SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Sold 5 Companies Before Age of 30, Now Side Stream Income is $500k/Year with Lane Campbell EP 218
02 Apr 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 talk.
Chapter 2: What five companies did Lane Campbell sell before age 30?
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Daniel Al-Soudini. He's based overseas. He's an employee at a current company and can't wait to break free.
For your chance to win $100, Top Tribe, simply subscribe to the podcast now and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it. Again, text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it. I give away $100 every Monday.
Chapter 3: How did Lane Campbell's business exits value compare to $10 million?
Coming up tomorrow, Morning Top Tribe, you're going to hear from Fizan Ali. He's 26 and is managing $8.4 million in ad spend with his business, AdSend Media.
okay top drive good morning to everyone i hope you're having a great jog or commute into work and you're gonna really enjoy our guest this morning his name is lane campbell and he's a serial entrepreneur by the time he was 25 he managed i.t for companies that cumulatively did 300 million dollars in revenue by the time he was 30 he had sold five companies folks it's gonna be a good one lane are you ready to take us to the top
Absolutely. Let's do this. Okay, so first things first, just name the name of the company and the exit price of the five companies you sold before 30.
Oh, well, I can't disclose all the exit prices, but I can say the five companies... First one that I sold was named ZigZap. It was a telecom. Second one and the third one shared the same name, separate entities, but the brand remained with me after the first sale. First was an IT services business called Centris. Second was an IT staffing business called Centris as well. A little confusion there.
Then I exited Rescue, a cloud backup service, and Manhattan Digest, an online publication.
And to avoid you breaking any non-disclosures with any one of those exits, if you just summed up the cumulative total of all those exits, would you say it was more or less than call it 10 million bucks?
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Chapter 4: What is Lane's current primary income stream?
It was less than 10 million bucks.
Okay, less than 10 million bucks. So when did you get, would you consider your first big win after 30?
Well, I'm 30.
Okay, so it says by 30, you'd sold five companies. That's what you put into me. I didn't realize you are 30 right now. So what are you working on today?
Yes. So I'm actually advising a couple of different companies. One's a gov tech company trying to change how lobbying is performed, giving citizens a little more power in the process. Right now, I'm sure everybody hears in the news that lobbyists get a lot of flack. They're hired to go and talk to politicians.
In reality, we want the politicians to hear us, but the politicians can't possibly filter out all the noise. So what this company does is
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Chapter 5: How does Lane Campbell leverage partnerships for business growth?
accumulate a database of staff and then allow for special interest groups that we all care about anyway to sponsor our conversations with these staffers, with these people. It's called Fast Advocate, and it does through a mobile approach. It's pretty neat. The other one's a med tech company that's helping change how clinical trials are conducted.
Anybody who's familiar with this process knows it's expensive. Most clinical trials don't result in there's an excess of 80 percent waste in in funding of clinical trials today. And yet this is life saving research. This is the stuff that needs to be structured, needs to have reproducible data. uh, research is part of it. And that's what this platform tries to solve.
Chapter 6: What challenges does Lane face in attracting technical talent?
So what is your main focus right now? You've got your toes in a lot of things.
You know, it's, it was as of last year, focused a hundred percent on a recruiting startup. Uh, I'm hoping to bring that back here called June, like the month of June. Okay. And then, uh, basically we're, we're, we're bringing together a few new ideas on that. It's on hold while we do that. And, uh, I hope to relaunch that later this year.
So is that, I mean, literally when you hang up with this interview, you're going to go back to working on getting June relaunched.
That's the plan.
Okay. Well, what, uh, so what about like view ventures?
I help them out as their CTO. It's a venture fund here in Chicago. They're doing great early stage stuff. And I sort of assess the technical aspects of deals.
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Chapter 7: What is the cost of hiring technical employees in the U.S.?
I'm not one of the principals there, just one of the officers and help them out.
Okay. So let me ask this kind of a different way because you seemed hesitant on kind of what you're doing with June or you kind of laughed when I asked that. How are you making like currently, let's just call it in January 25th, 2016, what was your number one income stream? Which business?
So I have a side stream of income called Creately, and this is something I do to help just other companies grow. Basically, I call it revenue optimization engineering. Fritz, for example, I give him some tips. There's companies I advise in New York, companies in Silicon Valley, companies in Texas.
Basic ideas, you know, you're you're doing something that works today, but you may be classifying what you what you do and what's working today incorrectly from a growth perspective. And I take a look at your existing revenue. I can help you establish new new streams of it off of the same things that are already working today.
OK, so so let's let's dive into one example of one of these. Well, what is the average kind of company pay you to consult with them?
So it really depends on the size of the organization. Typically, it's, you know, around between 20 and $40,000 to have me come in and do this.
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Chapter 8: How does Lane plan to optimize revenue for his clients?
This isn't your earliest stage business. And the idea is, from what I've seen out there, from all my business dealings, I built two pillars of sales. There's the pillar of trust and the pillar of value. 95% of the actual deal that's going to close is based upon the trust relationship that you build with a potential client or partner. And
From my experience, the faster you can build a trust relationship, the faster you can deal close a deal because the value proposition is it's important. And the only time that a value proposition becomes more important than the trust relationship is when they've hit a pain point.
We'll call it like the migraine point where you absolutely have to fix this problem and trust isn't as important anymore. But most of the time, deals happen on the trust relationship before the value proposition. So if you can find a way to leverage existing trust relationships, you can grow your business more expeditiously than if you try to build them yourself.
So let's talk specifically maybe about what you did for Fritz because the top tribe just heard from Fritz in yesterday's episode. He's doing about 2.5 million bucks at his agency out cold. He's got about 11 employees full time and about 400 part time employees or contractors around the country. So Lane Fritz pays you somewhere between 40 and 50 grand.
What do you what did you specifically do for him? Was it something with the car containers or what?
Well, so Fritz and I haven't entered into an agreement to work together. Uh, what I've done is give him some tips and he's kind of run with them himself, but he told me, uh, basically, you know, he expects to add over one and a half million in revenue with some of the tips.
And the idea is, uh, you know, some of the people you're working with today, you classify as a client or really a partner and every partner you bring on should bring on multiple clients. So if you structure a program around treating your, the revenue streams appropriately, and these are sometimes called channel programs, indirect sales programs,
there's something incentivizing that partner for bringing you deal flow in the first place. If you can figure out what it is and you can replicate it with other partners, you're going to grow much more quickly.
So, okay, let's focus on one that did pay you. What was the last customer that did pay you?
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