How a PE-Backed CRO Drove 4x Revenue Growth

In this episode of The Private Equity Podcast, Alex Rawlings speaks with Adam Crandall, Chief Revenue Officer at Addtronics, a private equity-backed platform of robotics and automation companies.

Adam shares how he helped quadruple revenue at a founder-led automation business before its successful exit. He explains why growth begins with putting the right people in the right seats, rather than relying solely on processes, industry experience, or technology.

The conversation explores how private equity firms and portfolio company leaders can identify attractive markets, improve pricing, align compensation with profitability, and build a repeatable go-to-market playbook across multiple operating companies.

Adam also discusses the cultural shift from pursuing revenue at any cost to prioritising profitable growth. He explains how sales leaders can communicate price increases confidently, assess commercial talent effectively, and give operating company presidents autonomy while maintaining platform-wide alignment.

Key Takeaways

• Why the right talent is the foundation of scalable revenue growth
• How Adam helped a founder-led company achieve 4X revenue growth
• Why attitude, adaptability, and soft skills can outweigh lengthy industry experience
• How market specialisation can create a dominant competitive position
• When strong demand and long backlogs signal an opportunity to increase prices
• How to position price increases around customer value
• Why sales compensation should reward profitable growth, not revenue alone
• How a standardised go-to-market playbook supports add-on integration
• Tools for assessing salespeople and commercial leaders

Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction to Adam Crandall and Addtronics
00:30 – Adam’s career journey from HR to revenue leadership
01:25 – Quadrupling revenue and exiting a founder-led business
02:19 – The foundations of 4X revenue growth
02:49 – Getting the right people in the right seats
04:08 – Identifying high-growth end markets
05:01 – Hiring for attitude, adaptability, and soft skills
07:48 – Building a team capable of accelerated growth
08:17 – Value creation through market specialisation
09:40 – Pricing as a value creation lever
11:33 – Implementing price increases in founder-led businesses
12:01 – Communicating price increases to customers
14:23 – Shifting the culture toward profitable growth
15:22 – Aligning sales compensation with margin targets
16:49 – Creating a repeatable go-to-market playbook
17:44 – Balancing platform consistency with operating company autonomy
18:11 – What belongs in a scalable commercial playbook
19:36 – Assessing sales talent and commercial leadership
20:33 – Recommended resources for private equity revenue leaders
21:00 – How to connect with Adam Crandall
21:28 – Closing remarks

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent. We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
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Transcript

00:00

Welcome back to the Raw Selection Private Equity Podcast. Joining us today is Adam Crandall, the CRO at Addtronics, a private equity-backed roll-up of automation technology companies. Today, we're going to be talking about go-to-market strategy, how to achieve four-times revenue growth, and also add-on integration.

Adam, if you can share with us a brief insight into your background.

Yeah, Alex, thanks for having me on this morning. My name is Adam Crandall. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer of Addtronics.

00:30

A little background about me: I basically got into the business world back in 2009 and cut my teeth in the Fortune 1000 world, working for a big biotech, big pharma organization.

I actually started in HR—a pretty non-traditional path to becoming a CRO—but jumped into the HR world, did that for a year, and really enjoyed it. After that, an opportunity presented itself for me to join the inside sales department in this big biotech firm.

00:58

I ran the East Coast territory for this company for a year. After multiple steps in that organization, I ended up diving into founder-led small businesses in the manufacturing space. I went from technical ceramics to robotics and automation.

After spending a few years in robotics and automation, I had an incredible opportunity to work for a robotics and automation company in Charlotte, North Carolina. So I left Rochester, New York, where I was born and raised.

01:25

I left Rochester and went down to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2019 to work for this robotics and automation company. The founders brought me in and said, “Hey, we want to grow this business. We want to exit the business. We want you to help us do it.”

I ended up working for that business. It was a small husband-and-wife-owned company with about 50 people. After about three years, we quadrupled the revenue and ended up exiting that business when we were acquired.

