Team Retreat Playbook: What we spent on our last retreat

please help me in welcoming Massimo from B to the stage all right thank you um nice to meet you everybody thanks for having me here Nathan uh I love these conferences because you always go home with a couple of nuggets of really good uh business advice and and so I hope that you get a couple of those uh from me so let's get started let's see yeah

[Music] yeah no problem yeah

so um last year was about 50 people in Naples Italy so we got really lucky because it was literally between two coveted waves and we just went for it and we said well let's try to do it and let's see if it worked and it was uh um I think it was uh the first weekend week in September or something like that it was really literally between two uh waves and and it was great and so well yeah we talked a little bit about that uh and then save time later

so what we've found uh is that southern Europe is just an incredible place for our team Retreats we I'm originally from Italy and about uh 50 of our staff is in Italy so B is about 70 people right now and so it's also a natural place for us but we've tried hard to look at other places uh because the Italians don't want to be in Italy they would love to come to the U.S Etc uh to give you an idea this year we're going to go to

Sicily again in Italy and the first week in October about 70 people for the team Retreat and per person this is a beautiful Resort on the beach 70 euros per night per person um it's it's practically impossible to find that kind of rate here in the United States and Portugal Spain Greece the entire southern Europe is a perfect

spot for all that kind of stuff and of course you you have people flying In from from different places but especially if you do it off season you know you you can kind of make the math work and it's so much harder to make it work when you look at places here in the United States but also UK you know in many other Spots I'm not in I'm not an expert on on Asia so we've never actually looked at possibly doing a team Retreat there

um but um so the well I'll talk about that part of the presentation now so we don't need to do it later the B was uh we started in 2014 B is a visual builder for building emails landing pages and uh and other digital assets and when we started in 2014 we were a remote from the get-go and I'm gonna turn it into interview style to buy him some more yeah is that cool all right so we'll just show up here you grab you

pick a seat I'll pick another one boom all right um yeah so so first off you came I got connected to you because you came on the podcast which is why the why do you agree to go on a podcast where you know you're just gonna get grilled well you you loved it because so the crazy story about B is that it's a startup within a larger company uh the larger company is called groins it's publicly traded in Italy and evaluation sucks uh well yeah remember you tell me tell me the actual multiple so your AR was what and you were trading at what so

growing so I'm not telling anything that it's not public information you can look it up but um growings is basically trading at about one time sales it's not all ARR so it's about 70 million euros in in sales and uh it trades at about one time that today on the Italian Stock Exchange and B does around 10 million ARR and so you were like okay this doesn't make any sense I was trying to convince them to like get money and take it private right I'm like wait you're

trading at 1X uh like let's get to the parent company straight in One X and B that does 10 million of that which is pure ARR is basically hidden in there and you know and so um yeah on itself all these folks are wanting to look up the Ticker on the stock exchange so what what's the ticker real quick give the name again it's grow so it's uh it's on the Italian Stock Exchange but if you look on Bloomberg you'll find it yeah grow grow Okay cool so so how did you get in this position did you sell the company to the parent company are you the founder of B how

does that work yeah the founder in the sense that I was the head of product for it for the group and then um we decided that this product was was good enough to see if it would stand on its own and so um and the interesting thing is that the company gave this little startup a line of credit so very much the way you're saying fund your business right so there was no big check that the company that parent company wrote um and uh so we started just with a

small MVP in 2014 with a small line of credit from the parent company and the parent company never actually wrote a big check so that's the way we did it and so we started um first Revenue was in 2016 and so pretty much uh zero then and it's about 10 million ARR now so it's it's taken you know some time as as you know when you when you bootstrap uh but very solid growth year over year so it's still a

business unit of this larger what was the size of a credit line how much money what's that the size of the credit line at the beginning I think it was a half a million okay half a million got it so and how we're able to recruit you I mean why not you just go build this off to the side own 100 and do it yourself I was I was actually already I was the head of the head of product for the group and then I decided when this actually started you know growing fast since I had built companies before I said okay I'm gonna do this because it sounds like fun

um and uh so yeah that's how it happened and it's been fun enjoy okay so now it's growing so um so like how do you as a Founder who's a creative that's driven the growth how do you capture more of the upside you're sort of stuck as an employee instead of a bigger company right yeah so I have I have is a piece of it because of just uh you know uh now I ask how big right is that the right question clap no answer right how much how much I don't think I could disclose that but

