SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Want a $100m revenue machine? Copy this monthly cadence, BrightEdge CEO
10 Dec 2024
Chapter 1: What is the story behind BrightEdge's growth to $100 million in revenue?
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But this guy's bootstrapped, right edge, to $100 million of revenue. He's got an incredible story. He's built an incredible team. And the product speaks for itself. Please let me welcome to the stage Jim Yu from Bright Edge. Jim. Right? It's all fair? Almost. Almost fair. All right. All right.
Coach us up. Teach us up. This is great. Excited to be here with everybody and share some of the lessons I've learned in terms of scaling and running BrightEdge at $100 million. We built the business with about $50 million in primary capital. It's been a long journey over 15 years. This is the 18th year of running the company, so...
Lots of lessons learned, lots of getting punched in the head all the time, but a couple things that I've learned. A big part of running at scale, I think, is really sort of how do you break up running your week, running your month, running your quarter, and ultimately, how you run your year, right? And so a couple things I've learned, first and foremost,
In the early days of the business, you're really focused on how do you build. So you're iterating, you're used to experimentation. Once you figure out your product market fit and your core formula, it all becomes about how do you find this right balance between how you run and how you build. The cadences are really good at helping you drive towards run, but you have to be very deliberate
about thinking about when are you going to drive the build of the business. So let me tell you a little bit about sort of what I do, right? So this is the Monday morning meeting, right? It's a running cadence to really drive accountability throughout the organization. It starts and runs through every part of the organization, right?
So the go-to-market function, starting from marketing and market dynamics, as you scale a lot of this, like you play in multiple segments, what's happening from a competitive from a competitive landscape perspective, what's happening from a disruption perspective. So you want to keep a pulse on that. Then it becomes about new business. What's the demand generation that you're getting?
What are the number of leads and qualified opportunities? Then it becomes about bookings. So the sales organization reports back out on that. Then it's about customers across the lifecycle. As you get new customers, it's about are you onboarding those customers well? What's that first touch experience? The first 90 days are super important.
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Chapter 2: How does Jim Yu structure his weekly cadence for running a successful business?
So spending time dedicated with the innovation and R&D team. This is a little different than the product team. This is with more the hardcore sort of engineers that are working on new data, new innovation, what's happening. Right, and really sort of that's a more free flowing, working with labs, understanding sort of what are the next generation set of innovations that we have to drive.
And that then leads to sort of the kinds of thought leadership that we put out. It also leads to how we think about the broader ecosystem. But Tuesday is really about stepping back and looking at the big picture. And this theme is important that you'll see as kind of
operating cadences focus on running the business versus cadences that are focused on stepping back, thinking about the strategy and building the business. And I found this is a good way. Now, you might find different days, but to force yourself to get out of the firefight and step back and think about what are you building?
Because it's easy to just get in the day-to-day of just running the company as well. Wednesdays for me are all about revenue, right? So there's some day of the week that's got to be all about money. So I call it sort of smelling the money, finding the money, chasing the money, that's Wednesdays, right?
And it's important that the entire organization knows, all your leadership knows that this is the day about money, right? And so it is about every segment, every leader forecasting what are they gonna drive for the month, What are they going to deliver? What are they going to close? So that's sales forecasting. It's retention forecasting. It's each business unit that gets rolled up.
And that drives accountability throughout the organization that there's that focus on sort of driving that rhythm of revenue. So Wednesdays for me are all about that. Closing the loop is very, very important in this cadence.
You kind of see a classic forecast sort of model there, but what's really important here is having the leader call the number, and then as those time passes, hit the numbers that they're calling. That sort of cadence of driving accountability on delivering is super important. Thursdays are all about customer and capacity, right?
So customer really understanding the prospect to customer journey and the segments in which we play, what expectations are we setting?
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Chapter 3: What strategies does Jim use to balance running and building the business?
What are the MPS surveys by segments that are coming back? Trending that over time is really important to look at the themes and then, critically, also capacity planning for the organization, right?
