify as needed, but this is a winning, proven method --> B2B Cold Outreach Sales Process. You can download my Google Doc template using that link.

Use our marketing software

Quadshift owns a communication software called Shift One. All our companies can use this for free, mostly to send email blasts. Some use it for regular/operational customer communication, some use it for newsletters or marketing emails. You can design beautiful branded emails, or just send plain text sales emails. You can also send texts, mail, recorded voice messages, and build landing pages as well. Best of all - it's free to set up, train, and use for all our companies.

For sales teams that benefit from email sequencing and automation, Quadshift has also tested the market for solutions for high inbox deliverability and ease of use (a challenge in this day and age) and we have some powerful tools we recommend and train our companies to use.
‍

Hire sales talent

We have recruiters who are plugged into the software sales world and we have internal, cheaper ways we can post jobs and help attract candidates. We have a few best practices for interviewing, hiring, and training as well, which we share.
‍

Inbound Lead Generation

Your customers can find you by searching for your services, or you can earn their attention through compelling content that inspires them to reach out. While it may feel passive, inbound lead generation requires deliberate and strategic groundwork — and that's where we come in.

For a deeper dive into how we help our companies build that foundation, read Inbound Lead Gen 101 for Vertical Market Software Companies: ICP, Keyword Research, Branding and Marketing Assets. In that article, I outline the exact process we use with our companies to establish the groundwork necessary to build an effective inbound strategy, including:

• How to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas
• How to perform practical, effective keyword research using your existing site traffic and your competitors’ strategies
• How to build marketing assets — like brand guides, websites, collateral, and social profiles — that make your company stand out
• A step-by-step breakdown of where Quadshift gets involved, and how we collaborate with your team to execute this work quickly and well

It’s written specifically for the kinds of companies we acquire — bootstrapped, profitable, resource-constrained — and it’s designed to help you get the highest return on effort with limited time and budget.
‍

Website Design, SEO, and Conversion Optimization

A high-performing website is one of the most important growth levers for a vertical market software company — and it’s often one of the first things we tackle after an acquisition.

We’ve built and launched the websites for all our companies using best practices honed over years of iteration. Our sites are designed not just to look good, but to perform — maximizing visibility in search engines, converting qualified leads, and staying easy for your team to update and manage.

We’ve become Webflow experts, giving our companies the power of a flexible, visually polished site builder without compromising SEO or usability. Whether your team wants to be fully in control or leave the heavy lifting to us, we make it seamless.

And while we don't run ongoing SEO programs (like link-building or weekly blog publishing) today, we do focus heavily on setting a strong foundation — both in design and discoverability.
‍

Here’s how Quadshift sets up your website and SEO foundation:

• On-Brand, High-Performance Design: We build clean, fast, mobile-friendly websites that reflect your brand and speak directly to your ideal customers.
• Built to Convert: Clear structure, strong calls to action, and social proof guide visitors toward becoming leads.
• SEO-Ready: We handle keyword research and optimize titles, metadata, content, and structure to drive visibility.
• Analytics and Technical Setup: We ensure sites are Lighthouse-optimized and fully integrated with Google Search Console, Analytics, Tag Manager, and your CRM.
• Easy-to-Manage CMS: Your site comes ready with a content management system so your team can easily update pages, launch blogs, or publish new content.

If you'd like to dive deeper into our approach, check out Inbound Lead Gen 201: Building a High-Performance Vertical Market Software Company Website.

We don’t just hand over a pretty website — we help you build a powerful marketing foundation that attracts, converts, and scales with your business.
‍

Once that foundation is in place, the next step is building momentum — turning visibility into leads. That’s where our approach to content, software review site strategy, and paid channel prioritization comes in. In Inbound Lead Gen 301: Sparking Inbound Momentum, I break down how we help companies move from “ready to receive” to proactively generating consistent inbound demand. The article outlines high-ROI organic tactics, a practical framework for choosing paid channels, and how to align your strategy with your team’s strengths — so you can scale smart, not just spend more.
‍

Finance, Bookkeeping, and Reporting (Back Office)

Small software companies often have unique, but largely functional processes for billing, collections, payments, reporting, and general financial operations. While these processes are rarely broken or wildly different, Quadshift typically gets involved in the following ways to align with our standards, improve reporting clarity, consistency and efficiency.
‍

Admin Staffing

We can augment your existing admin and bookkeeping team or take over the function entirely. In either case, we work within your current processes—making only the necessary adjustments to meet Quadshift's reporting standards. Our admin staff are trained in IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards), enabling us to produce timely, accurate financial reports. We may add a few accounts, train on items like revenue deferral, and implement changes to align reporting across the Quadshift portfolio. Even if we don’t fully absorb the function, we always oversee it closely.
‍

ERP, Payroll, and Banking

We have preferred tools for accounting and payroll but don’t push unnecessary changes. If your current systems are cost-effective, functional, and can integrate with ours, we leave them in place. The only exception is banking—acquired companies usually transition to our banking platform, but we’ve streamlined the process to make it smooth.
‍

Reporting, Forecasting, and Budgeting

We build a detailed financial model and track and prepare a detailed SaaS metrics waterfall for each of our companies. We also produce monthly financial reporting packages that include prior year comparisons and budget-to-actuals. In addition, we track KPIs tailored to your business, enabling smarter decision-making and deeper insight into financial performance. We don’t settle for guesswork—producing accurate, actionable information is a priority, and we invest the time to do it right.

