Sixteen Ventures is a consulting practice. It has one subject: what happens to a customer's value after the deal closes, and how much of that is a choice rather than a fact.
Lincoln Murphy founded it in 2008. Since then it has worked with hundreds of SaaS and recurring-revenue companies, from pre-revenue startups through global enterprises, on the same underlying problem in a dozen different costumes.
The problem we work on
Almost every company has a rigorous, instrumented, well-funded process for acquiring a customer. Almost none has one for growing that customer afterward. Expansion gets treated as something that happens when a customer asks, which makes it an inbound function that nobody owns and nobody forecasts.
The result is a business that pays full price for every dollar of growth while sitting on revenue it already earned the right to collect. Retention protects that base. It does not grow it. A book of business that renews flat is not stable, it is declining slowly enough that nobody has to explain it.
What the work looks like
Expansion design. Building the motion into the business rather than leaving it to chance. Measuring the latent revenue actually present, deciding through strategic unbundling what comes out of the initial sale, mapping the ascension path the customer will travel, and orchestrating the conversation so the next thing is expected before it arrives. The output is a playbook with owners, not a strategy document.
Sales conversation analysis. Most of the damage to lifetime value is done before onboarding, by well-meaning people saying reasonable things. We read the transcripts for what they did to the ceiling, which is not the question any sales review asks.
Workshops and training. Working sessions where a team builds its own expansion inventory, milestone map, and orchestration playbook, with ownership assigned before anyone goes home.
Speaking. Conferences, internal kickoffs, and leadership offsites, usually to rooms that came for retention advice.
Who it is for
CROs, VPs of Sales, RevOps leaders, and CEOs at companies with recurring revenue and a customer base large enough that nobody can hold all of it in their head. The engagements that work best are the ones where somebody already suspects the number is being left on the table and wants to find out how much.
The adjacent work
LTV:Max is the division of Sixteen Ventures focused specifically on expansion revenue and customer lifetime value: the frameworks, the workshops, and the analysis that come out of this practice.
This site is the archive. Over 800 articles on SaaS growth, retention, onboarding, pricing, and Customer Success going back to 2008.
Contact
Email lincoln@sixteenventures.com. Sixteen Ventures LLC is based in Dallas, Texas.