How Bant CEO Andrei Breaz grew to $7M revenue and 31 customers in 2021.

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 bent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top drive this week's SP up the 100 bucks is Rick segman Rick segman he is stuck brick and mortar business that is his Focus so congratulations Rick if you guys want to win 100 bucks every Monday on the show in order to enter simply subscribe to the show on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 again text the word Nathan to 33444 folks many of you reach out to me and you say Nathan so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching but whenever I try and batch you tell me this you go Nathan they don't book backto back times so you or they don't show up after they book it's frustrating the answer is guys you have to use Smart Tools I use a tool called AE scheduling at Nathan l.com I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode this is episode 543 my name is Nathan Latka and be sure to tune in tomorrow morning where I talk to Eric bogs he was a former competitor of mine at heo now he's running rev boss which did 700 Grand in 2015 Revenue they're doing about again 90 grand per month now in December January 2017 and they're helping customers Drive Revenue by getting them B2B leads again I will acquire a business in the B2B lead space here very soon follow me on Facebook Twitter and Snapchat to get behind the scenes details good morning guys Nathan ly here our guest this morning is Andre Breeze he's currently the founder and CEO of b. a B2B leads company before that he was founder at captify which was acquired by well Investments and before that he was working uh as an STL specifically on the VMware account at Hardy Hanks and has many many more kind of experiences in the B2B sales space we'll focus on b. today Andre are you ready to take us to the top yeah I'm ready okay tell us what the company does uh b. and what's your Revenue model how do you make money okay so um in essence what we do we we um um initiate conversations uh for other companies we we're solely talking about B2B companies here so we we engage in uh conversations with their ideal prospects and once they respond with interest that's when we forward the the lead and and they continue the conversation from from where we left off and yeah they they work on closing the deal um that's just simply put it um there's much more behind it um it's you I will say uh they get access to an analystic dashboard as well so it looks like a SAS based business model but it's also a service that we're providing because we need to and we have to hold our customers hands through the whole process um Andre just to be clear this is just we only have 15 minutes so I want to make sure we we figure this out quick this is basically if somebody doesn't want to hire their own sales team and have headcount expenses they can basically buy your services and you act as basically a sales team finding the lead getting the lead hot and then passing the hot lead off to to be closed by the company is that accurate yeah pretty much I wouldn't say sales but more like uh prospecting and lead generation stage uh very close to pre-sales rather than uh actually closing the sale okay are you any different than these companies where you go and say you know download a thousand targeted leads that have a team of 10 people in the B2B Enterprise space and they shoot an Excel sheet how are you different than that yeah so first of all we don't sell data uh it's not what we do we use um the data that we generate using our own software and that has a lot more data points than any other spreadsheet that you can buy off the shelf out there um I'm talking about really Advanced Data points that we're using in the campaign uh you can start I mean apart from the basics um you can um just think about the technology that they're using on their website uh how much they're spending on third party Technologies even whether they're a male or female uh or are they part of a certain group on LinkedIn um any connections that they share in common so really hundreds of data points that we using and uh again for each industry each uh camp pain it's a different set of data points that we have to use and then give us an idea you said your pricing model is kind of a combination of SAS plus Professional Services what's the average customer paying you per month well I wouldn't say yeah uh the the delivery is more like a combination the uh but yes you are correct it's a monthly um subscription that they're paying uh the average I'll say the medium plan that's most popular one it's almost uh 1,200 a month okay that includes the all the prospecting the um uh all the campaign creative and everything else the whole strategy uh it's a customized strategy that that that we're bringing for each client uh and it comes with a guarantee as well uh with a 100% money back guarantee what's the guarantee around uh around the number of hot lead um because what you see on our plans that's the minimum that we guarantee 100% it's usually a lot more than that that but how do you know if it's a hot lead though that sounds pretty subjective uh our definition of a hot lead uh because we're working with cold email Outreach is basically a a positive reply with immediate interest in their product or service how do you know if the reply is positive uh basically you Andre how do you get around this happens all the time how do you get around the situation where somebody pays you you say 's a thousand hot leads we're we're guaranteeing their hot leads we know they're hot leads the customer gets the list and goes no only 80% of these are hot leads then there's a debate how do you work out that debate okay so the 1200 those are the quality leads those are the prospects that we're reaching out to the ideal prospects or customers that we're reaching out to on their behalf the hot leads are a lot less like 10 to 15 hot leads those are the guaranteed ones uh there's usually very uh little debate around the hot lead uh and