The Right Bets for Subscription Businesses: A Conversation with COO Bryan Varblow
Subscription businesses are under pressure to adapt faster than ever. Change is coming from multiple directions: AI, shifting customer expectations, emerging revenue models, and the growing complexity of SaaS operations. To explore what these shifts mean for leaders, we spoke with Bryan Varblow, COO of AdvantageCS, about the capabilities subscription organizations need to build now to remain flexible, efficient, and customer-focused in the years ahead.
Q: As subscription businesses face constant change, from AI to shifting customer expectations, what separates the organizations that adapt successfully from those that struggle?
Bryan: I think the organizations that adapt well are the ones that can keep two important but sometimes opposing ideas in mind. The market is changing quickly, yet maintaining operational controls is still important. AI, new pricing models, and emerging customer opportunities all create the potential to increase revenues or reduce costs, but they can also carry significant risk, especially if there are long-standing weaknesses in existing business processes or important processes are abandoned. Companies struggle when they treat each new opportunity as an individual project instead of asking how it fits within previously defined processes and company strategy. Rather, they should leverage what has been done in the past and worked well. Change or define new processes as opportunities emerge, but do so intentionally and with forethought.
Successful organizations have flexibility built into their processes, which enables them to make changes without each implementation becoming a special project. They’re also willing to simplify when needed. In our work with publishers, membership organizations, and other subscription businesses, the companies that are thriving are usually not the ones chasing every new idea. They are the ones that can define the potential opportunities with the greatest value. AI, for example, has great potential for reducing internal costs and better engaging with customers and prospects. To be successful, though, you need to identify the right targets and execute well.
Q: Operational complexity seems to be increasing everywhere. How should leaders think about scaling their organizations without creating unnecessary complexity?
Bryan: Scaling does not necessarily mean adding more people, more systems, or more exceptions. In fact, that’s where complexity becomes costly. Leaders need to distinguish between complexity that is required due to the nature of the business and complexity that’s been created by past decisions. Subscription organizations typically have complex pricing, renewals, billing rules, and integrations. The goal is not to pretend those things are simple, it's to make them manageable.
A practical starting point is standardization. If every client, brand, product line, or campaign is handled differently, the business eventually loses the ability to scale. Standardization does not mean every offering has to be identical; it means the organization has common patterns, data structures, and processes, as well as a good governance model to handle justified exceptions.
At AdvantageCS, we see the importance of this standardization when it comes to areas like system upgrades, reporting, APIs, and customer self-service. The more a company can keep practices and processes standardized across brands and product lines, the more efficiently it can operate over time. Custom solutions may feel faster in the short term, but they often create long-term cost commitments for upgrades, support, and staffing. Leaders should ask a simple question before adding complexity: will this make the business more scalable two or three years from now, or will it only solve the problem we are facing today?
Q: Many companies focus heavily on growth, but sustainable growth is harder. How do you balance growth, efficiency, and customer experience?
Bryan: Sustainable growth starts with recognizing that growth, efficiency, and customer experience are not separate — they’re all connected. A company can acquire customers quickly, but if acquisition costs are high, its renewal process isn’t streamlined, or its service teams are overburdened, that growth will become expensive. Similarly, pushing efficiency that simply reduces cost at the expense of customer experience may seem positive at first, but it can damage retention in the long run.
Balance can be found by focusing on the full customer lifecycle. Acquisition matters, but retention, expansion, payment recovery, service quality, and ease of doing business matter just as much. Research on the subscription market continues to show that mature subscription businesses are shifting attention from acquisition alone toward retention, perceived value, personalization, flexible revenue models, and lifecycle management. That matches what we see in practice.
For leaders, this means analyzing the business in a way that represents the entire relationship with the customer. Growth should be evaluated not only by measuring new sales, but also renewal rates, operational cost to serve, ease of upgrade, and the ability to launch new offerings without negatively impacting baseline offerings. When those metrics are viewed together, efficiency becomes a way to improve the customer experience rather than a competing priority.
Q: As technology automates more work, how do you see the relationship between people, processes, and technology evolving?
Bryan: I don’t think technology replaces the need for top-tier people or robust processes. If anything, automation makes both even more important. Poorly designed processes don’t become good processes just because they’re automated. They usually become sources of confusion and amplify underlying issues. The organizations that benefit most from automation are the ones that first understand what they’re trying to accomplish and then use technology to make that work more efficient and scalable.
The role of people will continue moving toward analysis, exception handling, relationship management, and process improvement. Technology can handle repetitive work, detect patterns, recommend actions, and reduce manual steps. But people still need to decide which processes should exist and what the right customer experience should be. There’s also the question of how much risk is acceptable as automation is implemented.
At AdvantageCS, we see this relationship in our own product direction. Automation, AI-assisted tools, reporting improvements, customer journey capabilities, APIs, and self-service features are all valuable because they help people leverage better information and spend less time on avoidable manual effort. The goal is not technology for its own sake. The goal is to allow people to focus on higher-value decisions and better customer outcomes.
Q: What operational capabilities do you believe will be essential for subscription organizations by 2030?
Bryan: By 2030, I think subscription organizations will need several capabilities that are already becoming important. First, they will need better customer data structures. If a company can’t understand the customer relationship across products, channels, service interactions, and payments, it will struggle to effectively personalize customer interactions or proactively manage churn.
Second, subscription organizations will need flexible monetization capabilities. The market started moving beyond simple monthly or annual subscriptions long ago. Organizations need to support bundles, hybrid models, usage-based offerings, entitlements, and customer-specific offers without rebuilding their operations every time the business wants to test a new idea.
Third, they will need analytics and automation that are built into the daily workflow. It’s not enough to have reports that explain what happened last month. Organizations will need systems that identify what’s happening now, recommend or initiate appropriate next steps, and allow execution to happen quickly. This will be especially important for teams that manage renewals, payment issues, service issues, and upsell opportunities.
Finally, organizations will need upgradeable, secure, and well-managed platforms. This might not sound as exciting as AI, but it’s absolutely essential. If the underlying platform is difficult to maintain, difficult to upgrade, or overly dependent on client-specific customization, then innovation slows down. That's why we're placing greater emphasis on SaaS offerings with prospective clients and having more strategic conversations with existing clients about whether these offerings are the best long-term fit for their needs.
Q: If you could fast-forward to 2030 and look back at today, what would need to be true for you to feel the industry made the right bets?
Bryan: I hope we can look back and say the industry invested in capabilities that made customer relationships stronger without making the technology stack unnecessarily complicated. That would mean that AI was used to improve customer service and retention, along with operational decision-making, rather than simply adding another layer of tools. It would mean companies built cleaner data structures, more flexible monetization models, and more efficient processes that reduced friction for both customers and employees.
I also hope we can say that the industry became more disciplined. Subscription businesses have a natural temptation to add more offers, more channels, more packages, more integrations, and more exceptions. Some of that expansion is necessary, but without discipline it can undermine the economics of the model. The right bets are the ones that make it easier to launch, execute, measure, and strengthen subscription offerings over time.
For us at AdvantageCS, that means continuing to invest in the areas that help clients operate with confidence: customer journey capabilities, AI where it adds practical value, analytics, paywall and eCommerce, APIs, upgrade improvements, cloud operations, and secure managed services. If by 2030 our clients can adapt more quickly, serve their customers more effectively, and operate with less complexity, then I think we'll be able to say that we made the right bets.