Definitive Healthcare at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Turnaround Insights

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Definitive Healthcare (NASDAQ:DH) presented its strategic vision at the Morgan Stanley 23rd Annual Global Healthcare Conference. Led by CEO Kevin Coop and CFO Casey Heller, the company outlined its focus on stability and growth amid competitive pressures and macroeconomic challenges. While emphasizing strengths such as data quality and AI integration, the leadership acknowledged current market headwinds impacting the life sciences sector.

Key Takeaways

• Definitive Healthcare is focusing on stabilizing revenue and returning to growth.
• The company is leveraging AI and machine learning for operational efficiency.
• A strategic initiative involves enhancing data manipulation with the Definitive ID.
• The leadership emphasizes radical transparency and open communication.
• Life sciences, representing 40% of the business, faces macroeconomic challenges.

Financial Performance and Outlook

• The near-term focus is on stabilizing revenue and returning to growth.
• The business model supports high incremental margins and strong cash generation.
• Q2 renewal rates were the best in a year, indicating improved customer retention.
• Long-term growth will be driven by integration into customer data supply chains.

Operational Updates

• Emphasis on four strategic pillars: data quality, integrations, customer success, and innovation.
• The company is reorienting to solve problems for patients, enhancing customer service.
• AI and machine learning are utilized to enhance the data supply chain.
• Changes in commission structures to emphasize ongoing customer success.

Future Outlook

• The company plans to enhance data manipulation with the Definitive ID.
• A partnership strategy focusing on "build-buy-partner" opportunities.
• Collaborations with Databricks and Snowflake to support customer data movement.
• The board supports the strategic direction, prioritizing share buybacks.

Competitive Landscape

• Competes with companies like IQVIA in the data provider space.
• Differentiation through domain expertise and high data quality.
• Data delivery is agnostic, working across various platforms and systems.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Kevin Coop emphasized data quality as the business foundation.
• CFO Casey Heller expressed confidence in capturing market demand and expanding margins.
• Life sciences are notably impacted by macro pressures, influencing sales cycles.

Organizational Changes and Culture

• Radical transparency and open communication are emphasized.
• An open-door policy and regular town halls engage employees.
• Leadership refresh to bring experience in operating at scale.

In conclusion, Definitive Healthcare’s strategic initiatives aim to stabilize and grow revenue while maintaining profitability. For more detailed insights, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley 23rd Annual Global Healthcare Conference:

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: All right. Great. Good morning, everyone. I’m Craig Heddenback. I cover the health tech and provider space at Morgan Stanley. Thanks for being here. It’s the second day of the conference. Just a quick disclosure up front. Disclosures can be found on the Morgan Stanley website, www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. With that, very pleased to have Definitive Healthcare with us, CEO Kevin Coop, and CFO Casey Heller. Welcome.

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Thanks for having us.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. I thought we’d just start with kind of a brief refresher or overview of Definitive Healthcare, if that’s okay, just to set the tone for the discussion here.

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Sure, Craig. Definitive Healthcare was founded back in 2011, and it was around the time that there was a large movement to digitize records. That was sort of the original foundation as part of that. It became very clear quickly that there wasn’t really a great solution that mapped the healthcare ecosystem of hospitals, doctors, physicians to insurance companies and payers and the entire ecosystem, ultimately leading all the way to patients. The effort was put in to start to create a very differentiated database around reference and affiliation data, which is still one of our core datasets today. Over time, that evolved into other areas like claims data, bringing in different datasets to provide a more holistic view to our customers that are interested in either selling to or understanding about that ecosystem.

Today, Definitive Healthcare actually provides solutions across a variety of different segments, including what we call our diversified segment, which would be companies that are looking to sell into the space, like could be anybody, whether it’s package goods providers, manufacturers, or consulting shops, to biopharma, our life sciences business, medical device manufacturers. It’s continued to kind of expand over time. Today, we compete in a large variety of segments, and we have primarily data products that cover all of those.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Perfect. The company has gone through some management changes with you and Casey up here. I’d love to just kind of dig into that in terms of some of the things and areas that you’re focused on, particularly where we are for life sciences, right? Kind of a lot going on in the background. For Definitive Healthcare specifically, what brought you to the company, and what are some of the things you’re most focused on?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: The first thing that was on the table is we needed stability, and we needed to reestablish trust and transparency with our investors, and also to get our employees focused on what we believe were the most critical and urgent areas in a much more simplified fashion. Part of that was initially to come in and put together what we’ve talked about externally about our four pillars. The first is really data. Data quality is the foundation of the business, and we need to remain vigilant on that because that is the, as I said, foundation.

