Cadient

Reset the culture — don't negotiate with it

On Day Zero, BVC simultaneously removed the CEO, CTO, and VP of Sales. Partial changes in politically captured organizations are absorbed as evidence that political navigation still works. Complete discontinuity at the top is the only signal that changes the incentive structure.

Bill Mastin — the VP of Operations — was promoted to CEO from within. This sent the second signal: high-agency operators would be elevated; those who had optimized for political protection had no path forward.

Every dollar re-earns its place

The first act after removing leadership was to open the P&L to the remaining team. No one had seen the full numbers. The cost structure was invisible to the people responsible for it — which meant no accountability and no urgency.

BVC built one spreadsheet: every non-people cost line, with three columns — owner, monthly amount, and proposed alternative. The rule: if you want to keep a cost, justify why the alternative won't work. Default is remove. The results were immediate. The Raleigh office was shut — post-COVID, no one was using it. Software subscriptions were cut to a critical core, with open-source and AWS-native tools replacing everything else. All internal systems moved to Zoho One — one flat cost, one integrated stack. Professional fees, insurance, legal fees: all renegotiated using BVC's cross-portfolio benchmarks from Relecura and Vorro. The total reduction in non-people, non-COGS operating costs: 70–80%.

Convert offshore from order-takers to owners

The India team was capable and completely disempowered — executing tasks with no visibility into P&L, customer health, or pipeline. Without business context, there is no judgment. Without judgment, there is no ownership.

BVC gave the India team access to the same operational data as US leadership. The behavioral shift was immediate: people began surfacing problems proactively because they could now see consequences that had been invisible to them. Information symmetry is the mechanism — not management process.

Infrastructure Reset: three effects, one migration

Legacy infrastructure was eroding margin on a recurring basis. The AWS migration reduced infrastructure COGS from 35% of revenue to approximately 7–8% — but the financial impact was only the first of three effects.

The second was velocity: cloud-native deployment compressed release cycles and let the product team ship against market requirements rather than infrastructure constraints. The third — least anticipated, most consequential — was cultural: migrations force documentation. Engineers who hoarded tribal knowledge as job protection became visible bottlenecks. The migration created an accountability surface no management process had been able to generate.

From commodity ATS to Recruitment Pipeline OS

The ATS category is defined by feature comparison and price compression. Cadient's capabilities exceeded what its category allowed it to monetize. With operations stabilized, BVC repositioned SmartSuite™ — Cadient's predictive assessment engine — as the basis for a new category claim: not candidate tracking, but pre-interview hire quality prediction.

The platform became a Recruitment Pipeline OS for high-volume employers where bad hires carry measurable operational cost — retail, logistics, healthcare. The repositioning changed the buying question from "what does it cost per seat?" to "what is a bad hire worth to you?" That shift changes pricing, buyer access, and ultimately the exit multiple.