How Agiloft CEO Colin Earl grew to $71.4M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is colin earl he's a software industry veteran with 25 years of experience as a developer product manager and cio he worked at ibm general electric and three startups before founding agiloft it's they're a leader in contract life cycle management and they've been featured many times in the gartner magic quadrant conn are you ready to take us to the top sure so you first have to tell people what does that mean what does contract life cycle management mean it just refers to the creation and management of contracts typically contracts between b2b organizations and to kind of set the stage for this negotiating and agreeing upon one of these contracts can well cost well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars in attorney fees so it's it's not a small issue of course the entirety of business is focused around contracts and those define the relationships between between the companies now this is fun for me colin because the last time you came on was back in 2017 so you're one of my first interviews we're now almost 3 000 interviews in the world has changed significantly since when we last spoke so let's get through the updated story here what kinds of customers are paying you for your contract lifecycle management software organizations from the very largest enterprises down to a few smb companies there's a list of customers at our website but you know includes the likes of cdw chevron um right down to startups so colin you're going to hate this as an engineer but if i forced you if i forced you into an average what would you do the average customer is paying you per month uh we don't disclose that information uh but it is it's like let's say it's significant uh ranges from a million plus at the high end down to a few thousand at the low end so someone can get started on you guys for as little as you know a thousand two thousand dollars a month yeah and for someone that's paying one thing i want to understand is what's the difference between someone paying you two grand a month versus someone paying 100 grand a month what are you upselling against is it number of contracts number of seats something else it's primarily the number of seats there's also different versions of the software for example the higher end customers will typically use the api they may be using 24x7 support services etc are those the main two though it's support services and api frequency support services api frequency and of course the number of users yep yep now that all makes sense okay great and now this is a this is what you call sort of the slow growth story but still a great story you know this is something where you went and raised a bunch of capital and exploded overnight you launched this i believe in 1991 correct that's right yeah so so been going and pretty capital efficient i think how much have you raised to date we had a round of funding from ftv uh about a year ago until then we had no funding at all had grown purely through brute staffing and actually achieved number one ranking in the gartner magic quadrant at least in the enterprise critical enterprise capabilities report without having a penny of funding purely through bootstrapping now how many customers are you serving today i think in 2017 you said you're working without a thousand yeah um then the number is that a partial listing is available at our website there's about 500 companies listed at the site uh a number of organizations ask that we don't disclose their names or logos i'm not asking i'm not asking you to disclose the list of your customers i'm just trying to understand number of customers right this signifies if you're moving up market or moving down market based off the number at the top of your funnel so how many total customers are paying at least a dollar um but i won't answer that directly but i will say that growth over the past year in terms of new sales has been more than 50 percent um and the prior year was about 40 percent okay now when you say year over year 50 growth in new sales is do you consider up selling a current customer a new sale yeah um so it's actually it's more growth in revenue i should say yeah i got it so you you may not be adding a bunch of new customers but if you're expanding wallet share across the current base you can still get great revenue growth yeah um and of course we are adding a lot of new logos but we're also getting a lot of demand from the existing customer base i mean are is the general fees you know when hubspot went public they made a very intentional thing to say guys listen to the analysts our average rp is going to decrease we're going to open top of funnel we want a wider net we'll drive rpo expansion over time it's a very intentional decision what how are you guys thinking about customer growth over time are you happy with just maximum 2000 customers and driving wallet share and rpoos up or will you ever really open top of funnel and be have a self-service you know 100 a month tool we would we don't anticipate having a hundred dollar self-service tool and the reason for this is that angelaft was really designed to meet the needs of sizable enterprises organizations with complex requirements complex workflows demanding loads etc and that level of sophistication is necessitates a certain level of sophistication in the product itself um it just isn't a great fit for the extreme low end that makes sense what does the sales motion then look like today do you have a bunch of account executives calling into new accounts or you mainly have more heavy on csm customer success reps that are just