The second would be integrations that we need to, as the market has evolved and there have been changes, especially in the life sciences world, having the ability to deliver our products and services and data in the way that our customers need it, whether that’s integrated through their CRM, it could be through APIs directly into their systems of record and systems of insight, or it could still be through our UI/UX. That would be very important to do that and to make the investments that our customers have already made more valuable. The third is really around customer success and ensuring that the service levels and the way that we show up for our customers remain top shelf. Lastly, focusing on what we believe to be very easy adjacencies around innovation, around digital activation, and master data management.

We reoriented the company around some very specific things that everybody can understand. We’ve aligned all the internal operations around that, and we’re communicating that to the street. I think over the last year since I’ve been here, we have been able to reestablish predictability in telling our investors as well as our employees and customers what we’re going to do and then meeting what we said we’ve been able to do.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah. I would echo that. Very important that you hit up front in terms of stability and trust. Despite what’s still a volatile end market, the results have been steadier, for sure. Anything from your prior experiences and things that have maybe been helpful for the organization as you implement some of these changes?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Anytime you come into a situation that needs some change, whether you want to call it a turnaround or reignition of growth or the situation that you have, it’s always usually, even if you do a tremendous amount of diligence up front, the experience is always very different than you think it might be, right? Once you’re on the ground, you have to be very adaptable. In the case coming into Definitive Healthcare, we have great domain expertise. We have what you would expect from a company that was founded and run for many, many years by an exceptional founder that prioritized that domain expertise. We have that in spades. We lacked probably in some areas process. We’ve been able to bring in, and what I view as sort of augmentation and complementary, people.

We’ve been able to recruit in a senior team of folks that have been there and done that at scale. It isn’t a complete rip and replace. We have a lot of really fantastic folks and domain expertise as well, being able to blend the two. That’s allowing us to be more focused on the executables that I just talked about around those four pillars.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Can we talk about just the data provider space? I think most people look at someone like IQVIA, kind of the 800-pound gorilla, very established. I think life sciences customers will use them, and they’ll use other sources like Definitive Healthcare. How are you kind of differentiated in this marketplace?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. It’s a great question. I started off by talking about the expansion of Definitive Healthcare’s breadth of offerings across segments earlier. In healthcare in particular, you need to have a very heavy emphasis on the domain expertise and understanding the market and the level of data quality, for example, that we talked about as the first pillar, is super important. For example, just having healthcare data, especially if you’re modeling it through, let’s say, like claims, which many of our competitors do, you’re going to miss perhaps 40% of the market because the reality is that prescriptions are not written at the facility level, and you just simply are going to have gaps. Unlike Definitive Healthcare, where we stand and we’ve spent the years, over a decade, really building out that parent-child relationships and hierarchy to really map that ecosystem to a very, very granular level.

I think it’s probably safe to say even a cursory review of the market will tell you that, especially our core datasets, the quality and the level of accuracy is significantly better. For those customers that need accuracy, which in healthcare is quite important, we believe that differentiated data asset is very important. The second aspect is that you have to be able to deliver it agnostically through the platforms and systems of insight and systems of record the way our customers want to receive it. Unlike other competitors that are software vendors first and may have integration with CRMs or one particular CRM or another, and it goes down the list, Definitive Healthcare is agnostic.

