Alphatrust revenue, CEO Bill Brice, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka many of you who have met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built you know I'm an anal analytics like crazy person I love the data and I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices their phones and TVs throughout the office now the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at Nathan ler.com analytics it's using a company called clipfolio and I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them it's naa.com analytics this is episode 640 and up tomorrow morning you'll learn from James Sweeney he has 25 billion that's with a B in medical technology exits guys he may be the best in the world in the Medtech space he himself has raised over $2 billion across those companies and he's now sitting on a new photo therapy billion dooll bet you'll want to hear what it is tune in tomorrow good morning everybody Nathan ly here my guest this morning is Bill Bryce he's currently the Chief Executive Officer of alpat trust Corporation which he launched in 1998 to capitalized on the sustained long-term shift from paper-based document businesses to fully electronic document processes a noted entrepreneur bill is considered one of the industry pioneers and is leading and is a leading Authority on electronic signatures especially around generating real economic impact and brand enh enhancement he served as chairman of the board for the signat electronic signature and Records Association is currently a member of the board of directors now bill is not a one hit wonder before this company in electronic signatures he started his entrepreneural career when in college by co-founding Bryce foods and as chairman and CEO he grew the company into a global Enterprise best known for its chain of I Can't Believe It's Yogurt frozen yogurt stores the company grew to 1500 franchise locations in 43 countries with manufacturing operations on four different continents for his work he was awarded the entrepreneur of the Year award from the international franchise Association which is the world's oldest and largest organization representing franchises worldwide Bill Bryce are you ready to take us to the top yes let's go that's who who who in who when they graduate college is thinking about yogurt well let me tell you actually we're based in Dallas and that's where I started that company as well and uh back in this was back in 19070 7778 and you know I guarantee you there were no Texans interested in frozen yogurt uh no it's a product that actually got started out in California back around that time and we were the first company to bring it to Texas and we started the franchise here and it started out as a bunch of comp stores around Texas and we built it up and learned what we were doing and after about 5 years we turned it into a franchise and went from there now Bill what do you mean by that you said it was started in California and you brought it as a franchise to DST were you the actual owner of the concept or did you just buy access to to the franchise no the the product frozen yogurt was was kind of first invented and popularized in California in the mid to late 70s uh but we we found it out there and in terms of the product people were selling it at Mom and Pop stores and things like that uh we thought it would be a good Market here so we were kind of pioneers in the market here in in Texas um so we just operated our own chain which we created we owned it um and and then we turned it into a franchise and began to franchise it and you did that very successfully 1500 franchises across 43 countries if I wanted to come and and franchise one of these Concepts what would I pay you both upfront and and an ongoing basis well I getting back then so we're talking about you know 19 late 80s early 90s kind of dollars but uh back then they probably to build one of those Source would have been about $150,000 of which there would be a $220,000 franchise fee PID you know that the company would receive and they also the company also collected about about six five six% royalties B A Lot some of juice are advertising yep and those are that's on Top Line right that's gross not net yeah y exactly y so what I want to uh I want because we didn't do this in the intro I want to get to kind of how you WRA that company up and then got into electronic signatures at at its Peak uh the Yogurt Company what was it doing in terms of annual revenue and then how did you exit that business uh that company uh the systemwide revenues in that company probably got up to about $1 1560 million um but we uh uh back in the in the early the mid we sold the company 1996 and it was sold because someone was coming along and buying up uh and consolidating frozen dessert franchise operations and they they made us a good offer and and sold and went on down the road Bill what what is a you don't have to say the specific offer but how is a franchise operation like yours how was it valued uh it's it's actually sold pretty much like most businesses at least back in the day you know used to be companies were were sold based upon you know multiples of earnings or cash flow it's a it's it's a little different for you know getting used to these days when companies are sold on multiple of sales yeah interesting so I know isn't that crazy so yours was yours was cash flow something a cash flow multiple oh yeah okay got it and what was a good what was considered a good multiple back back in those days you know I don't know I was I was born in ' 89 so you got to educate me here sure um well probably uh in things are sold on multiples of EIT do typically and so you know probably um somewhere between six to 10 times was the was depending on your growth rates and things like that would would be kind of where you would see on a multiple of EV interesting okay so you go okay I'm done with this being valued bottom line I'm now going to go into electronic signatures where I get Topline value based only on growth and I can still lose a lot of money every month but be a billion- dollar company right well some people can tell tell us about alpat trust why' you launch it well I mean frankly we we uh we did a lot of software back in the yogurt business because we were doing manufacturing and and managing a lot of inventory and a lot of stuff and so we did um all lots of fun stuff around Justus in time inventory and and you know real time processing of manufacturing operations and it's all kind of boring stuff but it was kind of fun to optimize it and make it make it make it sing uh so we got