SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1225 Enterprise Management Company Alfresco Passes $100M ARR, IPO Next?
01 Dec 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Guys, you can't solve everything. Sometimes you just have to move on. She joined Alfresco, really moving up the ranks in 2016. The company before her had raised, call it, you know, 50-ish million bucks. There is another 45 million just before she joined. So about 90 million in the company before in 2017, about a year after she joined, they were essentially taken private.
She's now continuing to drive incredible growth, over 100, really best in class in terms of net revenue retention, over 100%. serving over 1,300 customers, paying anywhere in the tens of thousands. If they're older customers, up to now, they're signing new customers at the $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 ACV levels, growing rapidly with 350 people all around the world.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
Chapter 2: How did Bernadette Nixon contribute to Alfresco's growth?
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone.
Chapter 3: What is Alfresco's business model and customer base?
My guest today is Bernadette Nixon. She is the CEO of Alfresco and leads the company's strategy for growth, customer commitment, and culture. She's an experienced global leader with a proven track record of growing some of the leading companies in the market and has a wealth of experience in the process and content management industry as a whole.
Before joining Alfresco, Bernadette served as president of SDL PLC, a global software and professional services company, after having grown its sales team as chief revenue officer. Bernadette, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely.
Okay. So I feel like Alfresco is one of these companies. It's actually pretty large, but a lot of people maybe haven't heard of it because you do so many different things. So kind of put it in a nutshell for us.
Chapter 4: How does Alfresco utilize cloud technology in its operations?
What's the company do? And is it a pure play SaaS company?
We're a pure play subscription business. Yes. So Alfresco is a fast growing open source software company, and we've got a digital business platform. At its core, the platform has process automation and content management services. And then a great app dev framework on top to build your own engaging modern user interfaces.
So the space we play in, it used to be known as ECM and BPM, but now in the more modern times is known as process services and content services. And certainly the way we play there is in a cloud native way.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Alfresco face before its recent funding?
Yeah. And just quickly give me a story of how maybe a customer is using you to really bring it home.
Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, if you think about NASA, for example, they look to us to help modernize their processes. They've got lots of processes internally and all of those processes have content that are associated with them.
So as they're, you know, playing their part in the space station or all the different ways to advance their mission, they are using us to automate processes and to be the custodian of all of that information. And it could be pictures or video as well as documents. And they need to, you know, have it available for 70 years
So just to be clear, Bernadette, this is like a really sophisticated intranet.
Chapter 6: What strategies are in place for customer acquisition?
It's not content published out to like the community, the world. It's internal processing documentation.
It's internal. Most often, most often, yes, it's internal processes and your internal enterprise class content.
Very cool. Very cool. Okay. And I'm sure you serve a ton of different customers, but on average, are we talking, you know, million dollar a year deals, a hundred grand, 10 million, generally, where do you fall?
Well, we've got open source roots. So a lot of people used to know us as the cheap and cheerful open source content guys.
Chapter 7: How does Alfresco define and measure its revenue growth?
And a lot of companies that are with us from those days pay us probably 20K a year. But over the years, we've gone up market in terms of serving some of the largest companies and governments globally. And those customers can end up spending millions with us.
Yeah. So would you say maybe a fair average is a million a year or something like that?
I'd say people start at probably 200K and they build up from there.
I see. If they're expansion revenue, et cetera.
Yep, exactly.
Very cool.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Bernadette share about leadership and company culture?
Now, I want to put this on a timeline because the business has gone through all kinds of crazy changes and things like that. What year did you join?
I joined in January of 2016. Okay.
And what year was the company founded?
The company was founded in the UK in 2005.
Okay.
2005. Okay. So what had happened in 2016, both in your own life and on the other side of the company that made it a good fit for you?
You know, I'd always believed in this notion of process and content coming together because every process typically has some content associated with it. And so I believed in the vision and the mission for the company. And given where they were in their stage of evolution, I also thought I could help.
I'd seen some of the movie before in terms of some of the things I thought they needed to overcome to achieve what I would class, you know, more breakout growth, which is what we've been able to do since 2016. Yep.
Now, last year, you know, there was, you know, murmurs on the street that the company was for sale, but it sounds like last year there was an actual event with some folks associated with Thomas Lee, the private equity firm. Walk us through what happened there.
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