We are making it our business that we need to be able to agnostically work with whatever system of record across any platform or any data movement that’s needed in any dataset very easily and seamlessly. I think that puts us into a, we like our chances in that space, and we think we do prove through the head-to-head competition in those spaces that we do very well when that comes up.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. I do want to touch on, even if it’s high level, kind of longer term. If we started with kind of important stability and trust, I want to jump to like, okay, what’s the growth going to be next year? Just on a longer-term basis, what’s the growth for this kind of category? How do you think about the margin profile of the company that stands today and where it could go over time?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about the strategy, and then I’ll hand it off to Casey to talk about what we think the financial impact and the shape of that would look like. The first is, and I started off with, the origin of the company, which was really around a differentiated dataset that made it very easy for people to get it through our common or our UI/UX. The evolution is that while that is still very powerful and made customers, especially in the mid-market, need that easy access through the UI/UX and the single sign-on, which we’ve now deployed, there’s also the need to deal with it through or receive the data through integrations with their applications, coming back to that agnostic approach around integrations.

The third is there’s a mastering of data aspect of it that’s penned to the Definitive ID, which is a token that we’ve already had in market for years, which now makes it easier for our customers to manipulate the data and move the data, whether that’s across providers or partners, like whether it’s Databricks or Snowflake, could also be directly into their data supply chain where they want to master the data with other third-party datasets. That level of integration into the data supply chain, I think, is going to be very interesting because now you become part of the workflow. You become part of the outcome. You’re providing insights off of it, and it makes your data stickier, especially if you combine that with the fact that it’s the most accurate and it’s the highest class, best-in-class data at the same time. What that does is it shifts.

Maybe, Casey, you can talk a little bit about how that will evolve on the margin profile and the financials.

Casey Heller, CFO, Definitive Healthcare: Absolutely. It’s probably a little bit premature to try and set out a new long-term growth model and trajectory. Certainly, in the near term, we are very focused on stabilizing our revenue and eventual return to growth. We’re really excited about the market opportunity ahead of us and our ability to capture that demand. We’re confident that as we return to revenue growth, we’ll have the ability to further expand margins. That just reflects the nature of our business model. We’ve got a really strong business model that gets a very high incremental margin, and we generate a lot of great cash.

I think from those kind of components, those are the things that really give us the confidence that over time, as we return to revenue growth, we’ll have the ability to further expand margins beyond what I think, even today with the declining revenue base, is a pretty attractive margin profile.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Let’s switch gears to just kind of technology and AI. We’d love to hear just kind of on the AI front, how are you using technology kind of internally and then also perhaps from a commercial perspective?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. That’s a great question. It’s certainly one that comes up a lot. I would break it into three buckets. We already do a significant amount of AI and machine learning already, and we use that everywhere from our data supply chain. We do it with our segmentation, for example, in our products where a customer may want to automate the medical affairs aspect of legal for compliance and other, ensuring that they are compliant with governmental or regulatory concerns about human intervention. We’ve got a large focus right now on internal efficiencies, which I think is a very obvious and immediate opportunity for operational efficiencies, whether it’s in our customer success and offshore custom analytics teams. I think those are all pretty straightforward. There are elements of the product which have become just simply part of, you know, table stakes.

Then you’ve got operational efficiencies, which are a lot easier to monetize in the sense that it will be efficiencies that we can calibrate very effectively. The third bucket, which I think is a little bit more difficult, is in the innovation area where we also are looking to do that as well, but it isn’t quite clear yet how you monetize that, nor do we think we want to necessarily directly. We think it might be part of just simply what we need to be bringing in 2026 as part of the base product.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. How do you think about, you know, in terms of because that’s one of the bigger questions for investors, right? Like a lot of buzz around technology. What does it ultimately need? Are you able to kind of absorb some of these investments? We talked about you have a good profitable model, but how are those kind of trade-offs in terms of what you’re spending on versus what you ultimately expect to capture?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. Again, it’s a great question. I think that we talked about earlier, you’d ask a question, Craig, about, you know, coming in, what was, sort of the what did I what was I bringing in that was different or the same? One of the things that was attractive about Definitive Healthcare is while we have certain challenges to address and we needed the simplification, we also don’t have a lot of the pressures that you would find in a similar type situation where our balance sheet would be getting pressured, right? We’ve got good capital. We’ve got a good balance sheet. We are very profitable. It gives you optionality.

Once you’ve stabilized the business, and then you’ve also been able to kind of simplify what you’re focused on, and you still have now you have a very clear strategy on what’s going to be needed to return to growth, the next stage is starting to talk about that externally to you, tell your customers, and you’re going to tell the street, and you’re going to tell your, you know, everybody what you’re doing. As part of that, it needs to include that fourth pillar that I was talking about, which was innovation, which includes our AI-driven tools and mastering of data, which is really around match and append in a more sophisticated fashion.

