How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years

I don't know [Music] hello everybody thank you my name is Cody McLean I'm the founder of a company called support Ninja the the company was it's a company based in Austin and Dallas and IT services tech companies based in the Philippines my story is a bit ADHD I guess a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of ADHD but I'm going to cover so many different components of business and personal life so part of that is my own personal story

growing up and why I ended up being here in the first place also we're going to cover how I was able to bootstrap pretty much every business I've ever had and especially support ninja which ended up being a very successful business had it currently has over a thousand employees then we're going to talk about some of the methods that I was able to use to build the business as well as some of the insights that I was able to have actually having the access to peer in to some of these larger tech companies that we

would end up Servicing our company again it's an Outsource support company we do everything from customer support back office content moderation lead generation or data mining so there's a lot of different areas and we service tech companies online businesses Etc a lot of companies would come to us expecting customer support but they would end up finding out that there were many other avenues that we could actually help them with and that's a common use case that I think you guys

will leave here with today so one of the ways that much to the detriment of my CEO he doesn't really like this but I love it so let's go back to 1849 so we had everybody going to Cali to try and strike it rich so I kind of Imagine that's basically a lot of startups everybody's trying to find that that one hit to strike it rich and be successful but as you know it's a very

risky Venture so what's a better way of trying to strike it rich well just Supply the pickaxes to the miners and I see that is effectively what support ninja was able to do is providing a proven service and business model to other companies so from my perspective as an entrepreneur it was very risk-averse because it was already a proven model and in most of my Ventures I simply found a niche that was untapped by somebody else so I can pretty much

guarantee no matter what industry or vertical you're in there's going to be some kind of Niche that is untapped that perhaps you haven't discovered yet so a little bit on the revenue we had about 3.9 million back in 2017 I founded the company in 2015 in 2021 it almost hit 25 million in ARR these are reoccurring revenue and a lot of what the success we had was a combination of inbound marketing and really honing in on the inbound marketing for lead

generation and that's something and not a lot of Outsourcing companies really put a lot of time and attention because you really put most of your time towards building out your Enterprise sales team and that was another component once we really honed that that was able to help nurture those leads that we already had coming into the website so kind of jumping to my personal life a little bit so when you have nothing you bet everything and so my parents died when I was young I was partly in a foster care while I was running my first

business and it was something that I was basically put into a corner of dropped out of high school I had very little friends and I was basically the only thing I could do was actually try and build a business and I could try and be successful because frankly I didn't know what the alternative was and with that in mind it was something where I didn't have a whole lot of purpose and it was something that it allowed me to which is going to pause here and see where my notes are so one of the things that I

saw after I wrote a book to to help others obviously called from Foster Care to millionaire and that details my story because I saw that somewhere I wanted to inspire others because I went through so many obstacles in life that I knew somewhere it would be able to help and Inspire others because most of my life I thought I was worthless I thought I was stupid I would never achieve anything and it was only by achieving small little things here and there and having some success with the business that really expanded my potential and really

what I thought was possible for myself and so one one of the quotes that I like is that your potential can far exceed your expectations so I at some point I was able to travel and get a pilot's license and I started to to take photography I looked at scuba diving and all the certifications you could get with that and mentioned this because often we build our business and we are the key man in that business and we build the business

around ourselves and we often forget why we started the business in the first place and that's especially true especially when you're bootstrapping because you're putting so much of your time heart and soul into this thing that you can't take a you can't take a break and we often forget that we have the business if the business should should serve us not the other way around and I discovered that there's certainly more to life than entrepreneurship you are defined more than by just your business

and by getting outside my comfort zone and finding passions and purpose outside of business that entailed me to set a core Foundation to invest in myself because we often neglect our own health and our own well-being at the expense of just trying to have more money and more success with the business but often we neglect that so that's an important consideration that I took time out of my life to make sure that I'm serving myself from this element as well

so a bit about the startup timeline back in 2004 I was just 14 had my first business and I found a business partner up that was up in British Columbia we merged that into a company called Aptos but we were both very naive and I was maybe 18 19 at the time and so I let him do the business legal registration stuff and then we found this guy who was a penny stock investor that was my first real experience with meeting somebody who was just kind of a bad person and long story short noted in my book he

stole the business from us and there I had less than 100K in my bank account and so I was having to start all over and I was able to start over again I built another company called Pacific Coast but thank you I built another company called Pacific coast and with that I was able to replicate that success and have a thousands of customers that I was able to build over a period of a few years and with that it required that I had to build up a support team and so the India that was managing my support team I ended up co-founding another company