driving expansion in the current base it's most it's not so much uh sales people calling into new accounts but newer new potential clients coming to us registering at the website and then getting a follow-up call from a product specialist or a sales specialist so how many people total are on the team today uh we we don't just disclose those numbers but as you can see from the linkedin profile in excess of 200. okay got it uh so over 200 and how many of those folks would you consider uh engineering in-house engineers about a quarter okay so pretty pretty heavy then at least 50 there are engineers and then do you are there any like functions you've decided to outsource because you feel like it was more effective for the business not so much functions means the number of services that we outsource yeah we don't run our own mail server for example we use the hosted version of microsoft exchange um we use aws for hosting abroad uh we offer hosting on aws in virginia as well yeah so whenever you can use and this is i think a general rule when there's a commoditized product out there that's best of breed and backed by you know significant organization like amazon or microsoft you're almost always better using that than than developing your own yep going back colin to the back straight it's rare you see a founder stay committed for almost 30 years so a pause to you uh to one to one startup here but do you remember can you take us back do you remember the year you passed a million dollar run rate yeah what year was that it was back in 80 i think it was 89. oh so you didn't know it was sorry it was not 89 2000 2001 it was it was quite a while um and the reason for this is that if you bootstrap an organization you have to develop some working capital and we developed that by providing consultancy services we then use that money to fund development of our first product and then use the money from that product to fund development of the agile off suite today so it takes a while um and if i had to do it again maybe i'd raise capital at the beginning now are you the sole founder or how many founders are there i'm the sole founder you are the sole founder okay so you kept 100 equity all the way up through the beginning of i guess 2019 2020. oh no um you know the equity was shared with the employees and you know i think it's part of the agile off culture that every employee gets some piece of equity and you know when we had the investment from fdv millions of dollars went to existing employers as well as of course a fair chunk to myself yep before we get to the ftb stuff because i do that was obviously a big decision you made in the life cycle of the business um there's a lot of bootstrap founders that listen to this show and one of the things they struggle with is when to set up that employee stock option pool or should they just stick with dividends right and and use free cash at the end of the year to incentivize them how did you make that decision when to set up and incentivize employees with equity pretty pretty much right from the beginning um yeah we wanted the one of the core tenets of agiloft is to align the self-interest of the company the employees and the customers and one of the ways that you align the self-interest of the company and the employers is by giving them a piece of it and so what was there again there's people listening here they want to learn from you right what percent did you decide on day one to reserve for you know employee option pool around about ten percent and and looking back would you do the same thing again where did you make it bigger smaller i think we'd do the same thing again okay got it so then over time really all the way up you know 20 30 years later you basically you know you own called 80 to 90 percent you use the option pool to incentivize key employees for another 10 percent and that was until ftp was really the first we'll call it outsider on your cap table then is that right well the the initial option pull was about 10 we expanded that option pool as the company grew so to walk me through that process why did you have to explain did you just find yourself you deployed the full ten percent and there was still great talent you wanted to go acquire so you need that exactly yeah yeah yeah so how did you think about expand like can you share so did you double it or triple it or what we we'd look well what you do is you look at what what will it take to make the company really attractive to a potential employee how many such folks do we anticipate hiring on before we get to the next level of revenue uh you know if if you're giving somebody say 0.1 of the company or 0.5 percent of the company that's very different if the company is at a you know revenue rather revenue of say 10 million dollars a year as opposed to one million dollars a year so the the size of the pool is dependent upon both the number of employees you're looking to hire and the level of seniority and the size of the company at the time that you hire them and yeah we we more than double the the the equity pool and then you obviously made capital decisions in 2020 with bringing ftv and can i ask how much equity you still own today um i'm still the largest shareholder good answer all right so you still own more than 50 um why did you make that decision why not sell a majority to ftv why did you want to keep more than 50 well i didn't keep to be clear i didn't keep more than 50 of the stock i'm the largest shareholder oh i see but you know there are there are other shareholders as employees there's ftv et cetera um and you know we bought in ftv because we felt it was time to accelerate the growth of the