SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to 5x Your Bookings with a Transactional Sales Model for SMBs
11 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What insights were shared from the Founder 500 event?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please welcome to the stage, Chris Marientis with Surefire Local.
Thank you everybody. I hope this, um, this talk is going to probably 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 a managed services company and then evolved to a SaaS 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.
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 SaaS 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 could see where the business took off. This is the reason why Nathan wanted me to talk. You can 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, 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
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Chapter 2: How did the guest transition from managed services to a SaaS model?
So we're a very KPI-driven company at this point. I have my KPIs, I do weekly with my executive team, but for the sales leadership, their KPIs look more like this on the outbound side. It's really around starting with dials, demo sets, dials to demo sets, demo sets, held 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, is about leadership and culture. So when we started this transition and to bring in new, 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 whiteboard what do we want our culture to be. 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 the analogy to this is like when you're on a diet, you don't want to focus on eating.
So we didn't 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're getting ripped off by agencies and they've got they're 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 create great results, right? The more people engaged, the better results you're gonna have. Everyone needs to feel like they're able to have, 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 connect and deliver.
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