How to 5x Your Bookings

please welcome to the stage Chris mariantis with Surefire local

tie together a lot of the things it's kind of interesting every entrepreneur has a story and this is going to tie together a lot of different stories because we've gone through the Outsourcing the um you know how to get culture right how to get leadership right and all those things so hopefully you'll get something out of this um so the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about how we bootstrapped our company from 2010 starting with the managed

services company and then evolved to a SAS company it allowed us to keep control of the company and have a majority of the company and right now we're actually sitting at about 26 million in ARR um in doing that we had to really think about how we had to change leadership over time and the culture of the company because it's really different having a managed Services leadership group and having a SAS leadership group and I learned that the hard way and I'll share

some of those lessons I learned and then how we thought about Capital we really didn't raise any Capital except for myself and a few other folks putting in some money until 2016 you can see where the business took off this is the reason why Nathan wanted me to talk you could see that spike in 21 and 22 but the key thing I'm going to talk to you about is what it took to set the company up to be able to do that because I tried to do that at different

periods of time and it never worked and some of the lessons I learned to try to get there so what we're going to learn today is uh or let me tell you about what we do we're a local marketing Cloud for Professional Services type companies like contractors attorneys Home Services type companies so we built really the Adobe marketing Cloud for the specific use case of local marketing and

delivering that at a price point that our customers could afford and in an easy use that they could they could use it what we've really become is a big data company and you'll start to see that at the end when we start to put together all the different data sources and how we use those so our story started when I was um I was a CEO of two venture-backed companies I was brought in to help some founding entrepreneurs that needed some adult

supervision and I learned two things that are doing that number One never do that again because you end up not really controlling the destiny of the company and number two um I realized how Venture Capital works and at my stage of my career my life I didn't want to be the one in ten that works because they're going to do is give you a pile of money and then they're going to tell you go fast and they want you to either fail fast or keep on piling in more money and take

away ownership and that's the issue that I saw so I started this company with the idea I wanted to create a real business that started with a book I wrote and the reason why I wrote that was in honor of my dad my dad was an HVAC contractor and I saw how technology could really change the game and give back control of marketing to these entrepreneurs and they didn't have to rely on agencies that were not very transparent and not really honest and and then or knit

together a bunch of Point Solutions so from that we started a scaled managed Services Company because people were asking for help on implementing that plan we put together the system we put together that system is still the DNA of the SAS platform that we created it really just automates all those things that we put together in that system around 2014 apis are becoming developed

enough that we could actually create that adobe like Cloud that I was talking about sketch that out put in a couple of million dollars just a few of us to do that and then started to test that with their own customer support people we called them coaches in those days because we were a managed services company and what we saw is our gross margin starting to go up because we're able to do a lot of the work in a more automated way be able to do reporting easier to our customers and we saw a lot

of benefits to that so when you scale with technology it takes human error out and it gives you easier ways to implement things around 2017 we got that software mature enough that we said let's give this to our customers and let's test the assumption that you know smbs will actually use software and not only use the software but use all the different pieces of the software because we're all in one we had

a lot of different pieces will they really get that idea when we launched it to our customers in 2017 we saw adoption month over month just continue to go up and it was going up with all the different pieces of the functionality that we provided to them we knew we're on to something we learned a lot from that and then we said let's launch the next generation of this software and LeapFrog from where we thought we were and we did that in 2019 and it was

clearly the best product in the industry clearly the best product in the industry but as we tried to start this to now shift to selling software my leadership team in sales in customer support in marketing really wasn't able to make that shift with us and I knew that was super apparent so in 2000 2020 I started thinking about new leadership and

brought in someone by name Mike Pierce who had four different scale opportunities at scale opportunities and selling in the SM into the SMB space and had a really different approach than what I was at that time uh doing and the rest is history in terms of our growth so what this you know Playbook sort of consists of and I'm thinking about this word at executive level is number one

you know the idea of committing to a process and that commitment means spending some money on the enablement of that process not only in talent but also in technology and also in um you know in in like leadership thinking about how to implement that process and you might be wrong like we had we were committed to a process before it was just the wrong process and

that's why we weren't growing the way we wanted to secondly I knew we had to have a different culture we were moving to a transaction more of a transactional sales model and I'll get into that in a little bit but that transactional sales model requires super high energy really granular data at the uh at the salesman level so you really know what they're doing so you could train them support