organization uh clm is an extraordinary and rapidly developing and evolving market and it's you know it's nice to take some cookies off the table how much of the 45 million was secondary enough that i don't have to worry about money [Music] that's more dependent on expenses than how much they take in secondary keep your expenses all you can live on nothing well yeah um you know and i don't have expensive tastes but you know it was it was nice to buy a nice house um i i'm delighted to say i now live in the house it was previously owned by the inventor of ldap oh wow very cool kind of very very cool that's that's that's incredible can i can i push you a little harder there was more than 50 percent of the 45 million secondary or less i i i i don't want to get those details um it's something that i wrote what i'll say is this the goal wasn't that i become wealthy if i simply wanted a ton of money then i'd have sold the company the goal was that i get enough money that the company can afford to expand rapidly and aggressively without my worrying about it so it gave us freedom to grow the sales organization to grow and expand the marketing organization well that was the only focus none of it would have been secondary right you took part secondary because you deserve to take part secondary you work hard for 20 years you bootstrap a business it makes sense the reason i pushed you on the question is because there's a lot of founders listening today that have boots dropped to five or 10 million and they're being approached by growth equity firms and trying to figure out how to negotiate what percent they should ask for for secondary versus keeping in the business right and what what i'd say is this is that if you want to grow a company rapidly as salesforce did it's you know one of the classic examples you have to be willing to go into the red because growth is expensive it is almost impossible to double revenue year over year without going into the red from a gap perspective and that's at least for me a very uncomfortable thing to do to you know and at a certain point you're going to run into cash flow issues so to do that you need to pull in investment capital you need to build the balance sheet but if you want to be comfortable doing it you also need to pull in enough secondary so that your retirement is taken care of yeah and that that i that is how i think about it or thought about it and how i recommend others think about it as well that's really helpful thanks for that rounding this out uh you know obviously you now have additional capital on the balance sheet to drive additional growth do you i mean do you see a clear path to breaking a 50 million run rate in the next 12 to 24 months that is that is certainly our goal yes does it feel reasonable or does it make you a little uncomfortable it feels like a stretch goal i think it's reasonable okay very cool yeah and the reason i ask 50 million instead of something else i take your you know more than a thousand customers today at around a 2 000 rpoo puts you at 3 million a month and annualize it's about 36 million if you keep growing at 50 to 60 percent year over year that gets to that 50 million here fairly rapidly right well one of you know one of the things that happens is when you get to a certain point you become well known in the market and we achieved that with both the number of customers and the gartner magic quadrant and then it begins to build in itself pretty rapidly getting to that point you know is is a lot tougher than exploiting it well yeah i mean it took you 10 i appreciate you sharing this but it took you 10 years to get to that million dollar run rate i believe correct yeah right so that's the grind that's that's that's what it's all about is the grind uh how long did it can i ask you how long it took you to get to 10 million run rate less than i was going to say less than half that time but yeah right about that so around about that would have been like 2015-ish yeah i'd say you know there was the other factor of course was that we transitioned from being a consulting organization to a product organization and as a product organization you can grow so much faster yep why weren't you able i mean so to call it 10 million in 2015 and now you're around like 30 or 40 million uh why were you able to like grow faster in that period did you just sort of hit a roadblock where you needed to bring in external capital to take some other experiments some other tests we would we would agiloft was focused on the platform uh because it's a no-code platform it allows you to build any enterprise application and one of the first applications we we focused on was service desk support yeah which is a large market but heavily saturated and it's much much harder to grow in that market than a relatively greenfield market like clm it was when we made the transition to focus on clm to put core development expertise into building the clm platform the growth really began to accelerate and now today with the additional capital and the expansion number you're seeing is your net dollar retention above 100 yes do you have a goal there or is that not important uh yeah well our goal is simply to make it as high as possible but getting it above and a hundred percent is a comfortable place to be and it's been above 100 for a number of years now yeah can you get i mean can this space can you get up to 120 130 which would be world-class compared to publicly traded sas companies um i i think so but i think it you know it it all depends upon the level of saturation you get with the initial sale in some instances people begin with a relatively small deployment for maybe