vFairs Went From $1.6M to $17.2M in One Pandemic Year, Then Flat at $30M — So Its CRO Raised ACV 60%
vFairs 10x’d revenue in the pandemic year on inbound alone, bootstrapped, then stalled near $30M once events went back in person. Its CRO’s answer was deal size, not demand.
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The most useful sentence on this tape is one a prospect said to a vFairs salesperson, repeated back by the man hired to fix it. Michael Burns had been Chief Revenue Officer for about four months and had gone hunting for the real reason deals were dying, and it was this: “We’re going back to in person events and you guys have branded yourself so well as a virtual platform that I do not even know that you could do anything but…” vFairs had won the pandemic so completely that winning it became the objection.
The numbers around that sentence are unusual. vFairs has never raised money — GetLatka’s funding record shows $0 across the company’s history — and its revenue went from $1.6M recorded December 2019 to $17.2M recorded December 2020, a 10x year built on inbound nobody had to go create. Then the world reopened and the same message that produced the boom started losing deals.
Which tape this is matters, because GetLatka’s catalog holds six vFairs interviews spanning September 2018 to September 2024. This one is not a Latka one-on-one: it is Burns on a conference stage, opening with “kind of interesting to have a really, really deep tactical sales conversation on the finance stage,” and it is filed as “How to turn your sales playbook into a revenue machine that adds $Xm in new ARR per quarter.” The record dates it to March 2023; the video went up on YouTube on October 19, 2023. The content agrees with March: Burns says he joined “in November,” points at “the little bump there in Q1,” and says vFairs took G2’s event-management grid “over the past three months.”
The 10x year, and the three flat ones after it
GetLatka’s dated rows tell the arc without commentary: $700K in September 2018, $1.6M in December 2019, $17.2M in December 2020, $25.03M in November 2021, $30.5M in November 2022, $31.6M in December 2023 and $30M in September 2024. None of the seven is flagged as an estimate.
Burns describes the same shape from the inside. vFairs began as a virtual job-fair product inside its parent company Bayt.com, the largest job board in the Middle East, until its founder concluded it was “really a company, not a product.” Growth after the spin-out was, in his words, “relatively modest” — and then the pandemic hit. “People were running events like this. They couldn’t do it in person anymore. Their hair is on fire and they had to go somewhere,” he said — and vFairs, on his account and G2’s ratings, had the best virtual platform on the planet.
The inbound just went off the charts, which is fantastic until it’s not fantastic anymore, right. And things kind of come back to normal.
Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer, vFairs
He had seen the pattern before. His own 2006 startup “grew super fast from 2006 to 2008 and then super not fast for the next couple of years,” which he calls the lesson that taught him to pivot and deploy a playbook. Since exiting that business in 2015 he has worked scale-ups rather than startups: a martech and adtech company taken from $50M to $80M in a year, an event-technology company taken from $20M to about $100M in two years, a litigation-services company whose revenue doubled inside a quarter.
- 2016 · Spin-out The virtual job-fair product leaves Bayt.com as its own company; GetLatka’s record dates the founding to 2016.
- Mar 2020 · 45 staff The headcount row on the eve of the boom, with six engineers.
- Jan 2021 · 207 staff Headcount more than quadruples inside the year the inbound went off the charts.
- Jul 2021 · $500M offer An M&A offer recorded at a $500M valuation, turned down.
- Nov 2022 · New CRO Burns arrives with one instruction: we need to grow.
- Q1 2023 · The grid vFairs takes over G2’s event-management grid; ACV up 60%.
That $500M is the figure to handle carefully. It is not a priced round and not an investor mark, because vFairs has never taken outside money. GetLatka’s funding table carries exactly one row for the company: an M&A offer collected July 15, 2021, valuing it at $500M, and the Latka interview recorded that same day is titled “vFairs Breaks $30m ARR bootstrapped, turns down $500m Offer.” GetLatka’s own modelled valuation for vFairs is $225M, and that one is explicitly an estimate.
“No value” was the biggest closed-lost reason
Burns’s diagnostic started with a sensitivity analysis of every conversion rate in the funnel — lead acquisition down to churn, renewal and expansion — rebuilt rep by rep. With a sales team of about 19 people at the end of 2022, that was tractable. The point was not activity policing: “Not because I care how many calls they make, right? I’m not about the micro KPIs, but I want them to know what a brute force approach would look like if they needed to take it in terms of conversions.”
The second thing he found was a CRM describing a mood rather than a process. The deal stages he inherited included one called demo highly interested, and when he asked what evidence sat behind it, the answer was that the prospects had seemed keen.
It’s like, no, no, they really seemed interested. And it’s like, okay, so we’re saying that we closed 40% of people that you think are interested.
Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer, vFairs
The reps were often right — Burns calls it “a lot of unconscious competency” — but a stage that captures a feeling captures no risk. The bigger hole was in the closed-lost data, where the most common reason on file was “no value”: “I had many a night in the late days of Q4 scratching my head saying, what is the no value?” So he went to the calls, listening to Gong recordings, because the system of record was never going to answer it.
