EP 118: 12 Kids, Took Salesforce to $100m ARR, 50,000 Books Sold
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This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, top tribe. Every Monday, I give one of you 100 bucks to invest in your idea and get to the top. To enter, subscribe to the podcast right now on iTunes and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove it. This week's winner was Jesse from up in Chicago. Coming up tomorrow morning, we speak with James Swanwick, who went from fat to 14k per month with his 30 day challenge.
Okay, Top Tribe, good morning, good morning. I'm tucked down here in the Appalachian Mountains in Southwest Virginia, as you know, with my tea, and I'm really excited for you to meet our guest today. His name is Aaron Ross. He's the number one best-selling author of Predictable Revenue. Turn your business into a sales machine with the $100 million. bestpracticesofsalesforce.com. The book is called The Sales Bible of Silicon Valley. Now, Aaron is also married with seven going on 12. Count that, 12 children. His next book with Jason Lemkin is called From Impossible to Inevitable, How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue. Okay, Aaron, are you ready to take us to the top? I think so. Well, listen, your story is so long, and we have 15 minutes, so I want to really focus it.
Guys, Top Tribe, here's where you want to listen to the full episode. Aaron took Salesforce and prospected it all the way up to basically $100 million in revenue back in early 2002 to about 2006. And before that, he ran a company that he actually raised capital on. He was, I think, 26 years old, Aaron. You shut it down after raising $5 million. I want to start there because a lot of the top tribe listening in are these companies that have raised venture capital, and they realize they're never going to grow into the valuation that they raised at. So walk me through the liquidation process of the first business.
Well, first, I'm going to say, I think when you're young and you haven't done it, or maybe a new entrepreneur, raising money sounds really cool. And then you do it, and you're like, fuck. This sucks. This can't. But I think raising money can be fantastic for the right companies at the right time for the right reason. But a lot of people raise it for the wrong reasons, just because it's cool, because they think that's what will make their company successful. Anyway, lots of wrong reasons. But in terms of shutting the company down, it was very painful. It was like losing. Later, I got divorced. So that's the only thing I can compare it to is one of the most painful experiences in my life. And I think a lot of it was having the dream die.
So all I could say is rather than – it's easy when you're running a company and struggling to deny reality, to try to believe it, to not – Just confront the fact that things aren't working.
So this was back in February 1999. How old were you? Were you 26? I was, yeah, maybe 27 by then or 28. So walk me through the mechanics. Again, I'm hoping that you're going to give us some answers. The top tribe can think if they feel like they're stuck in a business and they're never going to go into their valuation, that they can take one or two things to figure out how to shut down in the least painful way possible. So how did you shut down the lease exchange business?
Well, first it was, you know, once we were having cash flow problems to sort of confront who we needed, how to cut expenses sooner rather than later.
Okay.
You know, because I, like, I, of course, you know, respected my people. I felt responsible. And there's almost nothing. It's very painful to fire people, especially when you don't want to. Yep. How many did you have? We had probably at the time around 50 at some point.
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