one division of a multinational company and then they grow from there and of course you get extraordinary multiples if that's what happens if however you begin with a with an enterprise deployment across the entire organization you're only going to get incremental growth as the parent organization grows unless you develop new product lines to sell into different functional roles at that logo it does so you know and that's one of the things which is happening is that people having seen success with agile for clm are then looking to expand it for matter management case management etc are you building any new product lines outside of clm we're building adjacent applications to clm yep matter management case management are good examples closely tied to clm yeah yeah they've come their processes which involve contracts that involve negotiation and discussing between sites but they're not going to caught a clm itself evaluation is obviously a sensitive topic so i won't ask you what the valuation was when you worked with ftb you probably can't answer that but can i ask you in terms of the multiple against your ar was it more or less than a 10x multiple it was more than a 10x multiple okay got it like more than 20x multiple uh unfortunately not but maybe it should have been fair fair fare okay so between 10 and 20 x multiple that that's helpful let's wrap up khan with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book the tipping point number two it isn't strictly a business book but it's extraordinarily helpful number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah read hastings extraordinary guy number three what's your favorite online tool for building agiloft i don't really have an online tool for building agile life you know it's developers yeah number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night eight okay situation colin married single kids very happily married one kid one kid okay and how are you [Laughter] old enough to have gray hair i have gray hairs coming in now and i'm only 31. ah not as many of them look at me all right all right uh take us home to know something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i think i i think what i what i wish i'd known is that you really have to be if you want to make a difference in the world you have to be willing to reject the conventional wisdom you also have to be willing to look at the conventional wisdom and see where you can learn from it because there's yeah there's an entire history of learning background which has gone into that um but if you simply accept what people are telling you as being the gospel truth you're never going to be more than a wage worker guys a 30 year old overnight success story agiloff took them 10 years to boot you up to a million bucks in revenues they transitioned from an agency to a product company broke 10 million in terms of run rate in 2015. now they have over 1500 customers they are serving in the contract lifecycle management space with our team of 200 he decided last year in 2020 to go ahead and raise 45 million uh from a private equity firm ftv a portion of that went to incentivize and celebrate early employees who took equity early on and obviously porsche also went to calm but now they're doubling down on growth growing call it 40 to 60 percent year over year with plans to break that magical 50 million run right here in the next 12 to 24 months colin thanks so much for taking us to the top thank you nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what 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hello everyone my guest today is Colin Earl he's the CEO and founder of agile loft before the company he worked at IBM GE and startups as a developer product manager and CIO his vision was to dramatically boost the agility of business applications by removing the need for manual coding and the company has now become the market leader in no-code enterprise software Colin are you ready to take us to the top mr. Lyon alright market leader in no code enterprise software is a big title quantify that for me how do you know there's a very limited number of applications aren't there that a truly no code word we're leading away we were recently chosen by PC Magazine as providing the world's best contract management software and in the Infotech analysts award said that the angel of service best product was the market champion and best value you give me sense of IQ usage so how many folks do you have it using your suite of tools Wow in terms of companies we have something north of a thousand in terms of users well into the millions 2.5 well between 2.5 and 3 million at this point okay and give me more than backs right here so for people that are not familiar with the company what do you do when what your business models appear SAS yes it's it's pure SAS but we also allow in-house deployments so the vast majority run on our service for some such as the US Air Force and have a highly secure deployment run inside their own firewall on the secure network got it and walk me through some of the backstory here when did you launch the company hello's company back in 91 but the the no code application the agile off product that's a flagship these days was launched seven years ago okay and did you bootstrap the company or me raise capital bootstrap Joanie bootstrap that's great and where are you guys all Base Redwood City Silicon Valley very good my gosh so you've really resisted temptation you're in the lion's den and Eve managed to say bootstrap that's good stuff thank you why strategically did you make that decision the the proposition that we would be taking to VCS that we're going to