01:51

My whole background is more in sales, marketing, and business development. I’ve held multiple positions, including VP of Sales, SVP of Sales, and Chief Revenue Officer.

I currently reside in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area with my family. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer of Addtronics. We're a group of operating companies that have come together, and we're basically building a robotics and automation platform.

I’m super excited to talk to you today and share a little bit about my journey as a chief revenue officer.

02:19

And all the things that I'm seeing in go-to-market, private equity, and more.

Excellent. Well, quadrupling the revenue of a privately owned business is very impressive in private equity, but even more impressive when you’ve got no PE sponsorship.

It’s easy to put things down to one thing, and perhaps this is simplistic from my perspective, but what are one or two things that you did in that business that allowed that kind of growth and revenue unlock?

02:49

Yeah, great question. So, a few things.

I always go back to this main point: get the right people in the right seats. As a sales leader, president, or CEO, it's absolutely critical. Lay the foundation.

You can have the best KPIs and the best analytics. You can be doing all the right things from a strategy standpoint. But if you don't have the right people in the right seats, that's one of your biggest challenges.

I think, Alex, when I came into this small founder-led business in 2019—

03:15

We had a broken sales team and a broken marketing team. We didn't have the right people in the right seats.

No matter what processes we put in place, what markets we went after, or what customers we tried to acquire, with the business not having the right people in the sales department, the marketing department, and the applications team to provide solid quotations and proposals, we weren’t going anywhere. We were basically flat.

We ended up coming in and building a strong team that was really solid, bringing in the right people with the right energy.

03:43

The right skill set, the right talent, and even the right cultural connection to the organization and the mission of where we were going.

As soon as we installed the right group and brought the right team together, that was one of the major things that I saw make things honestly take off.

On top of that, the next thing is just focus. There are so many companies that want to be everything to everyone, as I always say.

04:08

When we looked at our market in robotics and automation, there were two or three key areas that, from 2019 even to now, have been growing substantially: power and energy, medical devices, life sciences, and pharma.

We really blocked out all the noise.

The business that I worked at in 2019, that robotics and automation firm, was about 90% automotive. We started to really look at the markets and say—

04:33

Automotive, for us, was not the core focus. It wasn't growing at the double-digit CAGR that we wanted to see.

So, again, we brought in the right people in the right seats, made a big shift, and had a defined, articulate group of core markets that we really wanted to focus on.

As soon as we did that, we started to see immense double-digit growth year over year.

I would say those two major value creation levers, you could call them, or just major areas of focus, are what helped us quadruple the revenue—

05:01

In literally about three and a half years.

So, the common theme among everybody who comes on the podcast is talking about the right people, which is ironic when we're in an era of AI and everybody is concerned that they’ll be replaced.

The right people, of course, will have different roles within those positions. You mentioned marketing and you mentioned sales.

But I’m curious to know if there was a kind of single avatar of person. When I say that, I mean whether there were certain credentials and criteria. I ask this question because it's something we use internally.

05:30

Was there something that meant every single person we hired had this?

It won't necessarily be that they had this exact niche skill set, but it might be that we went for somebody who had experience doing what we wanted—X, Y, and Z. Or did you grow people internally?

Was there a certain cultural aspect that you assessed for to build this team? Because saying, “Build a great team”—well, everyone's out there trying to hire the best people, but that’s easier said than done.

05:58

Yeah, I think there's a lot of noise out there around that, Alex. You just put it perfectly.

There's a lot of discussion and noise around, “Well, build the right team. You need to do this. You need to do that.”

One of the learnings that I've seen over really the past 10 years of sales leadership and executive leadership is that, when you're looking at building the right team, you shouldn't always hire solely based on experience and whether people have done—

06:22

What they have done in the industry you're in.

A lot of people will tell you—and I've heard it year after year—“Well, this person's been doing this for 20 years, and he or she is a specialist in this industry, so you need to hire this person.”