with him called support Monk and so I helped him find other hosting come in and actually build out the the team in India and we were able to build that together and so I sold both my stake in Pacific coast and support muck at around the same time here's here's a small team the relatively small team that I had when I was maybe 22 23 especially small compared to the team that support ninja is today

so we have looking forward so early on I had a lot of imposter syndrome especially when I sold my hosting company I actually wanted to get back into hosting because I'm not a developer I didn't know anything else hosting was the only thing I knew but I wrote an article at the time that really did a detailed analysis into the hosting industry and it was becoming commoditized so in that I tried to create another company called host Galaxy that I was going to compete against digitalocean but just doing the

metrics it just didn't make any sense and I really kind of sat with myself I'm like what do I do next I honestly didn't really know and so I put I put the host company aside and then I thought for a while trying to figure out what is the thing I'm going to do next and I discovered that well I wanted to work with startups but I didn't necessarily want to be one I didn't want the risk involved in having to create an entirely new company and trying to validate this new model and that's a difficult thing

to do and it's it's very risky and I thought an under appreciated thing that I didn't really realize was an asset or a skill was my ability to provide customer support since I've been doing since I was 14 serving servicing thousands of customers and having to be on the phone 9am to 5 P.M Monday through Friday consistently for a decade basically and building out my own support systems and I looked into the host I looked into the Outsourcing industry and I realized well every startup every company they need support

and I saw that there was one company that was providing support specifically to startups and tech companies and that was a company called taskus and so more or less they validated the model and I thought well if there can be one company there can definitely be more than one it could be two or three you know however many and so I looked at what were the things they were doing right I saw that they they were targeting very specifically towards Tech startups they validated the

market they had some pretty large tech companies and I saw the things that they had and pretty much I'm I'm a firm believer and fake it till you make it and basically look at your competitors and copy the best elements from your competitors and so they had an office in the Philippines okay check I need to have an office of Philippines that they I I would called them to pretend to be a customer and I was able to get a contract and able to like have that be my Baseline they had this cool upbeat office that was kind of similar to Google and because of that I needed to

have the same thing and I was also I also had extensive knowledge in online marketing since I was building web hosting and since I was 14 I was just trying to get traffic and trying to convince others that my hosting business is different or better than the thousands and thousands of other hosting businesses out there on the market and that was a difficult thing but I was able to use that asset and bring it in to actually build out my company

so we had a cool office an appeal to tech companies and I had to do the same so part of the key to my success and potentially yours as well are going to be covering a few different points here in the next these these next few slides we're talking about a strong culture and the need for tacit knowledge and what that is actually and also the importance of automation minimizing your overhead and your administrative costs and how I was able to do that then we also have the idea of using Outsourcing creatively

in a way that you might not have thought about before so the power of tacit knowledge so back in 2019 I was able to actually open up what was effectively my dream from the from the get-go was to create this really hit neat office that was going to not only appeal to our customers but also set us apart from our competitors because we had to have this type of environment in order to attract

the kind of clientele that we were looking for and this also allowed the agents to build relationships with the clients because our agents actually liked working for us and again the ancillary benefit is this concept of tacit knowledge which I'll get into in a little bit and so we were a very data heavy company that had to focus on metrics and a typical ramp up period for corporate BPO is one to three months to get all the agents that you're hiring to meet the kpis that you're setting to us

as the customer and one one of the things that I noticed is that whenever those companies would start scaling or adding agents our ramp up period for those new agents was actually less than the industry app average and so I looked into this and I really this is where I discovered the the concept of of tacit knowledge so here's some of the the clients that were able to build out and a lot of what we did is I put since I've been through

so much I wanted to note that we were going to give back to the the region we would end up volunteering at foster care at shelters doing donations doing a lot of charity work we would also have like League of Legends nights for the agents and sometimes we'd even allow them to play video games in the office and so I tried to replicate as much of putting myself in their position and seeing what would I want and trying to allow that from this perspective of

looking at my agents not necessarily as numbers on a spreadsheet but as fellow human beings which is hard to do when you're in an industry which they're effectively your product and one of the the side benefits is uh well I spent a lot of time looking at the small details so things like instead of just calling them agents we call them ninjas and whenever they would end up being hired we had this cool wooden samurai sword and then they would actually be knighted and that created

this kind of peak experience that was completely different from every other experience that they've ever had and that also made them part of the tribe they felt like they're in is a you're either a ninja or you're not and one of the things I saw is one of the most successful hard to get into Outsourcing companies in the Philippines is JPMorgan Chase and if you say if if you work for JPMorgan Chase everybody's like oh wow and so I want to create that experience where if you ask that question you could say you're a ninja that was that's my