be developing a product which will take in excess of five years to develop a full no code platform upon which it's possible to build enterprise class products and fight for a VC five years from initial investment to hello world not an IPO but the first product built on the platform is way too long and of course the VCS are calling us now that we've developed it but they tend to have a very short time frame we see enterprise software as being more like a marathon than a sprint and what making decisions based upon where we need to be and where our customers need to be five ten years from now endeavours again you mentioned the US Air Force and some other customers tell us that are actually using you wow that's a that's a pretty broad range calling to be fair that's like a fairly easy I mean that's like a business one-on-one thing right absolutely well let's take a couple of examples and Roche has contracts with hospitals with suppliers and those contracts are not just a paper contract they're living documents they're living documents which reply imply an obligation on the part of the customer to buy a certain quantity of drugs reagents each month and for the supplier Roche to provide service and maintenance and those machines so you know this is a way away from a simple purchase contract it's a living interactive document and back end supply chain management to ensure that all parties meet their obligations that's one example so you're like it just to be clear that's like it's like an enterprise secure version of DocuSign it's an enterprise of your version of a living contract documents just a signature part let's take another example chevron chevron needs to comply with the sarbanes-oxley requirements that in turn requires auditability it requires a mechanism for tracking how chevron how each individual in the company is addressing those requirements again managed throughout aloft take Cal Poly they have hundreds of thousands of students those students need to be provisioned with services they need to be able to make requests they need to be able to manage their assets again like computers they're renting and desks sir exactly computers access for laptops access to online trainings access to security codes to get into their dormitory Carl this seems like you cover so many differents like so many spaces how many people on your team we we don't disclose numbers but I can't say that we have more than 50 and less than 250 employees why do you disclose employee counts out of curiosity it's it's just standard practice for private businesses well I would actually argue with that we've had about 3,000 BB SAS to use on the show and almost everyone shares their employee count but there's a reason you're not doing it I'm curious like is it a competitive thing or you know if you're picking off employees or we don't work we don't want people pick you off employees and we don't well really what we're doing is we're not disclosing financials yeah that's why I'm saying so how does employee count tighter financials well you can you can set you can estimate for example that each employee fully-loaded is going to cost you between a hundred thousand two hundred and two hundred thousand dollars we're profitable if we if we stated were profitable and we have 52 employees you'd be able to put a pretty good range on our revenue if we profitable and we have 220 employees that also puts a pretty clear number on what our revenue is and we just don't disclose that okay so basically basically what you've just told me that you said between 50 and 250 you gave me kind of your assumptions you are using which may or may not be at board of companies around the world but you basically just said I could multiply 50 employees times 100 to 150 all in and then a high range is up 250 employees at 100 with Ulen and say you're doing somewhere between five and twenty five million annual revenue so you've given us a big vague range is that accurate yes yeah and I'll just say what a fair way beyond five million or you know seven digits were into eight digits that's great yeah so you're about so you're between ten and twenty five million that's wonderful yeah really between 10 and 50 but yes 10 and 50 what that's wonderful so tell me more about I mean are you only serving these enterprise folks or do you have kind of men markedness and bees using you as well no actually that that's one of the things I'm proudest about is that we serve the SMB market as well the same code that provides sarbanes-oxley compliance for one of the mods world's largest and most sophisticated company is the same code that's being used by 20 persons farter to manage the distribution of organics lunches to school kids in Marin so yeah it really runs the gamut now that said the majority of our customers are between 250 and 500 phones and employers on at me is a better question on average what's the average customer panyu per month are we talking $1 or million dollars the average customers paying us you know in the order of $1,000 per month okay the average deal size is about $45,000 a year no for the initial implementation plus the first year of service okay got it so you have that kind of a setup that you do do any on-prem stuff or no we occasionally we'll go on Prem to set up but the vast majority we just do over the web okay so you split that split that first your ACB down for me it's 45 grand what percentage that is going to setup versus just paying the 12-month contract all right it depends but typically in the order of $20,000 for the set up maybe $25,000 for the set up and then 10 to $15,000 per year makes a lot of sense I imagine with that kind of setup fee