That question is bigger than retention. Answering it well means testing product differentiation, sales efficiency, onboarding, and where AI spend actually shows up on the P&L, wherever the real gap is hiding, not just the function everyone assumes. I run the same evidence-first diagnostic across all of it, working from your actual numbers, not a hopeful narrative.
Same question every time: is there real, measurable evidence behind the story you're telling investors, your board, or yourself, or is hope doing the talking.
A full audit of whether your growth and retention story actually holds up, tested across the functions that build or break it: product differentiation, sales efficiency, onboarding, service, and where AI spend shows up on the P&L. Built from what the numbers actually show, not what the team hopes they show.
Some conversations work better as a short note rather than a scheduled call. If that's you, send me a quick email with your situation, your numbers, even just a question, and I'll reply personally.
kevin@yamanostrategies.com →Here's the bad news first. Nobody gets a pass on this anymore, not because your retention looks fine on paper, not because your customers love you. Investors have learned to ask the AI-vulnerability question of everyone, and a healthy business that can't answer it clearly still takes a discount it didn't earn. Now the good news: for most companies, the real numbers already make the case. They just haven't been pulled out, proven, and told as a story an investor can act on.
Source: Kyle Poyar / ChartMogul, "The SaaS Retention Report: The AI Churn Wave," analysis of 3,500 software companies, Dec. 2025.
Thin AI-wrapper products, sold cheap to curiosity-driven buyers with no switching cost and no service layer underneath the tool, are running closer to 23% gross revenue retention. That number is real, and it's what's driving investors to ask the question of every seller in the room, including the ones it was never really about.
Source: Kyle Poyar / ChartMogul, "The AI Churn Wave," Dec. 2025.
Traditional B2B SaaS, real service, real switching cost, real accountability structure, holds up far better: median net revenue retention (NRR, which counts expansion on top of retained revenue) around 106%. If that's closer to your business, the defense already exists inside your own numbers. Building it into a story investors believe is the actual work.
Source: ChartMogul, 2024 SaaS Retention Benchmarks, n=2,100 companies.
This is a tried and true method, run the same way every time, whether the client is a nine-figure SaaS company or a family business deciding whether to expand. It's not a framework I sell. It's the sequence I've used to find every real gap I've ever found, tested across industries for nineteen years.
Not where you believe it flows. The P&L, or the closest real equivalent, comes before the website, the ad account, or the org chart.
Higher multiple, a clean exit, provable retention, whatever it is, named plainly, not assumed.
Most of the time it doesn't. It points somewhere the team stopped noticing a while ago.
Specifically. This is usually the moment a leadership team says nobody had ever told them that directly.
A diagnosis without a next step is just an expensive opinion. I don't leave you with one.
Most leadership teams treat churn, competitive loss, and unmeasured gaps as one undifferentiated problem, and prescribe one undifferentiated fix. Ordered from what typically costs the most to what typically costs the least, here's what the audit actually finds. Only one of these buckets is addressable through the service and ownership changes most advisors reach for first.
Usually the largest bucket. Includes the build-versus-buy and AI in-housing losses investors are specifically worried about. This is a narrative and differentiation problem, not a service problem, and it's the one this diagnosis is built to answer.
"No reason recorded." Often the second-largest bucket, and the most urgent to fix first, because no other bucket's diagnosis can be trusted while this one stays large.
M&A, acquisition, genuine business closure on the customer's side. Real, and it has to be netted out before any recovery target is honest.
Adoption, onboarding, time-to-value, account ownership structure. The genuinely addressable slice, and usually the smallest of the four, notably smaller than leadership hopes.
Grew a venture-backed B2B SaaS platform from $20M to $40M ARR, driving 80% of total pipeline directly, reporting to the CEO with no marketing leadership above the role.
Led investor relations and marketing through a NASDAQ uplisting, presenting the growth and financial story directly to institutional investors. Contributed to a 20% increase in market valuation over the engagement.
Client details anonymized to protect confidentiality, standard for every engagement.
I've operated at the intersection of marketing, sales, product, and finance for two decades, most recently as Head of Marketing at TapClicks, reporting directly to the CEO with no marketing leadership above the role. Before that, I served as Head of Investor Relations for a public company during its NASDAQ uplisting process, presenting the growth and financial story directly to institutional investors, a rare combination for an operator to bring into a retention or exit conversation.
What sits underneath the resume is broader still: three decades working inside real estate, enterprise hardware and networking, commercial bandwidth, digital media, ad operations, and data, on top of the SaaS and consumer brands above. That range isn't a distraction from the diagnostic method, it's why it works. A revenue problem rarely respects departmental lines, and most advisors only ever learned to look at one of them.
Yamano Strategies is a single-advisor practice by design. The discovery, the diagnosis, and the strategy come directly from me, not handed off to an associate partway through. When an engagement needs execution capacity beyond that, I bring in vetted contractors for the specific work, but the analysis and the story stay in one hand from first call to final deliverable.
Twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether there's a real gap worth closing before you're in front of investors, or whether your story already holds up better than you think.
See Where You Stand →A mutual NDA is available on request before any numbers change hands. Materials you share are used only to complete the diagnosis you asked for, never shared with any third party without your written consent, and retained only as long as the engagement requires. If your situation calls for additional safeguards, a data room, restricted access, or anonymized figures only, we'll work within them.