The CRM is not going to tell you the skinny, right? The CRM is going to tell you what the salesperson bothered to put in.
Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer, vFairs
A platform that had sold itself as a point solution
The correction was a positioning problem, not a demand problem. What the calls revealed was that buyers moving back to in-person events had ruled vFairs out before the first meeting, on the strength of its own marketing. Burns was explicit that fixing it required no new software — he did not go to the CTO or the Chief Product Officer asking anyone to build anything.
He put a number on how well the old message had worked. The pitch full of 3D environments and features was “amazing,” he said, and it “grossed to 40,000,000 in a heartbeat” — “but it made us into a point solution.” That $40M does not reconcile with GetLatka’s dated rows, which peak at $31.6M in December 2023, and the tape never defines what was being grossed or over what period. Read it as his round number for the boom rather than as an annual run rate. Both figures are in this post; only one of them has a date behind it.
The reposition was a repackaging of what already existed: take the same software, map it onto the customer’s actual event workflow, and sell the workflow.
A discrete single-event licence, sold on 3D environments and features, more service engagement than software subscription — and renewed one event at a time, if at all.
The same product framed as how an organisation runs all of its events, sold into the enterprise as annual and multi-year contracts. In Burns’s phrase, “proper SaaS.”
The lever math
Volume and velocity were gone, so he pulled size
This is the part of the tape that generalises past events software. Burns walks through the four things a revenue leader can push on and rules two of them out by the state of the market rather than by preference.
So for me, volume is not a lever I’m going to pull. Demand is not what it was. Velocity is not a lever I’m going to pull because the buying cycle is longer. Size is.
Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer, vFairs
- Volume — unavailable; the inbound flood that built the company had receded.
- Velocity — unavailable; buying cycles had lengthened with the economy.
- Deal size — available, because a workflow sold to an entire enterprise carries a bigger annual contract value than a single event licence.
- Close rate — available, because selling to objectives lifts win rates at the same time it lifts deal size.
By the talk, that was the visible result: “We have so far increased ACV by 60%.” The other half of the platform argument shows up on the profile record, which carries no dates on its rates, so treat these as latest-known rather than as-of any month: 1,250 customers, 20% gross churn and 60% expansion revenue on the vFairs GetLatka profile. Expansion running three times gross churn is what selling a workflow looks like from the outside.
Sell to objectives, not pain
The messaging change had a mirror inside the sales methodology. Burns rolled out a relabelled version of MEDDPICC he calls CO-IMPACT, and he is candid that the novelty is the point: “This is not genius. This is nothing different than MEDDPICC.” The reason to rename it is that reps who think they already know an acronym stop thinking. “It’s a different acronym and it forces people to learn different words and therefore engages their critical thinking skills.”
The substantive change sits in the qualification step. Teams are usually taught to find pain and sell to it. In a market where budget holders are saying no to software, Burns argues pain is exactly what buyers have decided to live with.
Look, no one’s going to care about pain points right now, but everybody needs to hit goals.
Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer, vFairs
Not company objectives or vanity metrics, he adds — “what’s going to get that guy a bonus.” The questioning ladder he teaches to get there is the frog-in-boiling-water sequence: start where the buyer is comfortable and warm it up.
- Strategy. Open on what the buyer likes talking about, which is themselves and their goals.
- Tactics. Move to how they intend to hit those goals this year.
- Gaps. Only then name where the plan is exposed, and how vFairs de-risks it or gets them there quicker.
None of it survives on a slide. Burns spent his first months teaching line managers to stress-test deals against the methodology and sitting in pipeline meetings himself, on the theory that “you can’t drive performance through spreadsheets.” The output was a 17-page internal document he calls the eye chart, the thing that turns a working playbook into an onboarding process.
What the rows say happened next
The stage results were real: the G2 grid vFairs was not on three months earlier, ACV up 60%, deal stages that describe the field, a repeatable onboarding path. The dated rows after the talk are flat all the same — $31.6M in December 2023, $30M in September 2024, with GetLatka’s profile recording growth of about -5%. Headcount kept climbing across the same stretch, 222 in December 2023 to 256 in October 2024. Whatever the playbook bought, it was not a second 10x, and nothing on the tape promises one. What it bought is the thing a post-boom company actually needs: a written reason for every win and every loss.
The most honest moment on the tape is what he told the reps in the window when he had the diagnosis but not yet the fix.
Look, you’re facing adversity in the market, right? People are going back to in person events. We were virtual, right? We need to remessage and reposition. But until we figure that out, here’s the way to brute force it, right? So you could hit your target and you could feed your family.
Michael Burns, Chief Revenue Officer, vFairs
SourcesMichael Burns’s March 2023 conference talk for vFairs, filed by GetLatka as “How to turn your sales playbook into a revenue machine that adds $Xm in new ARR per quarter” and uploaded to YouTube October 19, 2023; GetLatka’s dated revenue, headcount and funding rows for vFairs, September 2018 through October 2024; the July 15, 2021 vFairs interview titled “vFairs Breaks $30m ARR bootstrapped, turns down $500m Offer” for the M&A offer; the vFairs GetLatka profile for the undated customer, churn and expansion figures.