even if there is we usually deliver a lot more than that minimum so that's always always covered uh if it's not for some reason then we always offer a full refund I see okay what year did you launch the business then pardon what year did you launch the business in uh a year and a half ago so early 20 late 2014 uh early 2015 I would say okay and have you bootstrapped or have you raised capital uh self-funded self-funded yeah you could say bootstrapped it all started as U this was basically the process that I've used to uh grow captify I needed a sales an effective and efficient sales process and Le generation process so this is the same process or almost the same process that I used and then from there on it evolved into b iio as a standalone service and here we here we are and so today December 2016 how many customers are you working with on a monthly basis um again it it looks like a SAS model but their needs are a bit different because many of them come on and off so existing ones right now active considering we've got hold days uh approaching F uh we're around 30 31 active ones but remember those are the ones that have existing campaign right now so in in your Mac in your highest month over the past year how many actives did you have in a single month uh around 50 55 uh but I'd also like to mention that we're now in I mean up until now we were in a sort of a discovery phase so uh we never really started to to REM things up and and made all the efforts to scale things up and this is something that we're planning for the for next year for uh 2017 okay and can I I know it fluctuates because you're you know people come and go and you have holiday season Etc but if you have a $1,200 arpo times the 3100 customers is it fair to kind of guesstimate that you're doing about 37 Grand in monthly recurring Revenue uh yes that would be pretty much accurate I would say around uh almost 400k uh in revenue for the past year yeah um but considering that I mean uh considering the uh the strategies that we've got lined up for the next year I would say we're we're now aiming for 1.5 million at least for for for next year okay and in 2015 what was total revenue do you remember uh don't have that in front of me but again it was a lot less this year I I would say that we were still in a discovery phase uh when and and learning a lot about the the clients that we can help because we got approached by various various clients from industries that you wouldn't even think of and they were able to uh and we were able to manage successful campaigns for them and some of them are still with us for for the past six eight months can you name Andre one or two of the clients using you just so we can kind of really put color around the ideal customer you're working with uh really various we you'll see on I mean on our website you'll have a lot of case studies and there are another 10 to be added this month uh can you name one most of them yeah most of them are small to medium ones uh appli cor chart IQ first mile Geo uh uh Treehouse you might know them um yeah so quite a few umil names out there yeah bmobilized uh quer Zenia um so so what do you what's the current team size uh 12 people right now and where are you guys based uh London London okay so all in London yeah correct I mean we are working with a few remote uh people but again the the the the head office isn't in London and then how are you getting these new customers what's your process uh so far um everything came through uh word of mouth and referrals basically uh we haven't even started using banto on banto so your first customer was this a company you knew or a friend or what first customer was captify but no we basically ran like a $200 AdWords campaign right when we started and everything took off from there so what's your process looks like bmobilized puts their email in because they saw one of your ads and and your $200 kind of AD set you then what you call them you email them what's the process yeah basically they get in touch for for a demo uh we we explained them more about the the process of the whole um uh campaign and of course it's also also a discovery call to see whether can we help them or not and we agree on on on on certain segments that we can Target for them uh we discussed the deliverables um and everything starts from there uh there is no long-term commitment um they can start you know it's a month-to-month service do you have an idea of what a customer is worth to you over their lifetime um yeah absolutely uh 7K right now and increasing and how do you get to that number well based on the uh uh uh average revenue per account and how many months they stayed with us but again they always come on and off the service so what is the so if you're forecasting a lifetime value of about seven Grand you know are are what are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer and how are you spending that money currently currently we're not spending any money on is that fully weighted though Andre I know you mentioned you weren't spending anything on paid acquisition but do you have inside sales people or anything like that not really not really no we don't we don't it's again everything came from uh referrals and and where who's doing who's doing the demos uh we've got two account managers basically they're not salespeople they also handle the uh customer relationships okay but they're doing kind of prec customer on boarding work like demos like emailing back and forth Etc right yeah yeah okay so so you if you had a fully weighted customer acquisition cost you to include both their salaries and divide by number of new kind of customers per month right I mean it sounds like it's marginal that yeah yeah sounds fair yeah but it's what you're saying the reason you don't include that is it's marginal right now it's it's low yeah very low I would say got it very cool okay good and what about uh well I mean I guess because you have people kind of joining and and then and then leaving kind of seasonally asking what gross churn is isn't really a valuable