SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Team Retreat Playbook: Why We Spend $2,500 per head for our SaaS team retreats
16 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What insights were shared from the Founder 500 conference?
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest's team retreat in Southern Europe come about?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Please help me in welcoming Massimo from B to the stage.
All right, thank you. Nice to meet you, everybody. Thanks for having me here, Nathan. I love these conferences because you always go home with a couple of nuggets of really good business advice, and so I hope that you get a couple of those from me. So let's get started. Let's see.
Small talk for a second.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of a $2,500 per person budget for team retreats?
Yeah. I think he's in a tough spot. After lunch, day one, slides will get possible up here, though. Yeah, no problem. How many people did you take to your event?
So last year was about 50 people in Naples, Italy. So we got really lucky because it was literally between two COVID waves and we just went for it and we said, well, let's try to do it and let's see if it works. And it was, I think it was the first week in September or something like that. It was really literally between two waves and it was great.
And so, well, yeah, we talked a little bit about that and then save time later.
Chapter 4: How does the guest describe the growth of their company since its inception?
So what we found is that Southern Europe is just an incredible place for team retreats. I'm originally from Italy and about 50% of our staff is in Italy. So B is about 70 people right now. And so it's also a natural place for us. But we've tried hard to look at other places because the Italians don't want to be in Italy. They would love to come to the U.S., etc.
To give you an idea, this year we're going to go to Sicily again in Italy. And first week in October, about 70 people for the team retreat.
and the per person this is a beautiful resort on the beach 70 euros per night per person it's it's practically impossible to find that kind of rate here in the united states and portugal spain greece the entire southern europe is a perfect spot for all that kind of stuff and of course you you have people flying in from from different places but
Especially if you do it off season, you know, you can kind of make the math work.
Chapter 5: What are the operating principles that guide the company culture?
And it's so much harder to make it work when you look at places here in the United States, but also UK, you know, and many other spots. I'm not an expert on Asia, so we've never actually looked at possibly doing a team retreat there. I'll talk about that part of the presentation now, so we don't need to do it later. We started in 2014.
Bea is a visual builder for building emails, landing pages, and other digital assets. And when we started in 2014, we were remote from the get-go.
And I'm gonna turn it into an interview style to buy him some more time. Yeah, let's do it. Is that cool? All right, so we'll just chill up here.
Chapter 6: How does the guest explain product-led growth and its impact?
You pick a seat, I'll pick another one. Sounds good. You go first. Boom, all right. Yeah, so first off, I got connected to you because you came on the podcast. Yes. Why do you agree to go on a podcast where you know you're just gonna get grilled?
Well, you loved it because, so the crazy story about B is that it's a startup within a larger company. The larger company is called Growance. It's publicly traded in Italy and the valuation sucks.
Chapter 7: What are the common mistakes made during team retreats?
Well, yeah, I remember you telling me this. Tell me the actual multiple. So your AR was what and you were trading at what?
So Growance, I'm not telling anything. It's not public information. You can look it up. But Growance is basically trading at about one time sales. It's not all ARR. So it's about 70 million euros in sales. And it trades at about one time that today on the Italian Stock Exchange.
Chapter 8: How can remote teams effectively build relationships and resolve conflicts?
And B does around 10 million ARR. And so you were like, OK, this doesn't make any sense.
I was trying to convince him to like get money and take it private, right? I'm like, wait, you're trading at 1X? Like, let's get some debt.
Well, the parent company is trading at 1X and B does 10 million of that, which is pure ARR, is basically hidden in there. And, you know, and so, yeah, on itself.
All these folks are wanting to look up the ticker on the stock exchange. So what's the ticker real quick? Give the name again.
It's Grow. It's on the Italian stock exchange.
But if you look on Bloomberg, you'll find it. Grow, Grow. Okay, cool. So how did you get in this position? Did you sell the company to the parent company? Are you the founder of Bee? How does that work?
Yeah, the founder in the sense that I was the head of product for the group. And then we decided that this product was good enough to see if it would stand on its own. So and the interesting thing is that the company gave this little startup a line of credit So very much the way you're saying fund your business, right?
So there was no big check that the company that parent company wrote And so we started just with a small MVP in 2014 with a small line of credit from the parent company and the parent company never actually wrote a big check so that's the way we did it and so we started First revenue was in 2016, and so pretty much zero then, and it's about 10 million ARR now.
So it's taken some time, as you know, when you bootstrap, but very solid growth year over year. So it's still a business unit of this larger.
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