How Agendrix CEO Charles Vallières grew Agendrix to $10.6M revenue and 4.2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is sebastian charlotte he's a cro and partner at egendrix a workforce management sas based in sherbrooke canada where he oversees the finance and cs teams with a customer base of over 40 4150 customers he holds an mba in cpa and joined his childhood friends in the company back in 2016. sebastian you ready to take us to the top yes thanks for having me all right why were you late to the party how many how many months or years or weeks were your friends coding this before you joined approximately a year year and a half maybe um my friends basically had a web uh service company where they would develop apps for for customers and the initial founder of agendrix was one so it was a service company before and they eventually merged with agendrix and following that and the first revenues i jumped in quit my job and joined them when did um what year did the company launch uh official years 2015 2015 and did the agency shut down or is the agency still going today no they shut it down and they moved all the employees with a big total of five people uh with the new product uh agendex do you remember how much revenue the agency did the year before they shut it down uh i believe like half a million dollars okay so not hard to shut down yeah so small but yeah it was their first year into their credit yep shut down and move to sas interesting um and how were you friends with him did you work with him at the agency or high school or what uh elementary school in high school so the cmo was my high school friend and uh ceo today but who was back then one of our developers was in elementary school since i was like i think five years old well this is relevant you know a lot of people listening right now have a company they launched then one of their friends joins like a year later and they're not sure how to do equity right because they're a year late so without like you know share what you can but like how much equity do you own how do you think about that yeah right now i own about say rounded ten percent of the company um we are five partners and then the other half is uh basically financial institutions who jumped with us to buy back the president you know the initial founder of agendrix who was older and who retired last year in 2021 and so they helped us buy him back but back then the company when i joined uh i had more like salary than the company had revenues and so the valuation was just off the roof uh i think it was like a hundred times mr or something like that whatever the number was what and so what was the actual evaluation what year uh that was in 2016 when i joined and i think the valuation was perhaps three million dollars almost and the company was doing thirty thousand dollars ar so you see where i'm going so i didn't get a lot of shares yeah yeah with the buyback we had a split equity and a debt deal which allowed us to buy back some shares and just sell some to uh to to the banks but there was no growth capital inflow it was just like to buy back the shares mm-hmm so this is something that uh back in 2016 valuation was about 3 million when you guys are doing 30 000 a month in revenue yeah interesting okay and so and so how much did you need to raise like what was the raise to go buy out the older guy uh i cannot disclose the numbers to this day in 2021 but um let's say it wasn't that far above that number um it was oh actually that's that's a that's a public number but in total we raised about three million dollars to buy everything back wait so you raised three million out of 3 million valuations so you sold 50 of the business to new investors yeah sorry so the split today is about yeah and this is going this is getting messy so back in 2016 we didn't have financial institutions it was almost only the five young guys if you want plus andre was the founder oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you wanna check this tool out if you wanna jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview now fast forward in 2021 when he wants to retire um financial institutions came in and basically bought directly half his shares and lend us uh gave us like a um a loan to buy back his own shares and just buy them back in you know cancel the shares but this was last year that was last year oh i see and so then the valuation was three million uh four years prior five years prior back in 2016. exactly i see i see okay very cool let's talk more about the product it's a very cool product tell me who's buying it and how are they using it yeah so we're a b2b mainly company um or workforce software so we basically sell to retail companies restaurants um a lot in the care system right now security companies um elderly residences all that kind of stuff that we want to manage their workforce the schedules the time attendance um communications and we're going and moving into hr as well for onboarding uh kudos we write rewriting and that kind of stuff and how much do these customers pay on average per month to use the technology uh so in usd right now our acv is eleven hundred dollars uh so if you divide that by twelve it would give you roughly ninety ninety two dollars that was december but uh yeah yeah no you're good and then in your bio you said 4150 paying customers right yeah okay so that puts your mrr about 381 000 a month pretty much in usd yes this is going this has just increased because we had a price increase in january 2022 inflation you know but yeah roughly i'll ask more about the price increase in a second because that's a big move in your cro so i think you're probably the right guy to ask that question um but talk to me about growth rate if you're doing 381 000 today what were you doing exactly a year ago uh roughly 2 million and 65 okay so 2.65 million sorry so that's about 46 uh year-over-year growth in ar yep yep so divide that by 12 right so you're doing about 220 000 a month a year ago correct 381 yeah got it okay um and what's driving like where are you getting new customers from what's driving the growth um so geographically speaking geographically speaking uh canada quebec to the french part and our second largest market is the european um in europe but it's the french speaking parts so france belgium and switzerland we voluntarily decided to focus on french markets uh they were a bit less crowded than the us or english-speaking markets because of our largest world competitors and there are some [Music] some work laws and labor laws which are very specific to different regions especially the french speak speaking ones where we uh we have less competitors and and grow better and then in terms of funding history is it have you just raised the the round you did last year to buy out the early founder and um and put up operating capital business already have rounds before that we did actually only one round and was in 2016...