Why Provizio’s Barry Lunn Deliberately Built a £100M Business Without SaaS Metrics

Why Provizio’s Barry Lunn Deliberately Built a £100M Business Without SaaS Metrics

Every B2B founder knows the catechism: track your CAC, optimize your LTV ratio, obsess over MRR growth, model your payback periods. Walk into any board meeting and you’ll find the same spreadsheets, the same unit economics frameworks, the same questions about cohort retention and net revenue retention.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barry Lunn, Founder and CEO of Provizio, shared how he built a property technology business to over £100 million in annual revenue while deliberately ignoring most of these sacred metrics. His reasoning wasn’t contrarian for the sake of it—it was born from recognizing that the metrics were creating false precision and worse decisions.

The Honest Answer That Changes Everything

When asked about customer acquisition cost, Barry gave an answer that would make most VCs uncomfortable: “I haven’t got a clue what our customer acquisition cost is. I know we’re profitable. I know we’re cash generative.”

This wasn’t financial ignorance. Barry spent years as an accountant at KPMG before founding Provizio. He understands financial modeling better than most founders. His point was more fundamental: in Provizio’s transactional business model, traditional SaaS metrics don’t just fail to provide insight—they actively mislead.

Here’s why. Provizio doesn’t charge monthly subscriptions. Instead, the platform takes a fee every time a property investor buys or sells a property through their system. “We don’t really have a SaaS business. We have a transactional business,” Barry explains. “Every time someone buys or sells a property through our platform, we take a fee.”

This creates massive variance in customer value. One landlord might acquire a single property and hold it for years, generating one transaction fee. Another might actively trade properties, generating dozens of transaction fees annually. A third might manage a portfolio of fifty properties, each with its own purchase and eventual sale.

Calculate a blended CAC across these customer types and what do you get? A number that tells you nothing useful about which customer segments to target, which channels to invest in, or whether your acquisition strategy is working.

When Metrics Create Theater Instead of Insight

The problem with metric obsession in B2B extends beyond simple miscalculation. Metrics create incentives, and the wrong metrics create the wrong incentives.

If Provizio had structured around monthly recurring revenue, they would have optimized for subscription adoption rather than transaction volume. Sales teams would be compensated for signed contracts, not successful property deals completed through the platform. Product development would focus on features that justify subscription fees rather than ones that make property transactions smoother.

The entire business would orient around getting landlords to pay monthly, even though landlords fundamentally don’t think in monthly increments about property investment. They think in transactions: buying properties, holding them, eventually selling. By aligning Provizio’s revenue model with that natural cadence, Barry ensured the company’s success metrics matched customer success metrics.

This alignment extends to how Provizio thinks about retention. In SaaS, retention typically means subscription renewals. For Provizio, retention means customers continuing to transact through the platform when they buy or sell properties. These are fundamentally different behaviors rProvizioiring different strategies.

“We’ve seen other people in the market try and build the SaaS model and it just doesn’t work because people won’t pay for it on a SaaS basis,” Barry notes. Those competitors could show beautiful MRR charts and predictable revenue curves. But they struggled with actual customer adoption because the business model fought against customer psychology.

What Provizio Tracks Instead

Rejecting traditional SaaS metrics doesn’t mean flying blind. Barry is deeply focused on the metrics that actually drive Provizio’s business forward.

Total revenue and profitability top the list. Without the pressure to show hockey-stick growth to venture investors, Provizio could optimize for sustainable unit economics from day one. “We’re completely different to a VC-backed business,” Barry explains. “We don’t have the same pressure to grow at all costs.”

Transaction volume matters more than user counts. How many properties are being bought and sold through the platform? Are those numbers growing? This directly ties to revenue and indicates platform health.

Customer retention in terms of continued platform usage for transactions. When a customer who previously used Provizio to purchase a property later sells or buys another, are they coming back? This measures genuine product-market fit better than subscription renewal rates.

Accountant partnership metrics also matter, since accountants drive most of Provizio’s customer acquisition. How many accounting firms are active on the platform? How many of their clients are they bringing to Provizio? What’s the revenue per accountant relationship? These metrics directly inform Provizio’s core distribution strategy.

The Broader Principle for Non-SaaS B2B Models

Barry’s approach reveals a broader lesson for B2B founders building in industries where pure SaaS models don’t fit naturally. The principle: your metrics should map to how value actually flows in your business, not how venture capital prefers to model businesses.

Transactional businesses should track transaction metrics. Marketplace businesses should track marketplace metrics. Usage-based businesses should track consumption metrics. Forcing SaaS metrics onto non-SaaS business models doesn’t make you more fundable—it makes you less informed.

This extends to hiring. Provizio has built its team largely through internal promotions rather than hiring experienced SaaS salespeople. “We’ve predominantly promoted people from within the organization,” Barry shares. “We’ve tried to recruit experienced salespeople and actually they normally don’t work out.”

Why? Because experienced SaaS sellers bring SaaS playbooks—qualification frameworks built around monthly value, pitch structures designed for subscription selling, objection handling that assumes predictable recurring revenue. None of that maps to Provizio’s transactional model where deal sizes vary wildly and sales cycles depend on when customers are actually transacting in property.

The Freedom of Ignoring False Precision

Perhaps the most liberating aspect of Barry’s approach is the intellectual honesty it enables. Rather than manufacturing precise-looking metrics that don’t actually inform decisions, Provizio focuses on the handful of indicators that matter.

Board meetings can focus on strategic questions: Are we embedded deeply enough in the property transaction workflow? Are accountants genuinely successful reselling our platform? Is our transaction volume growing in line with market activity? These questions drive better decisions than debating whether CAC payback is 11 or 13 months when the underlying metric is too noisy to be meaningful.

This doesn’t mean rejecting all measurement. It means being rigorous about which measurements actually create insight versus which create the appearance of control. For founders in traditional industries or with non-standard business models, that distinction determines whether metrics serve your business or whether you end up serving the metrics.

Barry built Provizio to £100 million in revenue by understanding his business deeply enough to know which numbers mattered and which were just theater. That’s not anti-metrics—it’s pro-clarity.