yeah no it's you know it's uh I think it's a successful example of and again the parent company is not huge it's about 450 employees um and B now the business unit is about 70. so but still it's a good example of how you can limit risk internally and and create a startup um you know that can grow um organically okay so before we jump into your sides first million in Revenue what was the growth Channel you relied

on product LED we were product LED from 2014 uh way before product like growth was kind of you know a super sexy thing that everybody uh was talking about and uh so in fact I'm going to show in the slides kind of how this website looked in 2014 and I made it work yeah so yeah so so product like growth and um outside of the 500 000 credit facility at the beginning and how is that structured was there an interest rate on that or was it it I mean it's the parent company so by law actually you do have to have

interest rates so I think it was it was one percent something like that so it was a special you know internal yeah it's not special it's free it is yeah we can't beat that by the way if you have a nice government go take as much money from them as you possibly can um okay so got it so product LED growth and you guys again will see this visually because when you say product LED growth again website builder powered by B is the sort of was that the early Playbook there on the plg side it so it back then the job to be done was a bunch

of people that use applications that send an email but the visual builder in that application sucks and don't think necessarily marketing could be a Billing System it could be an HR System we have a bunch of people in HR that so when they send an email do they have a visual builder in the HR tool or does it suck if it sucks they're going to look for something else because marketing is never going to help them they're at the bottom of the of the priority list so that's why B was launched in 2014 at

b3.io so people do that would come okay I can visually build this thing and I'm gonna grab the HTML and put it into my HR System or whatever so that that was the initial Playbook and then software companies said hey let me embed that thing into my software and after eight years the business is still pretty much split in half so half of the ARR is from software companies that pay us because they embedded our visual Builder and then there's the other five

in our in beds white label style yeah and five million are direct customers yes and okay so last question here so again why not go raise capital and take this private yourself it's Arbitrage right it's trading at 1X right now private markets you could get to 3x you know it gets complicated when you're already public and uh so it's you know first of all I'm not the expert on this stuff but uh it gets more complicated to say okay I'm gonna take this piece off the already Pub you know publicly traded

company and then I need to spin it off um but the majority owners didn't want to uh necessarily lose uh majority ownership on this asset and so the idea was let's let's keep growing it and get to a point where when we do sell it off it's going to be such a big win that every shareholder is not going to object so that was the idea do you have do you have leverage there if you told them let me spin this out or I'm going to leave would they say okay

no please let's talk I haven't used that leverage you should try that it's not my job on the line I would try it if I was you see what happens you know um okay very cool thumbs up in the back are we good to go sweet you good to go rock through these bad boys in 15 17 minutes okay so now you guys have context but again team Retreat ProBook and I guess just to set Comics here how many of you guys have run a team Retreat for your own company in the past year somewhere just raise your hand yeah okay cool on the count of think real quick how much you spent

total on the team Retreat okay just think real quick on the count of three up that number one two three all right so an average of about 1 350 per head is what the math was on that uh so take it away have fun all right yep all right guys uh so well we've we we're basically done already pretty much we've talked about a lot of stuff so that's uh um so um we talked about the the revenue

growth that you can see here again it was basically bootstrapped over the years and um um I'm gonna we're gonna get to the the details about running a team retreat but I just wanted to give you a couple of additional nuggets of what helped us grow over the years I'm a big believer in having operating principals in the company that are very easy to remember and that everybody talks about because they allow you to create culture and insist on those things uh you know as

you hire new people Etc so I'm going to talk about some of them uh real quick no friction as I was discussing with Nathan we were literally product LED from the get-go so some people had this job to be done I want to design an email or a page quickly no code and uh we had a a product that we thought would help them get the job done well if that is the playbook for you and product like growth doesn't work for everybody as you know we won't get into that but if it is something that you want to do then you

have to remove friction everywhere so the path for somebody to get into that product and experience that value has to be the fastest the shortest the smoothest and so no friction is something that is at the core of what we do we repeat it all the time because it's a a constant process of looking at any points of friction and removing it this is the website in when we launched in 2014 and we got lucky it was written up in Hacker News and some other places

