Episode 8 - Client-Centric SaaS – How to Scale, with Chris Regester
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Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business. We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best, and my co-host, Jonny Adams. Hello. Hi, Jonny. And today we are joined by the fantastic Chris Register. And Chris is one of the founding members and current CCO of Planhat. Planhat are a customer platform built to acquire, service, and grow lifelong customers. Chris has also a wealth of experience in growing and developing SaaS software organizations over his illustrious career so far. So Chris, thank you for joining us.
It's fantastic to see you. I know SBR and Planhat have been partners now for some time, and we talk a lot about customer success, or as it's often known, CS for short. And what would be a fascinating place to start today's conversation is just talk to our listeners a little bit about where things started out for you and how your journey began.
Yeah, I started my career at a great company called Meltwater, which at the time was about 40 people. They were just launching in the UK. It was like a PR tech company, very small. They'd come out of Norway, was launching in the UK, joined there in a sales and account management sales and CS role, and then very quickly moved and opened up the business in Asia Pacific. So they wanted to grow very quickly internationally. They took a team to the US. They took a team of two to Hong Kong. I turned 23 the day I moved, or about a month after I moved to Hong Kong. I moved over and started building up the business and spent the best part of seven years over there. So running sales, CS... Improvement strategy, marketing, everything, building up a business, built it to about $25 million. We opened in Australia. We opened in Tokyo. We opened in Beijing, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, Singapore. Hired people in those locations, bring them out to Hong Kong, incubate, and then open up the office. So then ran that region, which was a great big adventure.
And then by this stage, Meltwater was about $100, $120 million. ARR globally, and it had grown very quickly in all these disparate markets. And they wanted to start up a revenue operations function. I was asked to take that on. And the idea was to kind of herd the cats and bring the madness back and try and build some sort of central processes and central strategy and connectivity between all of the disparate offices around the world. So I moved back to London. This is when my first daughter was born. And I moved into a RevOps role. And that was kind of the journey from about $100 million, $120 million to about $450 million. So it's a big, exciting thing. Did lots of acquisitions and I was in the RevOps role, ultimately did the company public.
Big, big, big adventure. That is quite the journey and the international element there as well, right? It's so fascinating to experience all those different cultures, especially as you're building something new. That must have been really interesting.
I can't underestimate how important getting international experience is in a career. At one point, I also ran our San Francisco office for a little while as well in the middle of that thing. So I got some US experience too, but working and building out Asia Pacific was just so enjoyable. Just so many fun experiences. How do you hire an office in Delhi if you've never been to Delhi before, for example? There was just so many. We ended up with an office in an art gallery and a shopping mall. Yeah. which was fantastic and quirky, but also strange when everyone's working, sat on the phone, talking to customers and, you know, moms are pushing, you know, prams past the office window.
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