How Aida Soft CEO Joe Long grew to $120K revenue and 60 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is joe long he's a serial entrepreneur cfo ceo ceo for various companies the secret sauce is fixing adjusting smbs for operational efficiency and building perpetual motion teams he's had four years in the air force 30 years and around silicon valley and now is focused on certain industries like manufacturing i.t staffing companies with installers who are actually in the field he does this via adasoft.net his erp software for flooring companies joe you ready to take us to the top i am all right did i get that right adasoft is your software company that's right yep all right endosoft is uh software i started building three years ago actually that's amazing okay so where did you get the idea from so 2009 i worked for a flooring company and uh i started in it early on but the flooring company had some really antiquated software 40 years old started in the 80s and i thought well we can do better than this so we built some tools with excel built some tools with access and then i left the company so i kind of let it go fast forward to 2018 2019 i found myself back with that uh same group different flooring company still using the same software so i went out looked at the right four main competitors uh in the flooring industry and it's niche so everyone built the software uh who ran a flooring company and then yeah go ahead no that's great i'm just laughing this is a great story who are the other three so called q floor who else so there's rfms role master and those two recently got bought out so they got bought out by larger companies that are packaging different uh different types of flooring coffee floors one of the independents left there's another called q floors but all of them were started by floor professionals who just needed a better software way back when so they started in the 80s in the 90s i think q4s was the most recent but all of them you know they're built on old sql databases and they've all tried to put a new front end on it didn't work out so copy floor is actually failing uh in its transaction so the inventory isn't accurate things like that so i said well i'm going to go ahead and build it now that i have the time and resources and you're an engineer are you self-taught no actually i'm not i got into the it world uh funny story back in the air force right and when i got out i found out all of my technology was outdated so i went into accounting because i could still use computers still play with excel still play with little bits of code i'm not a coder by any stretch um you know i learned cobalt fortran and basic way back when so i hope you can keep up with so joe how do you how do you get the idp bill you start coding us three years ago how do you get the mvp up right so what i am good at is building a database so i built the sql database designed it built the flows around it and then i outsourced everything so i think i mentioned uh when i emailed you that on a one-man show in terms of that everything else is contracted everything else is outsourced and i think i'm gonna keep it that way for a while i love that so how many people last month did you pay at least a dollar to do some kind of task for you and adasoft sixty six okay okay give us a little bit of flavor of what they do right so uh it's a team out of india it's a company called flexsin and ceo logistics f-l-e-x s-i-n and c-o-logistics so they've done a great job for me i just contacted and looked at the reviews way back when and uh they started working with me over time within the budget that i had yeah which was what what was the budget well it was uh about ten thousand dollars a month to begin with and then it floated up to about twenty twenty five thousand dollars a month and now we're just kind of putting icing on the cake and you know we're down to around ten thousand dollars a month all right so how much have you sunk in so far your own money uh about 320 000 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 going to 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 going to 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 of 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 founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to 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 so how did people are going to go wait how's this guy rich already did you have some big eggs in your past or just savings or what right so throughout all this time uh from 2015 forward i actually restarted a business that i had started during the internet boom back in 98 to 2002. it was called q associates and q associates with an agency right we did staffing and consulting and the secret sauce is i do what other companies don't do well for themselves that's the small and medium-sized businesses so maybe they're really good at manufacturing maybe they're really good at installing floors but they're not really good at accounting i.t you know hr payroll so i come in i smooth those out i train people i set up teams and that's kind of the secret sauce one time and they're helping i might say well i'll force your accounting to me outsource your recharge again so you make money over there consulting right right so that business is uh more or less evaporated during tobin right because everything's staffed and uh everyone wanted the ppp money so i was able to hang on to them and get some ppp money which also helped uh to build this software that's wild also so what are they yeah oh sorry we're cutting each other off i apologize but you move back into off then once you get going you start putting it three years ago help me understand today what's the product and