and we had over 20 000 people that experience our Builder uh in 2014 and the first weekend you would select one of those uh you know very simple kind of ugly email templates and get into the pool tool right away of course we redesigned it but look there's a button that says start designing there so in one click you you would get into the tool we redesigned it again of course and this is how it looks today so eight years later you can still with two

clicks be into the product we don't ask you for anything no email no sign up nothing and this has been very core in the way we've acquired customers this creates words of mouth of course etc etc so no friction is one operating principle that we insist uh with with everybody at B all the time another one is always us first which means that if we can be a user of our own product for something that we're

talking about we absolutely need to be a user of our product a heavy user of the product you might say well this sounds like obvious well I've been around for long enough uh and I can tell you that it's actually not all the time in our own companies we cheat and we may not use our own product to do something so for example when I was head of product as I was saying yesterday earlier I discovered that there were some people um that where some developers that we're

not using our transactional email system to send a password reminder and and why not when it turns out our own transactional immune system was not fast enough they didn't say anything because people don't want to hurt your feelings right it's like but they did they weren't using our own software when we launched the landing page builder at B turns out the marketing department was not building landing pages with our own tool and we're like okay what's going on here it is a landing page builder why

are not using it well uh there's no tracking yet because it was an MVP of that okay we'll add you know integration with Google analytics will you use it then uh actually no because we want to host the pages in HubSpot okay so fast forward to today we have a very very solid integration with HubSpot and we have tons of people that use B to design and then push into HubSpot always as first gives you that understanding of

the why and as Todd was saying earlier of course it's not scalable you're talking about One customer you know yourself but you know that customer so well that you can get into the nuances of if they're not using it why why are they not using it third principle that um that we use a lot Best in Class on board that that presented earlier perfect example they're not just a you know a meeting

platform they are a meeting platform for board meetings and the one thing that you decide that you're going to be really good at you got to be Kick-Ass and you gotta repeat it all the time and again is this obvious uh maybe but what's not obvious is what comes after that because to be really good at something you need to focus at the point where you say no a ton of times and say no it's not easy uh customer Department product Department you know the sales

team they need to be really good at saying no because they know what to say yes to they know that we are very good at something and not at the other stuff and so Best in Class creates that clarity now how do you know if you're Best in Class one of the ways is to analyze churn reasons analyze messages from MPS we've talked about that now uh multiple times we do the same thing that pendo

does where we go through those uh NPS uh messages in slack so that's a great place to look so if for example let's say again in our case was it we're a visual Builder right if people complain that it's not easy enough to use or it's not fast enough okay that's a real problem because then it's at the core okay it means that we're not actually Best in Class at that very thing if they're complaining about something else

then that's fine for example people complain all the time that you can't access the HTML code through our no code Builder we're fine with that that's fine in fact I understand that you're not happy and that you may be leaving uh it's perfectly fine because that's not what we want to be best in class at um these are some of the reasons why people were churning um last uh you know a few years that this is our B pro product so the online

design Suite and if you look at the top four reasons it's about 60 percent over 65 sorry of total churn they weren't leaving because they were unhappy about the visual Builder that didn't work well enough but they just weren't using it that often uh it got the job done for them but they were done so I don't want a subscription so I'm gone so um this leads me into the second thing

that I wanted to talk to you about one of these big decisions that we made this year was to fully embrace freemium it was based on that an analysis of churn and a clear indication that some people just wanted a free plan a limited free plan you know infrequent users so we decided okay let's uh let's give them a free plan and I want to just show you a little bit about what happened when we went to freemium because again we did it based on an analysis of churn reasons

but what we found was an incredible uptick in the sign up in the web visit to sign up so today we convert 15 of every site visit in into a B pro sign up which is a pretty incredible uh conversion rate it's it's a free plan but still it's a really high rate of conversion for a police plan what happened well first of all the power of

free we underestimated how uh sign up free compared to sign up for a free trial really has a incredible amount of positive impact we drive 25 of visits to the sign up page directly from a button like that and again we we looked at uh you know leaders in this space like MailChimp that's been a Pioneer in in freemium from for you know many many years that had a substantial impact another thing that had a substantial impact was