goal to have it be where you can just say you're a ninja and you instantly know where you're at so with this tribal culture it also had this effect of decreasing the attrition rate which as you would imagine an Outsourcing company would be a very important factor and it allowed the clients to have stronger bonds with their agents back in 2019 we were able to get as a benefit of this in number 86 on the Inc 5000 list in one of the fastest growing companies in Texas and

thank you [Applause] and then we're going to look at this interesting concept about tacit knowledge that I've been mentioning but I haven't really described what it is so I found this this really neat YouTube video where this guy actually has he gives his kids instructions on how to make a PB j sandwich this is based off of the computer science program at MIT where they will ask these programmers to actually write down the instructions and

you'll see if hopefully the audio works that you'll see what I mean by this piece of bread spread it around with the butter knife no dad with the peanut butter I'm just doing what it says it says take one piece of bread spread it around with the butt with the butter knife hold on get some jelly rub it on the other half of the bread

they're on top of each other take a big bite [Music] and so so what I think this video demonstrates beautifully is that there is knowledge that you think is is something that's implicit that other people should know and it also demonstrates that no matter how well your Sops or your instruction manuals are it's very difficult to put in what

is effectively this idea of tacit knowledge and so it could be looked at like say how do you document or write down how hard you should press the brake pedal to make sure that you're not stopping too late or too early and that's dependent on the weight of the vehicle the wind so many different factors so you know to press the brake pedal but how do you write that down into an actual written instruction that you can hand off to somebody it's very difficult to do that or how do you know the exact moment at which you should

pitch your your potential lead or your client in that moment it's hard because that's based more on experience and experiential knowledge and so there are always going to be things that you can't really easily write down into a process and I think we put this is now in process but it can be something to consider because processes they're easy to create but hard to maintain they quickly become

irrelevant and if they're irrelevant or say if you have a static process somewhere in a Google doc if somebody is not updating it then nobody's going to go and check it and if they are updating it well you don't know that they're always going to go and actually review the process because they're going to think that they know it by heart and so going now into the lean mean workflows which is a little bit about how we can

use processes and automation together so support ninja started just as a website I I didn't do any investment other than I built a website and I put in some Google ads and we got our first customer which ended up being this customer called cleanify which was this cleaning agent service Nationwide and we were we serviced them just with a few agents and we were completely bullshitting them at the time because we had no clients and I never even set foot in the Philippines but they were the

impetus to me actually going to the Philippines and figuring out exactly how to do this I was able to tour a handful of corporate BPO offices and I was able to find somebody that was a staff leaser which is something I'll explain a little bit later on so we were able to start off with a few agents 20 30 40 agents and at some point I was able to go back to the Philippines and I spent two months there and I was actually able to build out our small office and that small office space as you can see is it's still pretty small but it was able to support up to 150 agents over a period of like three shifts on a 24 7

basis and retch going to a foreign registering a foreign corporation in a third world country is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy is a real hassle and that was effectively the IP the difficulty of having to go through that experience so it was able to come back to Austin but one of the things I realized is that it's hard to manage a team of people when you're thousands of miles away and then I realized well we need to consider what is the process that we're using to

actually build this so one of the most important processes with any outsources the client onboarding procedure and so very early on I we realized that we need to actually build out this workflow and so that's effectively what we did because there's so many moving parts and you have to know how is the sales team going to hand off the client to the to the client team how are we going to then have the client team give the appropriate instructions to the recruiting team in the Philippines so that they know exactly what agents and specifically what they need to hire so

this is a kind of a complex process but it provides that that big picture Force perspective and certainly that's what you need for for any process to start with and certainly it's difficult to make a diagram and then you the the aim though it was to pretty much reduce the amount of meetings that we were having to have and reduce the amount of upset customers and the other issue is that the majority of our clients they would end up dropping off on this onboarding period and so we had to solve that

and one of the things that I really liked is software called bpms business Process Management systems and they aim to combine the process from a static document into a dynamic part of that process so that every time the agent looks at that process they're having to to see the information and you can easily edit that information as you need to and by documenting this we were able to get the Filipinos to actually change from actually working with hard copies

because they're so imagine the Philippine government is basically like the U.S stuck in the 1960s so you have to have hard copies and they have a habit of having hard copies of information so we had to transition them to working with the software but trying to manage them remotely was a difficult process so we would so the software that I really like to use is called pipefy and I was able to build a documentation around the process and that allowed us to say build out this kanban board similar to Trello and then you can have