what are customers paying out on average per month for it right so it's an end-to-end erp system so from sales to cash right all the way through handles inventory accounting finance scheduling labor rates whole nine yards for for installer companies with installers in the field it's primarily designed for flooring right now but it can easily be applied to landscaping or you know electricians whoever has bands in the field to keep track of so the uh rate per user 169 dollars and uh you know our first customer here has about 60 users so right out of the gate uh we're you know we're in pretty good shape so wait come on you gotta explain so you gotta explain that how do you land as your first customer someone that's gonna pay you 60 seats times 170 bucks a seat or about 10 km or r i happen to be the ceo with that company so you control the budget this is insider trading right well yeah i don't get to choose whether they accept it but the fact that copyfloor is failing so badly and can't keep track of the finances it makes it really easy for me so literally copyfloor is failing across its entire customer base they've had three project managers who've left over the last 18 months lead programmer left so they've uh they're struggling so you know it's a ready-made market for me and i don't mind sharing that because i'm first to the egg when do you say when do you i mean doesn't eventually doesn't assault start growing so fast that you have to leave that other company in the ceo role or no potentially yeah yeah i mean i've got a team of people around who are willing to work as a contract basis so i was also the cfo of an itc it company that did oracle implementations so i'm very familiar with the oracle database environment they did implementations they did upgrades worldwide so they were global organizations so i've got contacts around the world who are willing to you know jump in do an implementation or you know talk to customers if need be about you know what works for their database so i've got a lot of outsourcing capabilities yeah that makes a lot of sense okay so so give me a flavor just because my audience doesn't necessarily know what flooring installation what sort of like looks like right so when you say 60 people bought a seat at the company what are the job titles or some of those 60 people so customer service they have case management where they take installer calls in the field accounting hr payroll the operations group who runs the warehouse and the inventory does the scheduling for the installers so they've got uh three locations um you know they're one of the top 100 flooring companies in the us uh and measured measured by what like square feet of flooring installed per year oh revenue okay no revenue yeah yeah so there's a huge one in the midwest uh the big daddy that's private anyway not the sherwin williams of the world but who is it who's the biggest one where are they doing revenue america's america's floor source and he's he's well over 100 million his name is jason goldberg he's profitable he's a yeah yeah i went out and visited their uh their place and yeah he runs a tight operation so what software does he use coffee floor okay you already signed him up he will be that's awesome what what would you give him uh well they're they're on compu floor and then they they augment it with an access database so you know they they've done a lot of work around there and really this is the story with every compu floor shop right there there's gonna be a copy floor shop probably in every major market i know of about 10 customers right now that i'll i'll be talking with or you know putting in the pipeline two of them are there i'm already in conversation compufor's revenue you think you know i tried to find that out i've heard two numbers so i talked to one of the project managers when he left and uh you know he didn't want to give up a lot of information he's just gone two months but i got the idea that they had 250 to 350 customers uh problem that that they did you know they didn't take a sas model they have they were all on prem way back when so they they've taken the on-prem and they're trying to make a sas model and instead of reinventing the whole thing they just slapped a front end on top of their database and it doesn't work well interesting but so what do you think their revenue is like 10 million a year if that yeah i mean you know it they have a layered approach so this company pays approximately what they pay for asoft right that's they're running the same thing ten thousand dollars a month or so uh but compuller charges them eight hundred dollars just to create a license just to create a license and you know just selling points like that or a slam dunk why would you pay 800 to create a user yeah so why not yeah i'd say there's a neighborhood of four or five million yeah i guess you know what i'm thinking a lot about like how i want to spend the rest of my life and what i'm what i'm realizing is like you know i've seen enough like sales sas tools and marketing sas tools and selling to other sas companies i love these sort of niche tools that are doing five to ten million a month especially on-prem trying to move to sas you know i should just team up and go buy this thing oh you know what i floated that idea to them they ignored me so it's run by a 70-odd year old guy who's a bit of a kingpin that's why the employees cite that they leave because he's too dictatorial he won't shake it loose he's got a son who's been trying to you know drag it into the future as i understand it i've talked to him a couple of times but uh yeah you know by the by the user base right that's what role master role master got bought by broad loom and they're