out of that business and and get to look around that was of course we're talking now 1997 1998. stop is bubbling internet's bubbling um people are all looking around how are they going to make a bunch of money um but but I was always kind of annoyed by uh the tremendous amount of pain that paperwork was in a business operation we had farling operations and people still sending stuff I mean I get email people were sending stuff around in inter office envelopes and and you know everyone had to sign off manually on paper and it just seemed like it was a real pain so seemed like a pretty good idea to maybe tackle we automate that because you know uh computer business has been about automating processes since the 1960s more or less at least in the business world so why not tackle that one so we've been tackling that one for almost the last 20 years and did you keep kind of your Tech team that was building all the Jus in Time Manufacturing stuff from the yogurt company or did you go out and Recruit new developers no completely different completely new team okay and what did you did you just fund this with your own Capital to start yes that's the nice thing about the way we did it and I still like that we did it this way we were completely privately owned and and uh and privately funded and been profitable for a long time and still day still do St oh great so uh you know we're we're happy about that and and uh uh it also enables us just to just to you know focus on what we do and not have to meet a bunch of external expectations yeah and so give us a sense of well what's the business model first off so so actually let's even go simpler if if someone listening right now wants to buy your product what exactly are they buying sure well we're in kind of a specialized segment of the market if you think of most people think of us as an electronic signature company so and if you think about that people have probably heard of companies like like DocuSign or or Adobe has a an online product called Adobe sign um and then people may have used it for like applying for a mortgage or or uh you know people send them stuff now you know in an email click on a link and a document pops open you can click and sign it or Draw it on your phone or something so that those kind of services have been around for or 10 years or so and we think of those as being retail so uh you know you can go sign up receipt for you know 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month or something and you can upload documents doents and tag them for Signature spots and and send them out to somebody and get a signature and that's been used and been popular for small business and individual use for a long time we on the other hand started on the Enterprise side of the business um so I remember back when we started was the late 90s and this is really before Cloud uh and so um was was much of anything so we really have clients like General Motors and uh ADP and paychecks and MetLife and New York Life AT&T to big companies so these are Big Enterprises automating very complex processes some of them have uh literally millions of documents that require signature and approval a year so we're specialized in in high uh High processing you know high high performance processing of these documents uh typically our customers still uh deploy and embed our software on premise or even in their own private Cloud just for security reasons yeah yep you know it's it's Banks and insurance companies and so they they feel pretty you know the content in those documents is sensitive information and you know they they're still a little itchy about the cloud for that yeah although we operate Cloud systems for some of those customers uh you know so we certainly do the cloud but but we support whatever deployment model a customer wants so Bill where you can't come to us and go to our website and buy anything got it yep so are you are imagine you have a chunk of your Revenue that is professional Services related to kind of onsite installation and security stuff and things like that and then the other half is what is it a SAS model no it's actually uh it's a mix of things I mean actually the the pro Services side of our business is relatively small because our our software actually is pretty pretty uh robust in terms of its it's uh the resources it has and the ability for people fig small is a portion of Revenue probably only 10 to 15% okay so the bulk of our revenue is it's the rest of it is really all licensed revenue of some form or another some of it's perpetual licenses some of it's subscription licenses some of it's SAS Based Services um but you know and some of it's the a lot of it's still really old school Perpetual license plus you know annual maintenance that bu is still alive and well and particularly in segments of the market that we serve these are annual these are annual contracts maybe sometimes they're multi-year and they have hundreds or thousands of seats per contract something like that yeah we don't even sell by the seat uh we we sell by typically transaction sizes so a customer had I mean we typically don't even talk to customers unless they say have you know you to process at least 10,000 documents a year for signing or approval and going up into two millions of documents a year so what your is probably somewhere between $50,000 to $500,000 I was just going to ask you that so the average sales the average contract value total or or per year is 50 to 500k uh that's probably initial contract value um I again literally some of our customers pay a one-time Perpetual license fee so they're paying a bigger number what does that mean like pay a million you get it for life yeah but then you're paying annual maintenance which is typically about 20% a year I see so it kind of works out the same over say fiveyear period I mean it used to be I mean I of back in the day you used to go buy you know Microsoft Office uh and pay a onetime you know onetime cost for the discs right sure yeah and that done until you were ready to upgrade three years later so what are you how many logos sorry we're we're getting short on time I don't mean to cut you off but how many logos are you serving today um we have well depends how you count it uh in terms of direct clients from us we probably have about 300 large Enterprises okay so again we're concentrated in the fortunate 500 got it and still still self-funded right no outside Capital raised exactly that's great and what's your team size you know the one thing about being private is we don't have to discuss metrics but I will tell you some