1213: When Constructive Tension Yields Sharper Decisions | Martin Uhrik, CFO, Third Bridge

Uhrik insisted. According to him, the business began showing creatives the profitability of roughly 3,000 projects a year. Teams then examined pricing, rate cards, utilization, client requirements, and whether changes requested during projects were being captured and passed along to customers.

Within six to 12 months, Uhrik tells us, margins improved substantially. The feared loss of creative talent did not materialize. Instead, he says the information “lifted the energy” inside the organization because employees had not realized their work was less profitable than they believed.

For Uhrik, the experience reinforced the value of challenging the status quo. He says finance leaders should not stop when they encounter pushback; tension, opinion, and conviction are part of reaching better outcomes.

It also challenged management’s assumptions about people. As Uhrik observes, leaders should not be too quick to predict how others will respond. Given the unvarnished economics, the creative teams did not retreat. According to Uhrik, they surprised the CEO—and then helped improve the business.

If I go into a little more detail and provide more context, we’re a global organization spanning Europe, Asia, and the U.S. We cover all those key markets. Practically, what do we do? Each year, we facilitate hundreds and thousands of expert conversations across sectors, geographies, and different stages of a company’s maturity.

That gives us a continuously refreshed view on three key things: which markets, companies, and questions matter to our investors; which experts hold credible answers; and which topics warrant further research. We convert all that into proprietary content. Every expert we engage and every client interaction we have creates an enduring record that compounds in value for our content over time.

CFOTL: Third Bridge remains founder-led, with Astorg as an investor. How has that ownership shaped the firm’s investment priorities?

Uhrik: Maybe a bit of history, and then I’ll come to the direct question about the capital structure. The company commenced almost 20 years ago, and initially there were angel investors, as with any startup.

For almost a decade, the company grew organically, funding its own growth through cash generation. In the late teens and early twenties, as you noted, Astorg invested. Astorg and IK Partners are minority shareholders. The founders still hold a big chunk of the investment, so it creates a nice balance sheet and structure.

In terms of how that shapes investment decisions, I think there are healthy discussions between the shareholders. The founders know the business very well. We have a very supportive sponsor, and they trust the management team. Of course, they put forward their suggestions and ideas, as they should. It creates a natural tension, as it should. But fundamentally, they back the founders, and it’s the founders and the CEO who drive the strategy. That’s how we operate in this environment.

CFOTL: If I understand correctly, customers buy expert access and research content. Which side best explains the company’s economics today?

Uhrik: We engage experts, whether it’s directly commissioned for our clients, and our clients can speak directly to experts on any particular topics they want to go into in more detail. That helps them form an opinion and collect facts for their decision process about whether to invest in a particular organization. That’s one revenue stream.

That revenue stream is very much tied to our content stream. We have annual recurring revenue through our content, so ARR. The services business is very much tied to the content business because the same experts also provide insights for the content. You get signals from the services side, and then you figure out which content to research. We have a team of very bright analysts who conduct research for our content.

Our clients can choose either to commission specific research or, through our research team, subscribe to our content and do their own research. We plug into their workflows with the help of AI and MCP, which is a new protocol. They can conduct research on their desktops to help fill their investment thesis for their investment committee.

Both sides are very much linked because experts are at our core, and the flywheel of services and content is very much integrated. That’s our business model and those are our revenue streams.

CFOTL: We always like to talk about your visibility into the business. We’re curious about the early signals that finance leadership has, whether it’s client research activity, library usage, or renewals. What are you watching?

Uhrik: First and foremost, it starts with revenue. What’s our ARR doing—our recurring revenue? What are our upgrade rates and churn rates? Those are the classical SaaS metrics you have in any content business.

What’s our usage? How frequently is our content being used? On the commissioned side, where we connect experts to clients, we also look at utilization and capacity. Those are a few of the key KPIs I look at regularly, just to name a few that are top of mind.