We are fortunate because of the balance sheet that we have that we’re able to, through that process, we’ve been able to free up capital to devote on these very important areas, which are going to drive growth in the future without having to do what I would call, I wouldn’t say unnatural is the right word, but, you know, something that would be a little bit more austere, right? We’ve been able to do that. We’ve been very fortunate in that way. I don’t know if you want to add anything to that, Casey.

Casey Heller, CFO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah, I think that was very well said.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Let’s touch on just partnerships. You mentioned before, whether it’s companies like Databricks, Salesforce, Snowflake. Really curious to kind of learn what that does for Definitive Healthcare’s business and then also the flip side in terms of why are these companies choosing Definitive Healthcare to kind of partner with, kind of full circle.

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. It’s an old adage, which I think is very applicable still today, which is, you know, you’ve got to look at everything you’re doing through a build-buy-partner lens. If it’s strategic, which we have a lot of strategic things that are imperative that we need to do, there are two categories of strategic. If we believe it is actually fundamentally strategic, we think we need to either buy it or we’re going to need to build it. If it’s something that we think is very important, but we don’t find the need to be such that we have the time or we want to deploy capital for that, then you can find access to that through partnerships.

We didn’t announce who it was, but one of the things that we identified very early on that we needed around that mastering of data, getting access to identity graph technology, helping us to bring in some different datasets that we didn’t believe was important enough because it was more commoditized that we didn’t want to bring it into our own data supply chain. We’ve been able to effect partnerships to attack that, either technology components or through data. The other aspect of it is there are large well-established players like mentioning like a Databricks or a Snowflake. We are not interested in, obviously, competing with those businesses, but our customers need to move large datasets efficiently, and they’ve already invested in those relationships. We need to be able to agnostically support our customers across all of those types of partnerships.

A third category would be in one of the areas that we’ve announced, and we are moving into. It’s really around audience, digital audience, targeting and augmentation. We have great data. Our customers come to us for that data. Often, they need to put that into motion, whether it’s through placing it in through Google search ads. They may be wanting to use that through a DSP or an agency to actually activate that data in some fashion. We’re not interested in competing with the businesses that are actually providing the technology to do that, but we know that our data helps significantly augment the audiences and helps them on the targeting. We also have the ability to help them on the measurement and attribution on the back end, which builds a virtuous cycle back into the data supply chain.

An example of that is we don’t need to compete with many, and that’s a very crowded space. We don’t need to be in that space. We’re in the data space. We’re in the augmentation space. We can add insights and additional data cleansing to it, which makes everybody more efficient. That’s kind of a long answer around the technology space. If you think of it in the simplistic way, do we need to build it or buy it, or do we need to partner? That partnership bucket is going to be a large area. We’re just trying to make that as efficient and as agnostic as we possibly can.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Let’s shift gears just to kind of the macro backdrop. I’d love to focus on just kind of the biopharma space versus providers. Any puts and takes in terms of the customer discussions that you’re having, what they’re dealing with, what that means from kind of a sales cycle perspective, how are things out there?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. The life sciences segment for us is large, but it isn’t the largest. It’s an important segment for us, and it has been going through some challenges. Definitive Healthcare’s participation in that with the challenges is, first of all, we don’t have stage one clinical assets. We’re stage two. We’re really around activation of therapies. We’re putting things in market. It’s really around once our customers have moved it into that second stage or if they’re medical device manufacturers trying to target it. As that market, that segment recovers, we’re going to be a little later. It’s a leading indicator that it’ll eventually roll its way through to us. In the meantime, we’re also not as subject to some of the market challenges others that are in that first stage are.

Things like whether it’s the big beautiful bill or there’s tariffs, that stuff isn’t really, really that affecting Definitive Healthcare. The bigger challenge for us in that space was what really happened in the claims data market last year. There was an impact that wasn’t exclusively to us. It was around claims data. It was Change Healthcare. For those that cover this space may be aware of that. It, in fact, took out a large amount of data and records from the market. We’ve been able to react to that, and we’ve been able to replace that. In the meantime, you have a significant impact to the industry as a whole, and that kind of reverberates through businesses that are primarily data businesses like Definitive Healthcare. We’ve been able to, I think, manage through that pretty effectively.