that really enables your customer onboarding team and the rest your team to only focus on real meaningful customers and your churn is probably super low because of that that fee is that accurate and if so what does your annual retention look like uh it is certainly accurate and your retention and it depends upon whether you look at the customer count or the seat count in terms of customers it's about ninety four percent in terms of a logo retention or a revenue retention logo retention in terms of revenue retention it's over a hundred percent because the the existing customers purchase more than enough seats to make up from the Baker the drop-off from the from the customers that we lose yeah so said differently you are very much in the net negative revenue churn range yes yes makes a lot of sense where are you finding these new customers how are you closing new deals that coming to our website they're coming to our website saying we have a need can you provide a solution how do they find your website going through exit well for example if you type contract management software on the first page of Google it'll bring up the PC magazine review of contract management systems and as the editors choice number one in that review a lot of people come to us through that others come through the review sites like kaptara G to craft trust radius and I'm pleased to say that we are the most highly praised in those reviews now these guys their business model is you can pay for placement do you pay kaptara or G to crowd anything I we pay in some categories we're paying for placement in in the list and in other categories were not got it you know I just brought up by the way this PC review yeah you guys are at number one then you have kind of updraft Concord on it contracts eight coop contract works a lot of these other guys so yeah that placement I can easily I can see where that drives you guys a ton of traffic it does yes yeah I'm interesting so are you spending anything oh I guess you are a little bit for categories you're not in but in a given month what is like a total now you're spending on paid acquisition only it varies but typically something the order of 30 to $50,000 a month so not actually fairly small as a percentage of your total revenue yeah yep and are you spending that in any other places besides these review sites let me think no another present okay and when you look at your sales and onboarding team plus you're paid spend in total what are you paying or what are you willing to pay for cap customer acquisition cost what willing to pay in total something in the order of six man months over six months worth of revenue SAS revenue from that customer which is about six grand could you tell me ARPU earlier was a grand yeah yep and and walk me through more the reasoning teach us a lesson there why six men why six months of revenue six months of revenue and shows that were profitable in the first year now the norm in the SAS business incidentally is to be willing to pay up to 12 months of revenue but we have a problem we can't hire people fast enough to address existing customer demand we're growing at over 40% per year and we're based in Silicon Valley in terms of revenue by the way our logos revenue it is simply a nightmare hiring smart qualified people in the valley we don't need programmers we just need people who have attention to detail and natural intelligence war intelligence and even there it's really tough to find the caliber of an individual that we need so we're spend it were deliberately spending less on sale marketing and sales than we could because if we were to spend significantly more we wouldn't be able to meet demand we wouldn't be able to blow the implementation services to get to make those customers live and happy and to be clear if you had a 12-month payback period and you were growing fast adding loads of new customers every month you would run into a cash cow problem since yourself I mean since your you haven't raised money you have to keep that pretty tight well actually we've accumulated several million dollars in in cash so no we would be good on that front got it okay good that's totally fair what do you sue my time value is of one of your customers in the well it is there's a wide range and we have as I say we have customers whose bill value ranges between 20,000 and 1.8 million dollars that's one year contract that's that's one year contract lasts the initial implementation so the lifetime value is typically in the order of half a million to a million dollars well Colin last time I checked that math works if you can put six grand in an ATM and spit out half a million over the first couple years of a customer's life you use an ATM all day long well bear in mind it's not the first couple of years its lifetime value for us is typically in excess of ten years got it and your I mean you look beyond the sample size to do it you launched in 1991 right yeah all right give me some of the back for Europe again sir 1991 you launched do you remember and your first year revenue no but it was a one-man shop at that point and another branch oh yeah lucky less less than a hundred Rand and fast-forward us I'll do every decade here so fast forward to like December 20 2000 you member what your run rate was then I I don't about I'm gonna have to cut you off on that because I simply don't have those numbers but what I what I could what I could do is I could I could if you look at our revenue over the past seven years it's shown a really startling rise we've been we've been increasing revenue at thirty to forty percent per year for the past seven years so you know if you if you were to