How Alfresco CEO Bernadette Nixon grew Alfresco to $100M revenue and 1.8K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is bernadette nixon she is the ceo of alfresco and leads company strategy for growth customer commitment and culture she she's an experienced global leader with a proven track record of growing some of the leading companies in the market and has a wealth of experience in the process and content management industry as a whole before joining alfresco bernadette served as president of sdl plc a global software and professional services company after having grown its sales team as chief revenue officer bernadette are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so i feel like alfresco is one of these companies it's actually pretty large but a lot of people maybe haven't heard of it because you do so many different things so kind of put it in a nutshell for us what's the company do and is it a pure place ass company uh we're a pure play subscription business yes uh so alfresco is a fast growing open source software company and we've got a digital business platform at its core the platform has process automation and content management services and then a great app dev framework on top to build your own engaging modern user interfaces so the space we play in it used to be known as ecm and bpm uh but now in the more modern times is known as process services and content services and certainly the way we play there is in a cloud-native way yeah and just quickly give me a story of how maybe a customer is using you to really bring it home yeah sure i mean you know if you think about nasa for example they look to us to help modernize their processes they've got lots of processes internally and all those processes have contents that are associated with them so as they're you know playing their part in the space station or all the different ways to advance um their mission they are using us to automate processes and to be the custodian of all of that information and it could be pictures or video as well as documents and they need to you know have it available for 70 years so just speak here bernadette this is like a really sophisticated intranet it's not content published out to like the community the world it's it's internal processing documentation it's internal most often most often yes it's internal processes and your internal enterprise class content very cool very cool okay and i'm sure you serve a ton of different customers but on average are we talking you know million dollar a year deals 100 grand 10 million generally where do you fall well we've got open source routes so a lot of people used to know us as the cheap and cheerful open source content guys and you know a lot of companies that are with us from those days pay us probably 20k a year but over the years we've we've gone at market in terms of serving some of the largest companies and governments globally and those customers can end up spending you know millions with us yeah so would you say maybe a fair average there's a million a year or something like that i'd say people start at probably 200k and they build up from there i see if they're expansion revenue etc yep exactly very cool now let's i want to put this on a timeline because the business has gone through all kinds of crazy changes and things like that what year did you join i joined in january of 2016. okay and what year was the company founded the company was founded in the uk in 2005 2005. okay so what had happened in 2016 both in your own life and on the other side of the company that made it a good fit for you you know i'd always believed in this notion of process and content coming together because every process typically has some content associated with it um and so i believed in the vision and the mission for the company and given where they were in their stage of evolution i also thought i could help i'd seen some of the movie before in terms of some of the things i thought they needed to overcome to achieve what i would class you know more breakout growth which is what we've been able to do since 2016. yeah now last year uh you know there was you know murmurs on the street that the company was for sale but it sounds like last year there was an actual event with some folks associated with thomas lee the private equity firm walk us through what happened there yeah absolutely we got inbound um interest and so we took the process seriously and that culminated in us um getting an exit in march of this year and we're very pleased to say that uh th lee are our new investors now and um they're excited also by their new investment because we are a growth thesis for them uh this isn't an uh an opportunity for them to get the red pen out this is a growth investment strategy and that's based upon the momentum that we're seeing in the market which is fantastic when you joined in 2016 did you know that like your one of your jobs was going to be find a strategic partner like this or was this a total surprise i figured there would be an exit and in order to get the kind of exit that we wanted we needed to grow the business and so i wasn't focused on an exit i was focusing on growing the business and building a really strong business which is what we have yeah now obviously you're putting together all kinds of pro formas as you're going through due diligence and data rooms in this process and sometimes the pro formas you know you look back six months after the acquisition you go oh they're working out and sometimes you go oh my gosh we were totally wrong what is something i know this is tricky for you to figure out but find something where you guys had a thesis together you said this is what we think is going to happen and it just didn't happen one thing that just didn't work like you thought it would uh perhaps i should touch wood but we've not hit that point as yet so your pro forma has hit exactly how you expected it to hit pretty much i've never seen that pretty much what margin of error would you say i'm not gonna go there i'm not gonna go there but we're pretty we're pretty much on the money right now okay that by the way that's so rare i mean i've seen the biggest companies even when you look at like rjr nabisco and that whole deal i mean they put together performance rarely if someone tells you we're going to do you know 100 million next year i can guarantee you're not going to do 100 million it's going to be like 98.5 or 110.3 never does it actually come out exactly you're saying you know what it feels good we're within a good margin of error and you don't want to say anything that you learn or that that maybe went differently i'm sure that we'll i'm sure we'll have some of those moments but we're we're on we're in a really good place the momentum that we've got in the marketplace is really quite incredible and that's you know not only due to the work that we're doing but the strategy that we've put in place the partners that we've chosen to work closely with we are an aws first product strategy uh we're moving to multi-cloud but you only have to look at the growth figures that um that both aws or azure are experiencing right now and when you're cloud native as we are in our new versions of the software then you know we've got a great story yep yep very good okay let's get some of some of the other kind of information here around kind of cohorts and product and where you see the space going so first off launch 25 2005. you joined in 2016. uh obviously today is 2018 what have you guys scaled to in terms of total customers using the platform uh you know there's multiple different ways of measuring that but roughly about 1300 1370 customers so when you look at the number of users that we have it's in the millions yeah well because it's open source yeah not just because it does open so it's not even counting the open source element of that i mean the the commercially paid stuff okay so you have millions of people paying that put out a credit card and they're paying you monthly some amount of money there's millions of users of our content platform in our process platform or our records management government services yes well no my question specifically is you said commercial so when you say commercial you actually mean they are paying for they're not using it as a user they're actually paying for the software we are a b2b so we're not selling to individuals so you know one particular customer for example cisco might have between a hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand people using us so when you look at all of the both users we're in the millions seats yes exactly good way to put it yeah yeah got it now okay got it 1370 logos and then millions and millions of seats you got it got it very cool okay and how are you getting new customers what you know tell me about the team today is there an inside sales approach we've got both we've got um inside sales and we have entertared sales and in fact we're actively growing the um enterprise sales team right now um to scale up for the next level of growth um so you know the lower end as i said you know you can get a pretty short um buying cycle if somebody's spending you know 20k for a departmental solution but if they're about to put down you know half a million or a million then you're into the classic enterprise sales cycle so what's the team size today total team total team across the company about 350. 350. and obviously the company i think you guys had raised before the the exit uh that you guys went through last year...