The life sciences space is a segment, while it’s very important to us, it isn’t the largest sector for us.

Casey Heller, CFO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. If I can just maybe add on a little bit there just for folks who may not be as familiar with Definitive Healthcare. Our life sciences piece of the business makes up roughly 40% of our book, providers about 10%, and diversifies our largest end market, of about 50%. Some of the pressures that Kevin mentioned, some of these kind of broader macro trends that have been weighing on across the segments, life sciences I do think has been more disproportionately impacted. We’ve seen that dynamic playing out over the last year and a half plus at this point. Really, as far as what we’ve been observing, there hasn’t been any kind of significant change. I think that there’s been tough macro pressures there resulting from the high interest rate environment and broader macro uncertainty, regulatory changes, that have really been kind of living within the space.

We’re seeing sales cycles. They were lengthened last year. They’re still long. We’re seeing more approvers getting integrated into these processes, more RFPs, just longer time to decision-making amongst the customer base. That has certainly been much more prevalent in life sciences versus the remainder of the business.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Can you touch on just the provider as well as the diversified in terms of the trends you’re seeing in that space?

Casey Heller, CFO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. Within that space, I think that we’ve actually continued to see some solid new logo growth, and our renewal rates in that space are stronger than what we see within life sciences. From those spaces, I would define kind of those two elements that make up, you know, 60% or so of our business as being healthier and a bit more robust than what we’re seeing within the life sciences space at the moment. I do think it’s important to point to the four pillars that Kevin touched on earlier. Those are really focused around customer-informed initiatives. These are all of the things that we are driving operationally internally to continue to improve renewal rates across the business.

One of the actually really great green shoots that we had coming out of the second quarter was our second quarter renewal rates were the best that they’ve been in a year. That was very broad-based across the business, so that includes improvement in life sciences as well. All very kind of encouraging signs to us that the elements that are within our control and that we are driving are having an impact while we really haven’t seen much change in terms of the macro backdrop.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. In the life sciences segment specifically, there’s been no shortage of news or macro-economic headwinds that these companies are navigating through. Outside of just long sales cycles, any impact on pricing or contract terms, or not so much?

Casey Heller, CFO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. Within the life sciences segment, this is an area where we’ve seen what we refer to as more of downsell pressures. We have a lot of clients that are still renewing, but they’re looking to renew for less given their internal budgetary pressures or changes in the sizes of their internal inside sales teams, and the folks that would be actively using our data. Within the life sciences segment, that certainly is having a downward pressure on customer renewal rates. We don’t have clients that are, you know, fully leaving us, but they are looking to renew at smaller values as they’re working through these tough budgetary cycles, essentially. That for us is something that is much more pronounced within life sciences than anywhere else. There’s elements that we’re doing to try to continue to capture value.

We’ve put additional focus on our professional services teams and driving deeper analytics and insights, particularly within the biopharma space. You know, those clients are looking for much more unique and specific insights. We’ve put an extra focus around the professional services teams focused on those areas so that we’re able to capture that piece of the value and help to offset some of the pressures from what may be some aggressive pricing asks.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. You mentioned retention. I think that has been kind of moving at least in the right direction, stabilization. You also mentioned things under your control. Just from an organization perspective, what are some of the things that are helping kind of drive stabilization and renewals?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: We made some relatively quick changes after I arrived when I looked at the way, for example, the commission structures were set up. Historically, the sellers were organized around hunters that were required or incented to bring on new logos, and then there was a very bright line handoff to a retention team that then was responsible for onboarding and then supporting those customers. Simply changing the commission structure to where there’s an ongoing responsibility for the seller to ensure that the customer was delivered what precisely was sold, it got onboarded timely, and that it wasn’t oversold, and that they continue to be happy. At the same time, there’s an incentive now to bring in those customer success people earlier in the process before the handoff so it’s not such a bright line.