question is it uh no we we're measuring everything you know as it as it would be a SAS model but it's really not I mean you can't talk about SAS based model when you've got uh $1,500 plans yeah what is the so what is gross gross customer turn monthly uh around 25 30% got it so yeah so high but that's just not your model it's just it's it's different exactly but it does pay to uh to to look at it as it as it is a sess based model because it sort of forces you to increase the all the metrics that matter because those are the metrics that matter but again it shouldn't be compared with uh I would say the top inbox yeah yeah yeah how' you find the top inbox well I was just looking at your links in profile so oh got it got it yeah I just acquired that company I'm really excited about it um where are you tell me more about kind of the data so I I mean a lot of this kind of data space is very ancestral people buy clear bit full contact all these other guys uh who are you paying uh to to kind of increase the quality of your data very good question so um we've got an internal software that uh we've got so we've got our own database uh we have third party software that plugs into that but as a last step uh we'll get that in a second as a last step before we upload the contacts into any campaign uh we've got uh uh our own researchers that basically go through the whole list and are making sure that we've got the right contact details that that person is still working for the company and so on uh this is the only way we can guarantee any results make sure that we've got top top quality data how many people on your team do just that uh we're working with contractors on that so around eight people okay got it interesting and then you mentioned some third party data apps you you plug into which ones uh build with is one of them yep uh I would say uh we are testing a few other in that area that's what technology um could have name more right now because some of them they're just in a testing phase okay who are you testing though don't want to tell why well until we have you know a study and working relationship with really wouldn't want to go into that right now U there's any maale finder uh there there's a few other yeah the the reason I asked those questions is because it seems like like everyone has their own version of a WebCrawler But ultimately everyone just buys everyone else's data to double check themselves and I always wonder who is the true data source uh there is no one true data source really uh I will say LinkedIn is one of our main data sources be we've got our own tool that I it's too much to say plugs into LinkedIn but uh it's a software that basically pulls the email addresses of uh any LinkedIn profile well I say 70% of those so LinkedIn is one of our main uh source of sources they sent you a season assist after the Microsoft acquisition or no no are you worried about that uh no not really you don't think they will no no well I mean yeah there are always ways around it uh and yeah again we've got our own database as well so worse come to worse we always have that guys I get asked all the time Nathan you host all these interviews hundreds of them per month how do you do them efficiently and guys the answer is simple people always agree to my calendar backtack meetings I batch my interviews to stay very efficient and the way that I do it is I use a tool called Acuity scheduling at Nathan lat.com ual and the reason I use them is very simple they keep my noshow rate very low because they send out reminders about when the interview or the meeting is coming up and also they make it very easy to schedule time right I don't have to go back and forth of the email 10,000 times with people I'm trying to meet with okay at Nathan lea.com schedu helps me so much and by the way look I like have so many meetings I'm the best at meetings okay I do them back toback very very efficient you guys know me many people say I'm the most efficient they've ever seen okay so I use the tool it's so efficient and by the way I got Gavin I said Gavin he's the CEO I said I want a great deal for my people he said Nathan well most people get a 14-day trial isn't that great I said no he's giv us a 45-day free trial at Nathan la.com schedule that's not going to stay up forever so go get it now Nathan lat.com schedu all right Andre five last questions here with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book uh Think and Grow brige number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now uh my sound Anthony Robbins and elen musk Anthony Robbins and Elon Musk yeah number three is there a favorite online tool you have like host skater uh favorite online Tool uh I would say Trello number four yes no do you get 8 hours of sleep every night no and and what's your situation married single you have kids uh married no kids okay and how old are you 32 all right last question take us back 12 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew um I wish I would have caught the entrepreneurial bug a lot sooner I always had it but I would say was always part time yep guys there you have it from Andre who would have started his own company earlier or been a full-time entrepreneur quicker will link to all of these resources in his show notes at Nathan la.com forthe toop 556 again building b. to help folks get B2B higher quality B2B leads it's totally bootstrapped they did uh a very small amount of Revenue in 2015 because they just launched but in the past 12 months it's December 2016 now they've done about 400k in Revenue hoping to again grow uh exponentially in 20177 again with their team of about eight people or 12 people based in London lifetime value of a customer of about 7 Grand and current Mr somewhere around 37,000 bucks Andre thank you for taking us to the top thank you for having me Nathan okay top tribe I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning and don't forget before you listen to any other episodes subscribe on iTunes right now for your chance to win a 100 bucks every Monday [Music] what