BrightEdge Revenue & Funding (2024)

but this guy's bootstrapped Bri edged to $100 million of Revenue he's got an incredible story he's built an incredible team and the product speaks for itself please tell me welcome to the stage Jim you from R Jim come on [Applause] up and did I get it all that right that's all fair almost almost Fair all right all right coach us up teach us up this is great excited to be here with everybody um and share some of the lessons I've learned in terms of you know scaling and running bright Edge at 100 million um we built the business with about 50 million in primary Capital it's been a long journey over uh 15 years it's actually 18 this is the 18th year of running the company so lots of Lessons Learned lots of uh getting punched in the head all the time but you know a couple things that I've learned a big part of running at scale I think is really sort of how do you break up running your week running your month running your quarter and ultimately how you run your year right and so a couple things I've learned first and foremost really as you start in the early days of the business you're really focused on how do you build right so you're iterating you're use to experimentation once you figure out your product Market fit and your core formula It all becomes about how do you find this right balance between how you run and how you build right the cadences are really good at helping you drive towards run but you have to be very deliberate about thinking about when are you going to drive the build of the business so let me tell you a little bit about sort of what I do right so this is the Monday morning meeting right it's a running cadence to really Drive accountability throughout the organization it starts and runs through every part of the organization right so the go to market function starting from marketing and market dynamics as you scale out of is like you play in multiple segments what's happening from a competitive landscape perspective what's happening from A disruption perspective right so you want to keep a pulse on that then it becomes about new business what's the demand generation that you're getting what is the you know what are the number of leads and qualified opportunities then it becomes about bookings right so the sales organization reports back out on that um then it's about customers across the life cycle as you get new customers it's about are you onboarding those customers well what's that first touch experience right the first 90 days are super important so having very clear Optics on that every Monday morning from the team that's responsible for implementation and onboarding then by segment right because we run today and four different segments across midmarket Enterprise International and channel really looking at in each of those segment leaders and Buu leaders what they're delivering in terms of customer satisfaction customer engagement um gross dollar retention net dollar retention and then other key Parts like technology and products how are they doing on delivery of the roadmap and then ultimately you also want to keep close eye on finance understanding the p&l of the business the cash flow of the business and so this drives a lot of the Rhythm of the operating Cadence of running the business right so across team's about 500 people organized around sort of multiple sites but by function really making sure you're kicking off and running the entire company across that drum beat of driving execution across the business this is important for driving visibility alignment and ultimately team accountability to each other not just to you but to each other around what each of those team members are going to deliver across the executive team Tuesdays for me are kind about that build Cadence it's about stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of what's happening in the market right focused on Innovation as well in our business as Nathan man mentioned we're in search right a lot of change happening with search and AI so spending time dedicated with the Innovation and R&D team this is a little different than the product team this is with more the hardcore sort of Engineers that are working on new data new innovation what's happening right and really sort of that's a more free flow working with Labs understanding sort of what are the Next Generation set of innovations that we have to drive and that then leads to sort of the kinds of thought leadership that we put out it also leads to how we think about the broader ecosystem but the Tuesday is really about stepping back and looking at the big picture and this theme is important that you'll see is kind of operating cadences focus on running the business versus cadences that focus on stepping back thinking about the strategy and building the business and I found this is a good way now you might find different days but the force yourself to get out of the firefight and step back and think about what are you building because it's easy to just get in the day-to-day of just running the company as well Wednesdays for me are all about Revenue right so there's some day of the week that's got to be all about money so I call it sort of smelling the money finding the money chasing the money that's Wednesdays right and it's important that the entire organization knows all your leadership knows that this is the day about money right and so it is about every segment every leader for casting what are they going to drive for the month what are they going to deliver what are they going to close so that's you know sales forecasting it's retention forecasting it's each business unit that gets rolled up and that drives accountability throughout the organization that there's that Focus you know on sort of driving that rhythm of Revenue so Wednesdays for me are all about that closing the loop is very very important in this Cadence right you kind of see a a classic forecast sort of model there but what's really important here is having the leader call the number and then as those time passes hit the numbers that they're calling right that sort of cadence of driving accountability on delivering is super important Thursdays are all about customer and capacity right so customer really understanding the prospect to customer journey in the segments in which we play what expectations are we setting what are the MPS surveys buy segments that are coming back trending that over time is really important to look at the themes and then critically also capacity planning for the organization right each of these goto Market functions and each of the major functions of the business as you scale ultimately is about taking a formula that you've built in the early days and really tuning the capacity that you have across the organization to then deliver that capacity into the market right that's true for prospecting and driving new accounts but that cuts all the way through to how you onboard