them understand you know and be have prediction about what your next month's going to look like based on the output of what they're doing and then you know next we really switched from a inbound model I mean I I didn't know a whole lot about SAS so I read predictive Revenue like probably most of you guys did in the room and said Gee I'm gonna commit to that model and I did that for three or four years and it wasn't working that was primarily

inbound SDR multiple steps advertising a lot in Facebook and and our our customer acquisition costs were fairly High we had a high ASP but still a super high for what we were doing and then Mike came in and brought in this transactional model that was really outbound first so today about 30 percent of our revenues from inbound we're still doing inbound but outbound

creates a predictability of Revenue if you do it right and you have the right types of Technology right kinds of management and leadership in that so we have we're very very kpi driven company at this point I have my kpis I do weekly with my executive team but for the sales leadership that their kpis look more like this on the outbound side

it's really around starting with dials you know demo sets you know you know dials to demo sets demo sets hell demos win rate mrr and by really looking at those in a micro level and even more so by team by vertical we're going after it gives you a lot of Rich data to help you better understand how your revenue is going to shape up in the next month or two but also where you need to spend

time and focus with your sales organization so it's super important that you have the infrastructure to be able to do something like that so the next section I'm going to talk about is um is about leadership and culture um so when we started this transition and to bring in new uh new brought in new leadership you know in my our philosophy on this is you can't take your new leadership and

go into a conference room and you know whiteboard what do we want our culture to be it's it's not authentic and it's not going to be something that's going to be bought into by your people what we ended up doing is we did a survey of all the people in our company and we said we'd like you to describe in words all the good things you think about the Surefire culture and all the bad things that you think about the Surefire culture

and you know sort of like uh the analogy of this is like when you're on a diet you don't want to focus on eating so we do want to focus on the bad things we want everybody focused on you know working towards behaviors that are the good parts of our culture and I'll just walk you through we ended up you know sort of putting all these ideas into five sort of pillars of our culture one is driven by purpose our purpose is really around helping small business

owners create wealth they were getting ripped off by agencies and they've got their overwhelmed confused pissed off most of the time because they really don't understand this new world of marketing so we wanted to make it super easy for them to understand it and how to be successful in it and that is our mission that's our Quest so we're all you know the people who come here have that same purpose and we make it clear in the interviewing process all

these different things that we expect the second thing is this idea of keeping it real some people call it radical transparency radical Clarity right but the idea is to have engagement up and down the company and that's the way you really great create great results right if the more people engage the better results you're going to have everyone needs to feel like they're able to have a not a say but comment and

freely discuss some of the things that we're doing and hopefully add to those things the next one is connected deliver you know in this you know a world of distributed workforces and not having an office everybody goes to it's super important to have people form connections not only within their department but across functions so we're really intentional and deliberate through physical events through technology acknowledgments All Hands things like

that to make sure people feel like they're connected to each other because then they can have those transparent conversations and then empathy is really key to really win ever having some empathy for the other people in your organization what they're dealing with helps you better uh communicate and communicate in a way where it's going to be a positive uh development between the two people

and then never settle we're a company that never settles we we are always looking to get better by the evening that we were in the in the morning we've done that with our technology we do that with sales we do that with everything in the company we also align the executive team to be um streamlined so that we could be built for Speed so um we have uh we have two offices here

in the states we also own and operate a company in Manila that does a lot of the help desk support and Engineering support for the company but we've got our president Mike Pierce that drives all the customer facing organization that's the biggest part of the organization that we have he also runs people operations that's probably the most underrated part of our organization I really thought of before

but now looking at in hindsight it was the single best decision we made to bring a really strong people operations person and then you'll see the effect that it had in the company and then we have CFO and and CTO uh separately with their organizations and the result of all that is we want Inc best workplaces this year Glassdoor 4.4 our employee net promoter score globally is a plus 74. we're a remote

first model and we have world-class benefits that are head of people operations able to get by having someone just focused on that the last part of this talk I'm going to give us about capital I know um you know it's a big Focus for Nathan here we are we're not Venture funded but we do have a debt cattle that we raised once we thought it was the right time to do it and that's the key is

understanding the right timing to raise debt Capital because you get yourself in serious trouble raising debt Capital too early so you know right now we're uh eight you know 22 about 18 million in bookings 19 million in bookings will end this year about 30 million in ARR but we really raised our first debt capital in 2016. it was only a million

dollars but that was when if you remember we were just about to launch our platform to customers and we knew we needed to grow our sales force to start to amp up the velocity a little of our of our platform sales and it was uh really done with a venture bank so it's fairly uh fairly good terms and pretty low cost for what we did and you can see we got a little bit of a spike in bookings when we did that