not really changing they're talking about rolling out you know an erp system in a year or two but they've just taken the same on-prem windows based software that looks like it's from the 1990s and they package it with a couple of other things same with rfms rfms just bought by 2020 com something group uh so you don't think this guy will sell you don't think he's willing to sell he'll be pretty motivated as soon as the dominoes start yeah i think yeah yeah you know i thought about going to role master and rfms and telling the same thing it's like look guys give me your customer base i'll you know whatever your profit is i'm sure i can match that yeah well so what are you at right now 60 11 kmr is that total today yeah that's right and nothing a year ago right that's right yeah okay so this just this just uh just rolled out the pain yep so what do you think you'll get this year total mri like december this year i think for the next two months we're going to perfect it here because once you have this reference here the others will just fall in so i'd say you know by june they'll probably be 10 and that's just you know a matter of a rate of implementation that you can do this and get everything acclimated but after that you know when you've got two or three references they'll be calling just trying to get a sense of marketing trying to get a sense of if you're a killer or not right if you sense this is a big space like if and you you want to go after like are you willing to do whatever it takes to go sign up these users because this just feels like to me like there's only 500 potential clients in the us you know they only have a max of 100 seats of pops there's only 50 000 seats you can sign up at 170 bucks a month like let's go freaking win them yeah so you notice in my bio one of my things to create perpetual motion machine perpetual motion teams what i mean by that is you set up a crew of people and you turn them loose right you got a person who's sailing and putting them into the pipeline and then you got a team that goes out and implements i don't have to be in on that like i am now right i'm the subject matter expert i'm the guy who can close it i know the industry but once the industry has references you can create these teams and send them off to do this you know one after another because copyfloor isn't the business isn't uh complicated the erp system isn't necessarily complicated compared to a net suite or an oracle so it's really lift and shift plug and play you can probably implement inside of a week so you know put these teams in motion on a contract basis right there's tons of contractors out there who do implementations and then we'll work on making it for landscaping and making it for construction teams in the field but one of the opportunities sorry i was going to say i hope you scale because you reached out to my emails i told you i was i told my whole list i said i'm hunting for who's going to build you know 100 million dollar company one percent because they're going to use contractors and you said i'm using contracts pretty well and i said you got to come on the show but i hope you scale i hope it works yeah well i've got something else in the works that i'll bring to you in a couple of months if that works it'll be worth talking about right now whatever is doing the most money that's what i want to know about yeah that's what i'm looking at today i'll tell you the next one if it works if this little algorithm i think i got figured out why not this one though it sounds like something good here you can replace an ugly legacy player why not this one i i will do this one but i'll also do the other no you can't do your stuff if you can't do all this stuff then nothing works is it hard like you think you can balance all three off four things at once no i mean with q associates i was literally you know the secret sauce five positions with five different companies ceolo cfo different different positions at different points in time and you know for me it's it's not that difficult for me yeah you know not me doing the work as much as showing and telling other people how to do the work finding the right teams perpetual all right we're out of time joe let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business all right you know it's a throwback it's think and grow rich it's what got me started in uh entrepreneurial mode good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i like tim cook on the big uh on the big stage but uh arvin sharma the ceo of i.t conversions uh he's a great mentor number three what's your favorite online tool for building ada soft oh that's a good one uh sql databases what uh what i started it with number four how many hours i sleep to get every night six to eight okay and situation married single kids uh i got three grown kids and a nice girlfriend three grown kids okay and how old are you 53 53 last question something you wish you when you were 20. don't get married start a business guys there you have it don't get married service adasoft.net he launched it to scratch his own it he's working at a flooring film but he had a terrible erp said i'm going to build it myself he then signed him up as his first customer on his new software platform now doing 10 grand a month in revenue hoping to double that triple that over the next six to 12 months what i love about this is a one guy shop he's got six contractors that he's in a great job managing uh high high revenue for employees joe thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much 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 1 p.m 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 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