those customers and then how you touch those customers and serve those customers throughout the customer life cycle you can see an example here of how you look at that end to end of how to plan that right this is a a fairly simple simplified model of that but you kind of see hey if you're 10 million in Revenue you're going to 14 50 million uh 14 to 15 million in a in a year planning month a month how many reps are you adding in each of those areas critically understanding the ramp time of those reps understanding the underlying sort of capacity that each person can deliver at their ramp levels and then you can see the areas are really important because that tells you when are you going to be behind on hiring right so the capacity planning then feeds into recruiting that then is really important for you then drive to make sure that across the team you ultimately have enough capacity to run run your business in terms of the underlying formula that you have so two Thursdays for me are sort of about customer Inc capacity super uh important for driving that and then Fridays are really around people and product for me right so people Cadence really as the organization grows and changes really important to look at a lot of the key metrics around what are you have what what's happening in terms of new hire there's an employee life cycle right in SAS we think a lot about the customer life cycle super important ultimately what you have to also delivers an employee life cycle across those pieces of the model where you're planning capacity right is who are you hiring how are they ramping and how is that working o over time and so you want to look at things like um you see a metric here called net hiring score which is an indicator both from the person you hired and the hiring manager on what is their satisfaction in the first 90 days right after the honeymoon period and that's a good early indicator of as you're adding people into organization how is that working and is it sort of accurate as you scale the business um other things you know involuntary turnover voluntary turnover these are important metrics that Trend as well to understand and then core sort of HR mechanics of you know just like give customer support tickets right sort of employee tickets around benefits and things like that and making sure that you're tracking just like you track seesac making sure that you're closing those tickets out so that that's an important part of the people Cadence other really important people cadences are around key hires the top five hires really important every week to understand in the organization are you moving on those top hires as you scale and then product from a product perspective looking at the road map and then also really tracking the key kpis that you're trying to drive in terms of of what that product strategy is in terms of each of those key business metrics that it's supposed to drive and ultimately does it result in that over time so you see an example here of how we track that and how we look at that over time um and then running the month right so you kind of get a view of every single week the rhythm of the business the Cadence of how it's running and then also where you're building the business and then every month it's stepping back and looking at how each part of the business taking a step back and looking at the overall business and how that's running right and so the monthly operating metrics are a little bit different there you're looking at the overall key SAS metrics right your ARR your contribution margin your LTV to CAC LTV to CAC by segment understanding the trends of those over time the unit economics of the business are very important at scale and understanding how that's shifting because as different Market shifts are occurring as productivity changes across your organization it's very important to understand that over time so this is a great way that I found for us to really understand that and Trend that over time and ultimately it's very important to get this just like that Monday meeting is about sort of driving the business on you know sort of week to week in terms of running the monthly Cadence allows you to drive executive accountability on what they're delivering against the business model right ultimately that's about stepping back and understanding the alignment to the business model that you're driving and then the last last thing I'd say is also a sustaining Cadence right like I mentioned at the beginning to build a company at scale what I found is over a decade it's a long time so ultimately there's also an element of how do you sustain that over time it's a constant struggle it's I've never found it to get easier it's always new set of challenges and so I think it's very important to keep in mind sort of you know health and also the relationships right it's not something I'm great at but you can kind of see on the the left hand side is my heart rate resting heart rate I track this on my Apple watch because it tells me when I'm under way too much stress and you kind of see the ABS and flows of that that's important just to get a sense find your own way right but like understanding what you're putting your your uh your your your your your physical and your mind sort of pressure that it's under and balancing that and then um what I found like with my wife just kind of relationships as well right is is a great way to sort of connect one of the things that I found with my wife over time is since it's been over a decade um the beginning we used to have date nights every week but what we found is we'd get a well get a nice dinner watch a movie and then ultimately after a couple years of that gain a lot of weight so instead what we found is there's this great Trail in the back uh uh there's a great Trail that's near our house and what we switched it to was every Sunday we would take a one-hour walk together and that walk for the last 10 years has been great it's a great way for us for her to share with me what's going on with the family for me to share what's going on with with um with with the business or whatever was going on and it's just a great way to connect right and and I think a lot in a lot of ways what we do as Founders is so hard that everything it never gets easier everybody always tells you oh it's how's it going it's great but actually it's never that great I think maybe once in a while it's great but usually it's not and so there's this element of finding your center of how are you going to sustain that how are you going to sustain the relationships that you have and that that you have as you go on this crazy journey and what I found is look like some of these patterns of things to do whether it's the walk or I got really into pelaton and doing the streak of that to manage my stress that I think finding that is also a really important Rhythm for being able to uh drive and run your business so with that thank you very much