metrics around the market that we're in which you're kind of oh wait come on Bill team size I can go on LinkedIn and look up team size you okay well you got a LinkedIn you're G to find about 20 okay 20 well and the reason I'm asking is because you have a new sales model and I'm curious about what your ratio of kind of ins like is your main model inside sales folks going out and selling or is it kind of a no touch onboarding process or what's your typical model there uh wait the V of it is still direct sales but we also have partner channels uh and we sell through partners and we have some in the banking space we have several customers that uh that are partner and and feed business to us that way okay T yeah go ahead we have a ton of virtual virtual people so they wouldn't wouldn't really be counted as headcount but they do a lot of specialized stuff around the world and we have Specialists probably 20 or 30 specialists around the world that we rely upon on a part-time basis that are virtual basically a virtual staff doing for doing what everything from from back Office stuffff Accounting payroll h are uh to to technical Specialists who like you know super smart cryp cryptology people cryptographic people who specialize in you know deep security stuff okay so that so I mean is is it fair to say a kind of full-time team SI maybe around 20 but then you have on and off contractors all around the world Specialists maybe you get up to 50 something like that yeah interesting okay cool great business model um what is the and so you were going to touch on the space a bit you know the space is very hot you know there's just an article out the other day maybe docy gets a new CEO they maybe they file to go public soon what do you want to do do you want to just keep growing this and milking cash flow or you want to take it public or or sell it or what yeah we're very happy growing in our growing our market like we are I mean obviously there may come a time when the some consolidation makes some sense I don't think it's quite here yet but uh you know if that happens and it makes some sense for us that's fine but we we are running the business as if we're going to be around another 20 years if Salesforce comes to you and says we want to buy you for for $800 million do you sell yeah probably so smart guy right smart guy you I mean bill I imagine this SP is hot I met you've had offers true or false true like I told you guys at the top of this episode I have amazing data and you guys know from my interview style I love data but what I have more than data is making it actionable via beautiful dashboards that I can view on my phone on my TVs in my living room or even on my laptop as I'm traveling and the company that I used to create these dashboards which pulls in data from my lips in backend my Google analytics backend Salesforce and other data sources is called clipfolio you can see an example executive dashboard or my social media Command Center or my web metrics dashboard at Nathan la.com analytics that's Nathan la.com analytics and you can try it there for free for 3 months it's clipfolio you can try it free for 3 months everybody else has to pay so you get it free for 3 months Allan's a good friend he's the CEO of the company he came on the show I said I love your product can I feature it so Nathan lea.com analytics go check it out now very cool all right let's wrap up Bill with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book oh gosh that's a darn good question what are you reading right now probably crossing the you know crossing the gasm is probably a great book Jeffrey M good one beautiful red orange color number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh not currently number three is there F besides your own uh is there a favorite online tool you have like a CD scheduling uh no we we actually we're pretty fun have a CRM system called HubSpot we use it very extensively so we're happy with it we like that toel great uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh seven that's pretty good and what's your situation married single do you have kids oh three kids married very happy oh great are they all young ones or they out of the house well since I've been around since the late 70s they're they're all grown well you got energy like a 20-y old so that's a good thing right how old are you Bill 59 all right last question take us back uh 39 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew oh gosh um 20-year-old self um um at the time I wish I would knew what what happened with the internet before it happened there you go guys from Bill Rice doing it again they like to say you know instead of growing you know fast and up and to the right and and and and do it with raising a lot of capital he's taking a slow methodical approach really one of The Originators in the electric uh sorry electronic signing business with their main with their main product Pronto sign launched way back in 1998 after a very successful yogurt business totally bootstrapped about 20 people full-time maybe 50 people when they ramp up all their contractors again serving Enterprise contract values between 50 and 500k first year with a multitude different range of kind of Revenue options ranging from 10 to 15 being Professional Services to to annual M maintenance maintenance fees to Perpetual license they've really targeted in and that's why they're having so much success Bill Bryce thank you for taking us to the top thank you Nathan if you enjoyed bill today go back and listen to Tobin yesterday he runs the fastest growing Canadian software company they went from 200k to 20 million in revenue between 2010 and 2015 it would mean the world to me if you guys got any value from this episode if you would go leave a review on iTunes right now and then subscribe you know I hustle like heck to get these episodes out every freaking day for you guys and trust me I love it I would do it with no listeners but boy oh boy it makes my day and it makes my teens day when we see great reviews and get your feedback so thanks so much okay top tribe I love giving away free money I feel like opra giving away cars and I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super Sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google ads well all of you listening right now yes if you're listening you get $100 in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the free $100 from Google right when you sign up with my website post provider HostGator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com Nathan again that's hostgator.com Nathan [Music]