I've always looked for the talent profile of individuals who:

A, have a winning attitude;

B, are incredibly open to change; and

C, have done really difficult things in complementary industries, even if it isn't the same industry.

06:49

They've tackled difficult, complex projects, they have that winning attitude, and you can bring them in and they're moldable. They challenge and debate respectfully.

I look more for soft skills than just hard skills.

I feel like every time I've made a hire where I brought someone in who had been in the industry for 20 or 30 years and fit that profile and box, 80% of the time, they didn’t work out.

But when I shift my focus and say, “You know what, I'm going to bring in a team”—

07:19

I look at their soft skills and their profile. You can bring some of that into an interview and see that they want to be better every single day. They want to improve every single day. They have a continuous improvement mindset. They challenge you every single day.

When you bring them in and give them a complex project, they don't just do it, keep their head down, and never raise their hand. You can see them actively raising their hand and pushing. They're very resourceful and creative.

I look for people like that. When I was able to do that—

07:48

At the first business in robotics and automation, we put that team together. That was really the impetus for that quick, scalable growth.

You can grow 3% or 5% year over year. But if you're looking to truly scale and grow at double digits, bringing in individuals and building a talent pool like that will benefit you more significantly.

Okay. So, in your role as Chief Revenue Officer at Addtronics, three and a half years in—

08:17

Share with us, similarly, two value creation projects that you've been working on. What outcomes have you had so far, and what are your biggest learnings from them?

Yeah, absolutely.

I would say one of the major ones, Alex, is that one of our businesses has a specific industry right now that's adopting automation at one of the most aggressive rates we've ever seen.

One of the big projects that we took on was—

08:42

Really diving in, conducting a market study, bringing the whole team together around this one industry, and saying, “Okay, each individual is going to get a piece of this industry.”

You're going to focus on who the major players are, which geographical areas we need to focus on, and how we bring this whole team together to take on this project.

How do we penetrate it? How do we get some of the biggest customers in this industry? How do we make sure that we're credible in this industry when it comes to trade shows, branding, messaging, and marketing?

That was a major project and—

09:10

It really turned into a value creation lever.

Once we did that—it took almost two years—we became, I would say, the dominant player in that specific industry.

When we did that, we started to see almost 100% growth year over year. I mean significant growth, and the business has not slowed down.

That was a major, major shift. If we hadn't pulled that lever, I think we would probably have grown only 10% or 15% year over year.

But now we're seeing our bookings and revenue grow by sometimes 100% year over year because of that.

09:40

The second big thing I would say is price.

A lot of people feel like it's a difficult task to increase prices and grab more market share at the same time.

In my seat as CRO, I work with my salespeople every day and say, “Look, especially in our portfolio companies that have significant backlogs, if you have a significant backlog and you're growing three or four times—

10:08

You have the opportunity to command higher prices.”

When you pull that value creation lever, especially in PE or even non-PE businesses, that's going to drive more money to the bottom line.

Dollar for dollar, what you're raising through price goes right to your bottom line. It's also helping your salespeople stay motivated through greater commissions because you have a higher price at which you're selling your projects.

So I would say, again, the second biggest one is price. Every single year, look at where you can increase prices and which businesses can—

10:37

Have higher and more aggressive price increases.

We have one business where we have a six-month backlog. Why would you not be raising prices?

So we're doing exactly that because customers don't want to wait. They're even asking, “Hey, can we pay an expedited fee?”

Sure, you're going to pay 10% or 15% more.

If you can capture that price increase, it's going to help your EBITDA and your bottom line. I also look at it as an incentive and cultural motivator because you can help—

11:04

Your salespeople become more motivated by paying higher commissions as well.

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11:33

And improve your access to data, reach out to Grata today.

Now back to the podcast.

Private equity loves price increases. It's a simple play. For the founder of their own business, especially a first-time founder, it is usually something that has been neglected for fear of losing customers.

How do you communicate—or how do you advise your teams to communicate—with customers about price increases?