take a seven digit number excuse me an eight digit number in the area of you know 10 to 50 million and tract from there as you know given 30 to 40% per year you'd be more or less where we were seven years ago got it we're very close to the end of 2017 I assume you throw based off that shirt you're wearing a wildly fun holiday party at the holiday parties what are you guys toasting to do you think you break 30 million in a are like what's a stretch goal but it's still a little uncomfortable we have we have some deals in hand which if was if we're successful in landing them taking them through to completion will represent in excess of 50 million dollars in revenue over whether for three four or five year contracts kind of thing yeah but that's for one individual such deal yeah well so tell me I mean your pipeline is what would I hear you're you saying is you pipelines very very healthy but do you I mean do you think by the end of this year you'll break the kind of magical thirty million dollar like actual closed runway mark I'm not going around so that I'm just keeping my fingers crossed all right Colin good stuff let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book probably kept crossing the chasm Jeffrey Moore it's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now no number three beside and I say no because there are several CEOs that I'm following maybe one that's not a normal like not a mainstream one no they're all mainstream okay there's no like I'm talking like Elon Musk Steve Jobs maybe someone someone might not have heard of before I'm not asking you for your favor by the way I'm asking is for educational purposes from my audience if they want to go learn from someone who's no sorry if they want to go learn from somebody the the one that I recommend above all else is Peter Drucker Peter Drucker Peter Drucker he wrote a number of management books and the beauty of these books is that they're brutal this to the point they're direct that entirely free of fluff and they're actionable there are you know there are other books which inspiring the Tom Peters books for example are inspiring but the folks who've tried to put those books into practice have struggled because that not actionable and they're more to do with getting you pumped up and enthused on the rest of it than in actually executing a business strategy ami Peter Drucker was superb for the latter all right Peter number three are quick answers here cuz we're almost at a time what is besides your on what's your favorite online tool / alright number four how many obviously to get every night seven right that's pretty good in what's your situation married single yeah kiddos very happily married for the past twenty years Wow and how many kids just one just one kid oh okay how old are you callin I'm less than sixty but not that much [Music] fifty nine are in that range less than sixty my net though alright Colin last question take us back 20 or sorry thirty nine years what do you is your twenty year old self new wow that's a good question um first trust in your instincts don't believe you don't believe them when they say it can't be done lastly be humble those especially these days there's so much knowledge out there on the Internet any question can be addressed any of any any any business question that you have can be found through research on the net what it requires though is the willingness to look at that answer look at a range of other answers to that same question and determine based on your circumstances your intuition and your knowledge which is right and nine times out of ten the one that's right is the one that is actionable to the point and lacking in fluff that you know that acknowledges that people are far from perfect and that includes yourself that's a good card I'm actually one last question here you go home tonight for dinner and you got to look your wife in the face she's sitting across the table from you and say honey today I turned on an acquisition offer for half a billion dollars what is her reaction sure let me let me ask that differently would you if Larry Ellison writes you a $509 check to acquire the company do you sell you know that question comes up a fair bit because obviously I'm not gonna be here in another twenty or thirty years and here's the honest answer it depends upon who's offering the check a check from an organization that I admire that treats its employees well that it's going to grow the business expand to new frontiers and can do a better job of growing the organization that I do then I can I'll take a serious look at that a check from an organization and there's a lot of them out there which are known from essentially strip-mining businesses buying it for no more than the customer base replacing the employees with low-cost alternatives will just keep it running for a few years as the money flows in that I probably wouldn't consider very goes out from collet be humble stay focused and never believe anyone that tells you it cannot be done he launched his company almost gone you're gonna hate me for this almost the year I was born in 1992 maybe one he's now well over a thousand customers millions of seeds doing somewhere between call it 10 and 30 million dollars annually maybe he breaks that healthy healthy annual retention over 94 percent willing to spend six grand to acquire a customer because they're worth over 500 grand to them in the long run he's spending very little on paid opposition each month less than 50 grand his team is between 50 and turning 50 people out there in Redwood City focused on building no code software Colin thank you for taking us to the top Thank You Nathan