the client onboarding card pipe and then you can have another pipe for recruiting so that when that when that client is in a specific phase it's going to hand all the information off to another department in the recruiting department and it's able to create a certain amount of automation that ties back into itself that is a lot that allows you to reduce the amount of errors and processes and information that's effectively lost in slack email or phone calls so here here's part of the example process just with pipefy itself this is part of the

client onboarding procedure and it allows you as say the entrepreneur instead of having to go and update all the staff about the revised process is that you can just go in here and add say a file upload field and so we realize that we need to have a copy of the ID for all the agents and then now you make that a required field so that the next time they go through that process it requires them to upload that information so it allows you to make sure that you're you have more consistency across your entire department and operations

a little bit more of the example process and this also allowed me to have this Kaizen mentality that allowed the agents to feel like they were a part of the process instead of just being the static employee that was following directions from the upper management is that this allowed them to actually feel like they can add and they can update and they can help revise that process and it gives them a sense of ownership that they otherwise wouldn't have had typically in

in any kind of documentation type of mentality and so going on to Outsourcing creatively there are a wide array of ways that you can actually Outsource your company or out use an Outsourcing company to to service your company as well so one of them is Corporate BPO which is what support ninja was these are typically companies that you approach and you have kpis metrics and you're handing off the training and the management to these companies and they take on the burden of managing that for

you so that you can focus primarily on scaling your your company and in doing so it allows you to offload the expectations of the kpis onto them so if they fail to meet them then that's something they have to resolve on their own but in doing so you're going to end up paying a much higher fee and probably get stuck into a contract and one of the things to consider with any corporate bpos again staff attrition and what is their culture it's so easy just to look at the bottom line so often we get companies

and we would quote a certain amount of money and then they're like all those other companies charging us this much and we're like okay that you know we don't recommend that but somewhere along the line they are cutting something from the process that they're not telling you and if even no matter how good a corporate bpo's training or onboarding processes if their attrition rate is low or they don't have a great culture to maintain those employees again you're losing this

tacit knowledge that is really difficult to train so you should maximize having employees for the longest period of time and this is also more ideal if you have a set process so if you are in a growth stage and you know that you're going to need a certain amount of agents to service your customers over a certain period of time that's what this is best for if you need a small team it's not necessarily the best idea for that then you also have sat staff or seat Leasing and this is actually how I

started support ninja I was able to find a staff and see leaser in the Philippines and they helped me to to get everything effectively allowed me to like borrow their resources to start it on my own and this is more economical it's a lot cheaper but again you're now managing those staff they're just paying those employees and they're making sure that they're meeting the labor laws in that country and you're still having to manage them so that can be a little bit more workload on you but it is cheaper and it is also more flexible and it is

great if you just need a small team for the specific types of tasks and then you have last but not least is specialized services so this is very good for say bookkeeping I would say maybe one out of every three or four accountants they probably Outsource the bookkeeping service that you're paying them for and you have firms that specialize in bookkeeping and they they maintain and update their employees to maintain accurate information so that they're doing that bookkeeping properly for you and this is relevant for so many different areas there are Outsourcing

firms that specialize in it Outsourcing so you can Outsource your I.T Department there are firms that just do web development or web design so a lot of even creative agencies they will work with these these middle agencies to actually then allow them to reduce their costs and effectively work on the thing that they're supposed to be elsewhere you're doing themselves but they're really not LOL and so then we have last but not least is outsourcing outside the box and so

one of the ways that I was able to boot job support ninja is I just took the idea from really my experience of running web hosting company is looking at all the various categories say like back office Outsourcing and looking at the sub niches within that category what are the things that people are searching for that we can do and then making landing pages for those things the very like a late 2000s type of strategy like a Content strategy and so it would have like photo manipulation Etc but in doing so it allowed me to see that a lot of

the customers would come to us expecting customer support but we were able to see other avenues that we were able to service their company for and so imagine like a popular ride sharing app that would you would take a picture of your ID so that you can actually use you could drive for this company is we would have the staff actually looking at driver's licenses so that we were actually validating those driver's licenses or there's another company a very popular expense company that allows employees to expense receipts and they would have a feature called a smart

scanning feature where you could take a picture of the receipt and then it would extract details but that wasn't a smart scanning feature because they didn't have the data analytics team to actually do that it was actually just a team of Filipinos in a room 24 7 actually going through those receipts and and they basically made the people as part of the product and I like to call that paas or people as a service but it's really in the back end so you don't really know it exists otherwise and that's that's it so I appreciate your time and thank you for for listening

[Applause] [Music]