How Aptem CEO Richard Alberg grew Aptem to $17.9M revenue and 170 customers in 2024.

Optimus helping companies big training companies in the UK teach more people faster in a more efficient manner they have 170 customers today that pay on average $40,000 per month for that software they broke about 8 million bucks this year in Revenue up 20% year-over-year from 6.5 last year which we love they've got a nice team uh 120 folks today 70 on product five quota carrying reps last valuation 3 million round last year out of 40 caught 40 million pre-money valuation as Richard looks to continue building business hoping to hit N9 or 10 million of Revenue next year hey folks my guest today is Richard olberg he's a Serial human capital entrepreneur fascinated by technology and how he deploys it to prove and how we deploy it to improve our lives he's motivated by working with interesting and capable colleagues married with two adult children and also an instrument rated pilot now building a SAS for vocational training providers Richard you ready to take us to the top absolutely let's go for it all right what's an example of a vocational training provider so in the UK we have uh a regulated term you use it in America as well called apprenticeships and essentially you can go to college you can go to university you can go to school and you can be a student and study but in the UK there's over three billion a year being spent on people who have a job who are in employment but are nevertheless learning skills to go one step higher so it can be anything from learning how to be a hairdresser to learning how to be a software enger to being a police Constable or a nurse adult care etc etc etc it's a big Market half a million people a year in the UK being trained 1,500 different organizations doing this training and my company provides technology to those organizations in order to run their business got it so the org would I want to be I'm in the UK I want to learn how to cut hair and be a stylist the the company that is going to employ me would pay for your soft teach me how to be a better stylist at their Salon with one little subtlety the company that employs you would employ a training company who would be delivering to you so you might work four days a week in the business working in the in the in the salon but half a day to a day a week you'll be studying who who's an example of a training company that might teach uh someone that wants to cut hair that sits in between the hair cutter and the salon there are many um uh learning curve are one of the big ones um hob salons they're a salon training company but they Al a salon operator themselves but they also do training the key thing in the UK is it's regulated there's a bit it's not a tax break in fact it's the opposite every firm in the UK with a payroll of 3 million or more has to pay half a percent of that payroll into a tax that goes towards funding vocational training so what you've got is this big big pot of money for training and it's use it or lose it because it's got but because there's government involved there's compliance and Regulation and that's the bit that's we're a little bit different on so you're selling the learning curve and hope Salon we H Salon learning curve life time there are 40 universities in this country who use our technology we are the largest provider in the UK of technology for this type of training so Richard how many paying customers do you have including the 40 universities in hopes sound about 170 okay 170 and and how do you price for them is it per trained employee or per seed or what we currently do per learner per month okay and what so if you've got a thousand Learners in training is a thousand times that amount each and every month and what is that average amount per learner per month oh the higher level is about eight pound and then it reduces down with volume so a large customer was about three pound something like that but that's very high volumes um a large customer will spend a couple of 100,000 300,000 a year with us a small customer maybe 10,000 a year with us and a sort of typical customer 40 to 50,000 a year with us 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 287 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 valuation 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 founder paath 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 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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 and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founder path.com products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.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 someone say is that your biggest customer today they pay about 300 Grand a year a bit more than that yeah okay okay and and how many seats or how many Learners are they probably using you for per month um they probably will have 15 18 15 to 18,000 Learners in training per month at any one time so again without digging into too much detail in the UK for an apprenticeship course lasts a minimum of one year but where we deal with universities often a we call them Learners the Learners are on a three or foure course because they're doing a degree I see I I see okay so 170 customers paying on average $40,000 per year would put you at about 6.8 million of AR today is that accurate yeah about that a bit more than that what are you talking dollars or Sterling let's do dollars dollars were about eight million-ish about 8 million-ish okay and do you remember uh just so we can get a growth rate where were you exactly a year ago uh we would have been something like 20% less put it this way we have for the last four years done over 50% year- on-year growth but we've recently run into a problem which is the bigger you get um the harder it is to maintain your percentage because each month we throw in two three more customers maybe four customers in a good month but the bigger we are it's a denominator you know so so the issue we have is how you reprice the existing book of customers that you have as because the main contributor to growth has been the number of new customers we secure each month we have very very low churn but we have only two or three well in financial terms last year was 2.3% that's on a on a revenue basis or a logo basis Revenue basis no Revenue basis okay sorry 2.5% that's for the year 2.3 I think it was 2.3 was last year's CH in financial terms 2.3 and that's gross dollar churn yes okay did you have expansion Revenue to get above 100% net retention um no that's our problem we will soon because we're now adding in adjacencies additional things we can sell but for the first three years of our growth four years of our growth we haven't had anything additional to sell to a customer Richard sorry I don't understand that if you've got if you've got learning curve paying you $1,000 in one month for 10 trainees per month if they love you and they expand to 20 trainees per month you have natural expansion Revenue built in why don't you have Revenue that's not how business works we have every training they've got there's no choice for our customers they run their entire business in our platform even the way they get paid is via the um Financial calculation that's run by our platform okay but Richard same question if hop sound was using you effectively to train their customers they would have had hop...