It starts to drive behaviors that immediately start to show themselves up in the happiness of the customer, and ultimately, it will translate into the renewals. It’s sort of one of those obvious, intuitive things that make sense. We started starting at the tip of the spear on how our customers sold and then ensuring that we have a delighted customer that gets exactly what they bargained for and that they’re supported in a way that they feel good and delighted. Once you do that, that will, because we know that the data is differentiated, we know that the use cases that they’re being deployed for are there. If you can eliminate some of the dissatisfaction around how they’re actually handled and managed, that’s where it comes back to that third pillar, which is customer success.

It’s just, you know, it’s what we view as sort of like that best practice and good hygiene, and it’s going to start to translate its way through.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. I think you got involved in the sales organization early on. I’d love to hear just what insights that helped in terms of shaping your strategy. I also want to touch on, I think you focused more on just kind of a platform sales and how that’s evolving.

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. The two things inside of that, many people probably are if they’re either reading this or in the room, but after I joined very quickly and inspecting the commercial team, the Chief Commercial Officer resigned within weeks after my joining. What turned out to be a blessing in disguise is it allowed me to get much closer to the sales team, get out with the customers more, which I would have done anyway, but this eliminated that sort of veil. I was able to start to really directly understand what the customers wanted. I got to get involved directly at the individual sales rep level. I spent the first really 60 to 90 days out on the road in addition to setting up what I call coffee and donuts, which were 15-minute kind of round robin. Anybody in the company randomly gets there for a Zoom call.

Over the course of six months, you talk to a couple hundred of your employees directly in a very one-on-one type environment. Between those two things, it really gives you a pretty good pulse of what’s going on. What I found to be very pleasantly surprising is that the customers, while in some cases were dissatisfied with the way they had been managed or handled, often found that the data was extremely valuable and were not displeased with that. That’s a very fixable challenge, right? It would have been much different had you found out that the products weren’t working as advertised or that there was something fundamentally wrong with the data supply aspect of it. What wasn’t intended to be job one ended up becoming job one, which was really getting out there and working with the commercial team.

I moved from that point once I felt that we had a pretty good handle on that. In success, we brought in a Chief Customer Success Officer who joined us, who’s been on board now, not quite a year, but she’s made tremendous inroads there as far as how we structure our customer success and client-facing teams on the support side. Most recently, we brought in another Chief Commercial Officer. I’ve replaced myself in that role a few months back with a woman who I’ve worked with in the past, who’s exceptional. She’s bringing in and taking that into the next level of detail on the commercial side of things.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Maybe we can touch on, and we talked upfront in terms of just stability in the business and maybe some things that aren’t apparent to external people or investors. Just from an organizational perspective, a lot of change that you’re driving. How is the organization responding to that? What are some things maybe you’ve learned along the way, and how is it going to make kind of the company stronger longer term?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. I’ll hand it to Casey to give a little bit of her insights too. It’s been a little bit longer. What I found over the years, and especially coming in with my background over the last 20, is that the first thing that needs to happen is you just have to be extremely, we call it radical transparency or ruthless transparency. We had initially, in addition to now having conducted probably 500 of those one-on-ones, I have an open-door policy. Anybody can get on the calendar. I eliminated the executive assistant out in front. Anybody in the company walking the hallways, having weekly stand-up calls with the sellers, monthly town halls, done what we call open mic or ask me anything where I’ll get up for an hour and take any question unfiltered through Slido without any filter, no pre-read, and you tell people what’s going on.

You share fundamentally all the financials, what the challenges are, and what the opportunities are. When you do that, people will self-select. Some people will simply not want to get on board, and they’ll leave. We’ve had some of that. Others that understand and are finally happy that people are addressing root cause issues or things that maybe they felt, they’ll actually rally to that. I think you’ve got a little bit, well, there is a little bit of change that goes on there. Generally speaking, when you’re honest and forthright and you tell people the truth and you’re handling it and you lead by example, I think people respond to that pretty well. I feel pretty good that that’s happening. I don’t, I think,

Casey Heller, CFO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah. I would absolutely echo that. I think that there is fundamentally an appetite for the team within Definitive Healthcare to embrace change. I think that, you know, while we have some really talented folks across the organization, you have some people that have been with the organization for a decade and have only seen things done the Definitive way. Actually, that’s where some of the leadership refresh that Kevin’s brought in across the executive leadership team comes in. You’ve got folks in seats now that know how things should operate at scale, what a healthy process looks like. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity and operational efficiency and just general improvement from a management and accountability perspective that’s making its way through the organization and being embraced.