today we have 11.5 million in debt and that was done in a couple of trajas the the first big traj of about uh four and a half million was done in uh 2019 when we launched the second version of our platform and I knew we had to make a big bet on new leadership and I needed to get the money to do that or we

would still just keep growing 20 25 a year we're growing now about 75 80 percent a year um so that's when we started the Austin office now our company has more people in Austin than our headquarters up in the DC Metro Market so the the key lesson I'd share with you is you don't want to bet the ranch with debt Capital unless you're using that money to grow they give you a sense is

we I I 5xed the value of my company so some people said you're taking that Adventure debt it's gonna be really expensive for you right I mean you're paying sometimes all in 16 17 percent but when you think about the valuation in three years of my company and what we've done it really was super efficient way to do it the other thing we're able to invest in you know we broke things like the last

speaker was talking about from pendo we so we forexed our sales and and really months four or five months and you can imagine when you do that and you have a customer success team that's not used to that velocity you could break a lot of things so we realized we had to start to get really systems and data sophistication in our in our company so we built an infrastructure stack that I think would right now would be one of the most sophisticated in our industry

we have a service desk that now helps us manage all the cases that come in from our customers whether it be tickets phone calls whatever it might be and escalate things really quickly and triage them really quickly between our Manila help desk and our U.S customer success people we have omnichannel communication for our customers so they can reach us anytime anywhere through voice chat text email and a bot that we launched

we also connected all these systems including our marketing cloud with you know voice to text so we get all that data in from all the phone calls we do with customers and all the other data and it's super powerful I'll show you some examples of that in a second and then we were able to start a Marketplace in our platform where now all of our uh our uh our service providers we don't want to be in the service business or

able to hook into this and get the benefit of all this information about our customers as well I'm not going to walk you through this but it gives you an idea of the complexity of all the different systems feeding you know our platform right now so we this is why we've become really a big data company this data is super powerful for our customers to give them insights about where they could get their best bang for their buck and markings spend in Roi but super powerful

for us because it creates predictive models of customers that might be ready to churn and where by the way we're we're probably not even 50 through implementing all this it's all stood up and going but we're not even through implementing all of it one of the partners I want to highlight here is a partner called involve.ai and what they do is they simply ingest all the data that you could give them through apis and they've got data scientists that

then create really sophisticated models that start to look at predictive churn like in the next two to three months and it allows you and your customer success team to really start to get ahead of that you in effect I start to feel like I know more about my customers mindset relative to their relationship with us than they do or before they do and it's super cool then we feed that information into an

application called churn zero so our customer success people again narrow that down into turn zero unpack what that customer is doing and find ways we could get that customer on a happy path and we could also do automation around that so we could do pop-up messages emails um you know in-app types of messages in Mobile or desktop so that we start to try to move them to happy path and answer all their questions so churn zero

ends up becoming a playbook for our customer success people that helps them get that customer on the on the happy path and the results of that have been grossing that churn or roasted that retention that's going up and to the right and we're in a SMB space which is really tough to get a positive um you know nrr but we feel we're on course to get at least a neutral nrr by

q1 next year leveraging all these tools and what's really neat about our business is and with all this data now that we've got you could you know we've we've evolved from a managed services company to now a technology company we've brought different uh customers on with a different brand promise at different times so now we're able to sort customers by time period to take a

look at how they behave differently and you could see why they did because of the brand promise and they were selling our bit or our application at that time but what's really interesting is the new customers meaning brought on from 2020 forward those cohorts are doing incredibly well and are at 2.5 percent gross churn and we're starting to get towards one

percent net churn with those new cohorts and that's because our velocity is so much higher now becoming a much bigger book piece of our book of business so to wind up what I talk to you about here is the idea of bootstrapping to retain control your company we're we're at a stage now and we're going to do a private Equity deal or strategic and you know that's going to probably be somewhere in the 125 to 150 million

range and I still own most of the company so that makes me super happy so debt could be a really great instrument at the right time to give you that control and also the better payout when you're done um establishing a strong culture and Leadership is critical to be able to enable when you do these pivots or when you do these evolutions of your company you really need to be able to do that um have a strong leadership and then

raise Capital at the right time and I think that is a great instrument when you feel comfortable that you could add the kind of add water and it'll grow that's when debt becomes a big opportunity for you thanks [Applause] [Music]