I'm honestly glad you asked that because literally just last week we had a full sales—

12:01

Training session on messaging to customers and how to deal with the mid-year price increases that some of these businesses implement.

The biggest thing I look at, Alex, is that your messaging should always focus on the value that you create.

The top 1% of salespeople focus their messaging around value when they're looking at closing the deal, not just around price.

They always bring the message—which is a good message—back to the value that your products are creating.

12:27

A lot of salespeople will apologize for the price increase. They'll kind of dance around it. They'll say, “Oh, I know this is not a great thing, but we have to pass this along.”

No one has to do anything.

We're increasing prices as salespeople because our products are providing so much value to the customers we're selling to.

In PE, at least in my world, we're focused on robotics and automation. That's a niche market.

12:54

This is not a commodity, a standard product, or distribution.

I've worked really hard with the go-to-market team within Addtronics and with my people to say, “Look, when we're implementing a price increase, we have to tie it back to the value we're creating when speaking to customers.”

In addition to that, we're not just raising prices for the sake of raising prices. We're not doing it to gouge people by any means.

There are inflationary pricing pressures right now. The cost of doing business continues to rise. Healthcare continues to go up, and—

13:24

If you want to continue investing in your people, how do you bring in the best technicians? How do you bring in the best engineers? How do you bring in the best personnel?

You need to bring those individuals in so you can continue making the best products and providing the best service.

If your customers continue to demand that, I don't understand how a company can continue to provide it and bring it to market without having price increases every single year.

Without being able to do that, something is going to suffer—either your profits, and you’re not going to be able to bring in the right people—

13:54

Which ultimately is going to lead to poor service or poor innovation when it comes to your product and talent pipeline over the long term.

Pivoting to what you guys are doing at Addtronics, you're obviously making acquisitions. It’s a buy-and-build process.

Acquisitions typically bring different cultures. For a lot of private equity firms, that literally means just smashing businesses together to the point that integration is done poorly.

14:23

Focusing on your role within that, what has been the toughest cultural shift that you've had to drive, and how did you make it successful?

Yeah.

When I look at the go-to-market organization, Alex, one of the biggest challenges I see is that most salespeople just want to sell and pursue top-line growth.

When I look at my career—Fortune 1000, founder-led small business—a lot of it was—

14:52

“Just hit your sales number. Hit your sales number and we'll figure out how to make it work.”

When you look at the strategy that we're putting together and what I've really focused on with my sales team, this big cultural shift, as you mentioned, is about getting them incentivized and focused not just on bookings or sales, but on profitable growth and the right sales.

A lot of salespeople want to sell everything to everyone or everything to anything. Sometimes there are sales that we should not be taking.

15:22

When you look at people's compensation plans, how do you make sure that they're aligned to incentivize the representative to sell profitable business and not just general business?

That was a big challenge when I sat down, looked across the whole organization, and said to my team, “Look, we have to change your mindset.”

I know you want to hit your sales number, but that’s not the only important thing.

I've even had conversations from a cultural standpoint where I said, “Look, if you miss your sales number by 5% or 10%, but you beat—

15:52

Our margin target by 5% or 8%, that's actually a win.”

The salespeople sit there in those conversations looking at me like, “Wait a minute, Adam. You're a chief revenue officer. You're literally telling me that if I miss my revenue or bookings target by 5%, that's a win?”

I'm like, “Well, yeah. It's a win if you have the right customer mix. It's a win if you have the right profit mix.”

If you're exceeding your profit target every year but you're slightly below your top-line revenue target, that's not a failure.

16:21

That has been a huge shift: getting our people focused not just on growth, but on profitable growth.

Makes sense.

Finally, talking about value creation and growth levers, which growth lever do you think most leaders underestimate?

Yeah, so I circle it back again. You have price and you have putting in a CRM like Salesforce when you look at the go-to-market world, but—

16:49

When I look at the full value creation package, one of my biggest focuses as CRO is the go-to-market playbook.

