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In 2016, when Jeff Nichols had been a senior member of Glassdoor\u2019s FP&A team for 2 years, he and other members of the finance team were confronting the nagging truth that the firm\u2019s path to going public wasn\u2019t getting any shorter.

The online job recruitment firm\u2019s efforts to grow its profit margins had met only mild success, while its cash burn rate was inching upward.

According to Nichols, Glassdoor\u2019s path to going public was further complicated due to the unique characteristics of its business model. Points of comparison between Glassdoor and top recruitment rivals such as LinkedIn and Indeed offered few insights due to the firm\u2019s unique approach, making Glassdoor\u2019s story more challenging for management to tell.

To help remove the firm\u2019s storytelling obstacles and address its meager margin growth, Nichols says, the firm\u2019s finance team began asking, \u201cHow do we get the business to perform over the long term in a way that would actually make for a compelling story?\u201d \xa0

To help answer this question, Nichols reports, Glassdoor first had to widen its lens and search for points of comparison with SaaS companies, ad tech firms, and other\xa0companies beyond the traditional recruitment realm in order to identify competitive attributes that aligned with those offered by Glassdoor.

At the same time, this broader comparison helped to magnify certain weaknesses in Glassdoor\u2019s model.

\u201cWhat we were lacking was retention. Most SaaS companies are focused on net dollar expansion or gross dollar expansion, and we just didn\u2019t have it,\u201d explains Nichols, who says that another challenge that quickly came into view involved small and medium-size businesses. \u201cThe way in which we went about SMB sales was just not efficient\u2014it was very labor- and cost-intensive,\u201d comments Nichols, who\u2014having played a central role in helping to broaden the company\u2019s strategic view\u2014was soon helping to put a restructuring in motion.

Says Nichols: \u201cWe reprioritized. We made some new investments that we had not made before, but at the same time we curtailed some costs and refocused what we were actually doing.\u201d \xa0

Ultimately, Glassdoor\u2019s path led not to an IPO but to a sale, when in 2018 Recruit Holdings, a large Japanese human resources company, paid $1.2 billion for the company. Having been valued by investors only 2 years previously at around $860 million, Glassdoor had a story that had no doubt become more compelling.

Looking back, Nichols\u2019 cites his part in helping the company to widen its lens:

\u201cAll of this was a directional change for the company. I feel that I brought something to the organization that it really needed, which was an honest, objective look at \u2018here\u2019s what\u2019s going on in the business, and here\u2019s how it appears to its peers.\u2019\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0