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Part of what we’re setting up for next year as we look at even the brand and how we talk about Definitive Healthcare. If you look at the website, it’s about a commercial intelligence operation, right? Commercial intelligence company that provides insights to companies that want to sell into the ecosystem, which is true. That’s true for about half our business. That nomenclature really doesn’t mean anything to a biopharma customer, and it doesn’t really mean anything to certain customers that we serve today. If you really peel back what does Definitive Healthcare do, we do have data that helps biopharma customers more effectively target therapies for cancer and solving and curing cancer. We’ve also got other businesses that are looking to bring to the commissary their foodstuffs that are going to be part of the comfort food that that patient is going to get in the operatory.

Really, everything that we do, whether it’s for a diversified customer that’s selling to hospitals or someone selling to biopharma, it’s in the service of the patient. That’s a pretty cool mission that you can really get around. It’s a lot more inspiring than, say, commercial intelligence is. That may be what we do, but that’s one of the outputs of it. You come in new and you look at this and you say, you guys see yourselves, meaning the general employee base, in one way. The way I see it from the outside, it’s a very different view. You sort of have to start to build that up. All this stuff needs to be built off of a foundation of transparency, stabilization, and much more focus around simpler, fewer things to do. That’s a little bit of a journey.

In a year, we’ve gotten a lot, I think, accomplished in the last 12 months. More to do, but that’s kind of the evolution and where we are today. I feel pretty optimistic about that going forward.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Appreciate that perspective. Just as we wrap up here in the next couple of minutes, I’d love to spend some time on capital allocation. Like you said, you had a good balance sheet, highly profitable. You’ve been buying back stock. Historically, the company did a lot of tuck-in acquisitions, and that was kind of paused. We’re talking about this buy versus build. Just how do you bring that all together in terms of where you see the best fit in terms of capital and how you’re going to spend it?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: I’ll tip to Casey on that. I think you need to make sure that the foundation of your house is solid before you start adding on more floors, right? You just have to fix that first. I would argue that given the current situation in our market, gap, it’s difficult to find quality assets that would probably be accretive. You need to be really thoughtful about what you’re going to buy. At present, we thought the best use of our available capital was to do share buybacks, which we’ve been doing now for the past, what, a year?

For about a year. We also think that given where we are, we have that opportunity to be very thoughtful about that. We’ve got a great board, we have a very active board, and we have a lot of domain expertise on that board. We are very much open to that. It’s just a question of when, and you need to make sure that it’s squarely aligned with a strategy beyond just bringing in, to your point, everything you said, very acquisitive and point solutions that may or may not be integrated.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. That makes sense. Since you mentioned the board in terms of, I’d love to hear kind of their input to this whole process, right? You have the turnaround underway. They’ve authorized the buyback, what you’re doing. Longer term, bigger picture, any thoughts in terms of where they, like the vision of where this kind of settles out?

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: I feel very supported by the board. I think we have a good mandate. We go back regularly to them for counsel and advice, as it would be appropriate. We’re not prejudging the outcome, right? I talk about it internally as far as, you know, I came out of and past businesses as a portfolio executive going in. One of them, it was a company that had been around for 185 years, right? You know, Abraham Lincoln worked at one of my previous companies. You think about, and that’s no joke, four presidents worked there. If you think about it from the perspective of a generational business, if you focus on building the best long-term business that isn’t just for the next quarter or the next year, but it’s going to stand the test of time, it gives you massive optionality down the road.

What we’re doing and we’re trying to manage the business without that is just simply, what are you doing to build a generational business and get the business back on track, fortifying the balance sheet, and allowing you to have the most growth? That’s sort of the North Star. Whatever happens down the road, we’ll have plenty of optionality for that.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: All right. I think we’re right at time. I think that’s a good way to end, a very clear message to wrap up.

Kevin Coop, CEO, Definitive Healthcare: Yeah, thank you.

Craig Heddenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Casey, thanks for your time.

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