That go-to-market playbook creates alignment across the entire organization. It sets clear expectations for each function within your business.

If you're a COO, CTO, or CFO, do you have that playbook?

I believe a lot of leaders will have these ideas.

17:16

They'll have these thoughts. They'll want to focus here. Bringing in the right people—all good things.

But one of the biggest value creation levers that I've developed since we sold the first robotics business and I've been with Addtronics is creating this fully aligned playbook.

It literally lays out: here is our go-to-market strategy, and here is what each function is going to be responsible for.

We then have a decentralized focus in the go-to-market world where, even as CRO, I don't have every sales and marketing leader reporting to me.

We actually have a different structure where we empower our operating company presidents. They bring in their own sales leaders, follow the playbook, and together we really empower them.

We give them decentralized decision-making authority so they can drive their businesses. They know their businesses best, but at the same time, they have to follow that centralized playbook, which helps them with the strategic, day-to-day decisions they're looking to make.

18:11

Could you explain that playbook in more detail?

What's something within your playbook that is transferable regardless of company or customer—something that should be in everyone's playbook?

Exactly.

For me, it's one page: simple, clear, and concise.

It lays out what marketing should focus on, what sales and operations should focus on—

18:39

And what sales leadership should focus on.

It looks at all of the different go-to-market functions and the roles within the playbook.

It then provides leaders with a blueprint showing which meetings they should be having and which top KPIs they should be tracking.

So it's people, KPIs, and process. Those are the top three things that the playbook focuses on, tracks, and communicates.

Like you said, Alex, I can literally take that playbook today.

19:08

We could run it at Addtronics. We could run it at Company X, Company Y, or Company Z.

At the end of the day, that go-to-market team should be able to execute, scale, and achieve double-digit growth.

What do you read, watch, or listen to that you recommend others check out?

The first thing is Adam Coffey's Private Equity book. It's a great book, and he's a great individual to follow on LinkedIn.

Also, Good to Great is an incredible book. If you’re a leader and you haven’t read Good to Great, I definitely recommend it.

19:36

Those are some of the things that I look at.

I also look at things like Culture Index and the DISC personality assessment when assessing talent.

I'm an avid reader, but I also look at a lot of tools.

The other major one I would mention is the OMG, the Objective Management Group sales assessment.

If you're a new CRO or sales leader, I believe they were actually acquired by a PE-backed business. I think they're based in the Boston, Massachusetts, area.

20:04

It’s a great assessment for chief revenue officers and sales leaders to use when assessing sales talent.

Again, it's called the OMG, the Objective Management Group assessment.

It's something we've adopted, and it helps evaluate the hard skills.

Can salespeople close? Can they negotiate? How are they at handling objections and dealing with disappointment or defeat when they lose a deal?

I also like to stay up to date with a lot of different tools in addition to books and other reading.

Lastly, I would also say—

20:33

J.D. Miller is a great CRO and a great voice in the PE community.

He just launched a new book on AI, and AI is the big thing right now that all leaders are getting into.

He's got a really good book on artificial intelligence and the different tools that go-to-market and sales leaders can incorporate and use to help scale businesses and drive revenue growth.

If anybody wishes to do so, how should they get in touch with you?

21:00

I can be reached on LinkedIn as Adam P. Crandall.

Feel free to reach out and contact me. That's the best way. I'm a very active LinkedIn member.

You can reach out to me at any time, connect with me on LinkedIn, and send me a message.

I’m happy to set up a call and continue discussing my journey as Chief Revenue Officer at Addtronics.

I’m also happy to help anyone when it comes to scaling businesses and hopefully taking their business to the next level through double-digit growth.

Well, thank you very much for your time, Adam, and for coming on to the Private Equity Podcast.

21:28

Yeah, I appreciate it. It was exciting to be on. I appreciate the opportunity.

And, as always, thank you very much to all of our listeners for yet again tuning into the Private Equity Podcast.

Until next time, keep smashing it.