uh a change in the UI that we made in the visual Builders so on b3.io you click on start designing select the template your individual Builder and then when you're done designing your thing you click uh you clicked on export and we were giving you all these options uh to kind of prompt you to sign up for a free trial um over cognitive overload uh we weren't we were underestimating how much this was actually confusing people you know

too many options when we switched to this there was a 20 250 percent increase in the conversion of people that were in the Builder and went to the next page this was easier to do because we had switched to a freemium plan so we did we weren't we didn't need to pitch anybody on anything just click on Save and you're gonna save your email or page into your free plan but we weren't expecting actually how much this was

going to lead to a substantial increase in uh the number of people getting to the sign up page so just some learnings from uh from this because it was pretty substantial the the amount of increase in sign ups overall 60 increase in sign ups from introducing a freemium plan and a few UI changes and then the other thing that happened was is of course you you are you have visits uh um to the sign up page you you add

conversions you have users so we had a pretty substantial increase in the number of uh active users in the application uh the year-over-year rate before it was around 17 and it shot up to over 55 but the interesting thing is that it wasn't just any users even the heavy users of the application the growth rate for those heavy users went from around 15 over year over year to

over 30 percent so the freemium model actually brought in people that turned out to be heavy users of the product not just it wasn't just a solution for the light users of the product so in this particular case for us it worked really really well uh we already talked a little bit about uh the team Retreat I'm going to give you some more pointers that might be helpful to you so again B it's been a remote

company now for many many years uh look you're gonna hit bumps on the road and the problem with the remote company well how many of you have remote staff many many of you okay so you've probably been there where it's all great but when when you hit bumps on the road when people get pissed when people you know uh short temper that's where being a remote company it's challenging because it might be the wrong word in slack it

might be right so how do you so you need buffer you need people to have a buffer with each other where even if they're not you know able to kind of just talk it out getting a coffee they they maintain you know positive business relationship how do you build that buffer I'm absolutely convinced that you need to get people together to build that buffer that will then help you when uh happens so how do we do that we do it in three ways one the the team

Retreat that we talked about already earlier with uh Nathan southern Europe is a great option um I would budget if I were you at least two thousand dollars a person two thousand to twenty five hundred dollars a person for that one-time company Retreat that you do every year second we give managers each department manager a budget to get their team together so the development team went to Portugal this year sales went to

southern Spain uh the cons the customer experience team went to Seattle Washington because most of them actually are in the United States and they flew some people over from from Europe so that's another budget it's a you know to give managers of each department and when you put those two together you're talking about at least three thousand dollars a person so it becomes a big budget item when people say oh we're going to save a bunch of money by running a remote company not necessarily running a remote company could be

expensive it's a talent technician strategy a hundred percent because now the total addressable Market of people that you're hiring is the entire world right am I gonna save money I don't know this is a big budget item that you're you need to be very very aware of the other way we get people together is uh events so why when you go to an event it could be an event like this or it could be that you're sponsoring a conference right with your sales and marketing team

bring extra people people that you actually don't need it could be two three extra people it could be new staff that just joined the company it would take maybe months to be at the team retreat but if you have an event coming up bring them to the event um this is the uh budget um with the line items of the budget that from last year that Nathan was talking about so you can find it into the you know the the uh all the files that you get from the

conference and I'm happy to answer any questions on that one thing that I also wanted to mention is that last year one mistake we we made was we packed the agenda with tons of stuff super interesting stuff but the one piece of feedback that we got from everybody on the team was we need more time just give them some empty space we'll fill it up with what we believe that we need to do with our own team Etc so don't pack the agenda too tight another mistake that we

made last year was uh too little time for customer support you know your customer is still there like using your product Etc they don't necessarily care that much that you're in Sicily uh for your team Retreat so you got to build more time into that um and uh and finally last actually we did two days and it probably wasn't enough time I mean it's a big thing that you that you that you uh you know organize so this year we're actually going to gather for three days for the

entire team and it sounds like it's a more uh it's a better fit you can leave some more empty space for people to get together and and do things um so a lighter agenda might be a smarter idea for this kind of uh Team Retreat when you're running you know a remote team um all right so I hope you got some nuggets uh that you can bring home that might be helpful from the rest of the conference of courses so if you want to go deeper in any of these uh topics uh

happy to do it and thanks so much for having me foreign [Applause] [Music]