Each of these go-to-market functions and each of the major functions of the business as you scale ultimately is about taking a formula that you've built in the early days and really tuning the capacity that you have across the organization to then deliver that capacity into the market, right? That's true for prospecting and driving
new accounts, but that cuts all the way through to how you onboard those customers and then how you touch those customers and serve those customers throughout the customer life cycle. You can see an example here of how you look at that end to end of how to plan that.
This is a fairly simplified model of that, but you kind of see, hey, if you're 10 million in revenue, you're going to 14 to 15 million in a year. Planning month to month, how many reps are you adding in each of those areas? critically understanding the ramp time of those reps, understanding the underlying sort of capacity that each person can deliver at their ramp levels.
And then you can see the red areas are really important because that tells you when are you going to be behind on hiring, right? So the capacity planning then feeds into recruiting that then is really important for you then drive to make sure that across the team you ultimately have enough capacity to run your business in terms of the underlying formula that you have.
So two Thursdays for me are sort of about customer and capacity, super important for driving that. And then Fridays are really around people and product for me. So people cadence really as the organization grows and changes, really important to look at a lot of the key metrics around what's happening in terms of new hire. There's an employee lifecycle.
In SaaS, we think a lot about the customer lifecycle. super important. Ultimately, what you have to also deliver is an employee lifecycle across those pieces of the model where you're planning capacity, right, is who are you hiring, how are they ramping, and how is that working over time? And so you want to look at things like,
You see a metric here called net hiring score, which is an indicator both from the person you hired and the hiring manager on what is their satisfaction in the first 90 days right after the honeymoon period. And that's a good early indicator of as you're adding people into organization, how is that working and is it sort of accurate as you scale the business?
Other things, involuntary turnover, voluntary turnover, these are important metrics that trend as well to understand. And then core sort of HR mechanics of, you know, just like you have customer support tickets, right? Sort of employee tickets around benefits and things like that and making sure that you're tracking, just like you track C-STAT, making sure that you're closing those tickets out.
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Chapter 4: How does the Monday morning meeting drive accountability across the organization?
how that's shifting because as different market shifts are occurring, as productivity changes across your organization, it's very important to understand that over time. So this is a great way that I've found for us to really understand that and trend that over time. And ultimately, it's very important to get this, just like that Monday meeting is about sort of driving the business,
sort of week to week in terms of running, the monthly cadence allows you to drive executive accountability on what they're delivering against the business model, right? Ultimately that's about stepping back and understanding the alignment to the business model that you're driving. And then the last thing I'd say is also a sustaining cadence, right?
Like I mentioned at the beginning, to build a company at scale, what I found is over a decade, it's a long time. So ultimately there's also an element of how do you sustain that over time? It's a constant struggle. I've never found it to get easier. It's always a new set of challenges. And so I think it's very important to keep in mind sort of, you know, health and also the relationships.
It's not something I'm great at, but you can kind of see on the left-hand side is my heart rate, resting heart rate. I track this on my Apple Watch because it tells me when I'm under way too much stress. You kind of see the ebbs and flows of that. That's important just to get a sense, find your own way, right, by, like, understanding what you're putting your ā
your physical and your mind sort of pressure that it's under and balancing that. And then what I found like with my wife, it's just kind of relationships as well, right, is a great way to sort of connect.
One of the things that I found with my wife over time is, since it's been over a decade, in the beginning we used to have date nights every week, but what we found is we'd get a nice dinner, watch a movie, and then ultimately after a couple years of that, gained a lot of weight. So instead, what we found is there's this great trail in the back. There's a great trail that's near our house.
And what we switched it to was every Sunday, we would take a one-hour walk together. And that walk for the last 10 years has been great. It's a great way for us, for her to share with me what's going on with the family, for me to share what's going on with... with the business or whatever was going on. And it's just a great way to connect, right?
And I think in a lot of ways, what we do as founders is so hard that everything, it never gets easier. Everybody always tells you, oh, how's it going? It's great. But actually it's never that great, I think. Maybe once in a while it's great, but usually it's not. And so there's this element of finding your center of how are you going to sustain that?
How are you gonna sustain the relationships that you have? as you go on this crazy journey. And what I found is, look, like some of these patterns of things to do, whether it's the walk or I got really into Peloton and doing the streak of that to manage my stress, that I think finding that is also a really important rhythm for being able to drive and run your business.
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