SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to build an A+ team to drive 700% growth on a shoestring budget
14 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What are the crucial elements for building an A+ team on a budget?
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. Steve Pokras from Verblio.
Thank you guys all so much for staying before lunch with me. I really appreciate it. I will try to make it worth your while. That is not me. That looks more like me. This presentation was, this was a much longer Sastr presentation before, and we streamlined it down, so it might run a little fast, but I'm gonna try to pack it a lot.
We're here to talk about how to build an A plus talent company with D minus budget. Um, which is what you do when you're doing with, with bootstrap world. So I think people think about bootstrapped in a lot of different ways. The way I think about it is if you're an investor company, you're investing two years in front of where you want to be.
And if you're a bootstrapped company, you're investing what you needed to do two years ago now. Um, And so you need to find the right people in order to do that. And getting those people who are going to drive that is your biggest competitive advantage. It's probably the thing that I'm most proud of that we've done as a company. Let me show you. So this is Verblio's growth rate.
I took over the company from the founders in 2000 at the end of 2016. So we have been growing at 40 to 50 percent successfully on a bootstrap budget since then. We are 100 percent bootstrapped until a couple of months ago when Founder Path helped us out with some work in capital. I have much to say about how amazing this is as a service.
I was not paid to do so, but please talk to me about it afterwards. There was no access to capital like this for any time before that. We're an S-corp company, so my founders were going to have to take out liens on their homes for me to get a line of capital before. And now I have a cheaper rate than he was available within two weeks. This is our story. This is what I'm talking about.
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Chapter 2: How has Verblio achieved 700% growth with a bootstrap approach?
And what are you not going to be investing your resources in? I'll give you one example before we jump in. We started off with a, actually, let me give you one of my favorite references.
So I read a long time ago that Steve Ballmer, at the beginning of every year, talked to his executive assistant about what percent of his calendar wanted to be allocated to every single one of the functions, 25% to sales, 25% to customers. 25% of people. I think of it that same way. I want over half of my time to be spent internally.
And that means we specifically don't focus on sales and product nearly as much as is the current dogma for startup success. Nathan really wanted to include an org chart. This is kind of amazing to me. I think there's a couple of things.
First, as anyone who's in a high growth company, you look at your org chart from a few years ago compared to what it is now, and you get blown away about how all this happened. I interviewed every single one of these people when they came on board. There were a bunch of things that I think really set us apart.
So one is every member of this leadership team that I've hired over the last six years, we have had 0% turnover. That gives an incredible competitive advantage. They are also built for growing a much larger organization than I currently have. So we don't spend time on turnover. We don't spend time on having to recruit every year. They get to do everything.
We've lost one person who we didn't want to lose over the last year. We lose an average of two people per year. That retention gives us such scale and such ability to focus on the bigger challenges for our customers and for our product than anything else.
Everyone in these top people who then hired a bunch of other people came from my referral network and people that I stayed in touch with over the years. They were the best of the best that I'd worked with.
And networking was one of my biggest keys is staying in touch with people that you like along the way so that they're there and they're available for the moment that you can actually afford to hire them or you have room for them. And then I think the other thing about looking at a bunch of people in boxes that I find interesting is these all used to there used to be any drop downs.
So every single one of these people that you're hiring at a certain stage of your client and this is really kind of like a. zero to 10 million type of, of org chart. Every person that you're buying, that you're bringing on board is an explorer. They're creating their own job rec. So you created a job rec that you thought was going to fit them, but they'd never created that job.
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Chapter 3: What strategies can be used for effective recruitment in a startup?
send them a swag package, make them feel part of the team and then have an onboarding session. So we now, once you're big enough, so it took us a while to get there, but I'm a part of every onboarding session too. I want to run the part about culture. I want to talk about the culture company history.
If your executives are making time for new people and they feel like they have a direct connection, they are going to be so much more energized to, uh, to go. And you're letting them know that they have that ability to make change themselves.
Um, and so I have one last story to end with, which is, um, is it kind of an example of what, uh, of what we're doing here of kind of the main point of the story. So I took over in 2017. I have another graph that I included in the SASTR presentation, which is, um,
I hired an amazing, so I met this woman, Zoe Treason, when I was, she was an intern at my previous startup and I thought she was a top talent. She was a film major and she was going to business school because she thought it would be interesting. She'd never managed one human in her life, but she was all of the traits that I just talked about, flexible, motivated, curious, passionate, dependable.
And so I went out and recruited her before she could finish business school to come over to the new startup that I'd taken over. And we had a head of customer success that just wasn't cutting it. And I gave Zoe head of customer success role after having managed zero people in her entire life. She now runs 20 people, which is half of my company, having never done so before.
And she grew up through the organization. And so the way that we got there was I had a big decision to make when we first came on board. If you're going to build a strategy about hiring top talent that's flexible and passionate, But has never done it before. You need to give them a lot more resources.
So I had a budget where I could choose one salesperson or an executive coach to support all my new leaders on my first year. And I chose an executive coach to coach up that team so they could do all of these things. So that's where strategy gets made and some of the things that you don't do as much as the things that you do do.
And I think that is really one of the major, the most important success features in growing us 700% over the last couple of years. And so Nathan just came in the room. So I'm going to talk about how I didn't talk about the first point and the third point that you added. Sorry, but I did nail the point. I think I talked about him a little bit. So this is how we scale the team.
And I'm happy to talk about contractors and scaling as well. And I would love to talk about marketplace and business models anytime. Thank you.
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