For deeper insight into our approach to SaaS metrics, check out my three-part series:

1. Is your recurring revenue valuable? Here’s how to find out.
2. Part 2: How to analyze your SaaS/ recurring revenue metrics: churn and retention
3. Part 3: The most important recurring revenue metric of all…
   ‍

If you’re looking for a practical guide to tightening operations and improving margins, check out 4 Simple—but Powerful—Keys to Driving Higher Profits in Vertical Market Software. In it, I walk through four levers we use across Quadshift (and see in the best-run VMS companies) to tighten operations and boost profitability — from instilling a cost-conscious culture to running efficient vendor audits, rebuilding budgets from zero, and applying a smart Eliminate → Automate → Delegate framework.

These aren’t theoretical ideas — they’re proven practices that can drive 5–10 point EBITDA improvements in the first year post-close. If you’re looking for actionable ways to run leaner and reinvest in growth, it’s a great place to start.
‍

AI Enablement with Quadshift AI

Quadshift companies also benefit from the resources of our cross-functional AI Enablement team — Quadshift AI.

Our companies are typically specialized, successful businesses with lean teams who wear multiple hats and often rely on reliable but manual workflows. They also operate in niche industries and have access to proprietary datasets that are unavailable to the broader market. These two factors — domain-specific expertise combined with exclusive data and workflow improvement opportunities — create a unique environment where carefully applied AI initiatives can have a high and lasting impact.

At Quadshift, we view AI as a way to enhance your team’s capabilities. Our goal is to unlock new efficiencies, enable your people to do their best work, and help your products stay ahead of the curve.

We capitalize on these opportunities in two ways:

• Empowering AI Super-Users: We train and support team members across our companies to become AI super-users — giving them the tools and confidence to identify and implement AI-driven improvements in their day-to-day work.

• Driving Strategic AI Projects: Where we see especially high-impact opportunities, our centralized AI team leads focused initiatives that create new capabilities, streamline key processes, or strengthen the defensibility of your products.
  ‍

By thoughtfully embedding AI into our companies' workflows, products, and operations, we help foster faster innovation, unlock new efficiencies, and build durable competitive advantages — all while preserving the specialized knowledge and personal touch that make our companies great.

Learn more about Quadshift AI, and check out 5 Predictions on how AI will Shape the Future of B2B SaaS.
‍

IT Management and Cyber Security

Reliable IT infrastructure and strong cybersecurity practices are foundational to the success and longevity of any software company. At Quadshift, we support our companies by building resilient systems that safeguard operations without adding unnecessary complexity or burden to the business.

Our IT Management services focus on practical, business-friendly support:

• Infrastructure and Equipment: We help standardize and manage core IT assets like domains, applications, email systems, and hardware across companies to ensure they are reliable, secure, and easy to maintain.
• ‍Systems and Communications: We assist with systems selection (ERP, CRM, communications platforms) where needed, ensuring solutions are appropriate for the company’s size, market, and goals.
• ‍Cybersecurity Foundations: We deploy best practices around cybersecurity awareness, such as phishing and security training, incident response planning, penetration testing, and endpoint protection.
• ‍Centralized Security Monitoring: We implement monitoring and intrusion detection solutions (like SIEM, IDS, and IPS systems) to proactively defend against potential threats.
• ‍Insurance and Risk Mitigation: We work with specialized brokers to ensure all companies have appropriate business and cyber insurance coverage in place, protecting against unforeseen risks.

Our approach is to layer in best practices while preserving the entrepreneurial spirit and flexibility that made each company successful in the first place. We view strong IT and security as enablers of growth — not obstacles to it.
‍

Software and Product Development

Last — but certainly not least — is the heart of your business: your product.

The companies we acquire have built software that solves real customer problems exceptionally well. They are often market leaders or emerging leaders in their niche, and everything we see points to your product continuing to meet customer needs for the foreseeable future — otherwise, we wouldn’t be investing in it.

When we join forces, we invest significant time — often over the first year or two — to deeply understand your product, your customers, and the unique dynamics of your market. We do this deliberately, so that any recommendations or support we offer are thoughtful, practical, and additive, never disruptive.

Once we have the right context, we can add meaningful value by:

• Supporting strategic product planning and roadmap development
‍• Setting up cost-effective, secure, and reliable infrastructure and dev ops
• Sourcing technical talent when needed
• Selectively improving UI/UX through our creative and front-end development teams

Our philosophy is simple: continue investing in the solutions that made your company successful — while strengthening the foundation for future growth.

We are always adapting and refining our service offerings. Over time, we’ve become more focused and effective — learning from every success and mistake along the way. We know where we can make a difference, and just as importantly, when to step back and let your great team keep doing what they do best.
‍

Thinking of Joining Quadshift?

The best way to understand how Quadshift can support your business is to start a conversation. We’re always excited to explore opportunities with vertical market B2B software companies who share our passion for great products, strong customer relationships, and long-term growth.

Please get in touch! We are always glad to explore opportunities with vertical market B2B software companies.

Want more insights like this?

Read and subscribe to my latest content ->

‍