How Eptura CEO Paul Phillips grew Eptura to $266.2M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Paul Statham he is the CEO and founder of a company called Connect Oh group he has established several successful and innovative businesses helping shape the relationship between real estate technology he's established conduct go as one of the foremost providers of workspace management technology and leading the company through a successful 30 million dollar series a round he was previously managing director of one of the UK's largest electronic security companies Paul you're ready to take it to the top you know I mean they all right tell us about the company specifically what you do and what's your revenue model how do you make money right we are a software primarily a software business we've run a subscription software solution that we supply to the enterprise corporate market which is to provide scheduling and reservation system management and you can work space utilization and walk me through the revenue model so is it kind of a pure place ask modelers are consulting professional services mcdale we run we have we have three parts for our business we run a assess element we run our services and consulting element and we also run a propulsion of hardware we matriarchy manufacture our own digital signage that goes outside of people's meeting space and on people's desks so we manufacture that as well so it comes in three different levels and breaked it's over the past 12 months break down the revenue percentages of each of those which one is you know 50 60 70 % etc we do about 45 percent of our revenues now through our subscription about 20 percent is through services and the rest is through halfway god are interesting now does the hardware obviously once you get installed does that create some nice lock-in so your retention numbers kind of go up through the roof yeah it's you know we're very we we had great retention we're a sticky product once people have invested capital into the hardware you find that they you know they they stick with you but they Steven the guys that don't use our hardware you don't have to use the hardware yeah we still have a 95 percent retention rate which we're very pleased with and is that that's 95 percent grosser net retention that's logo attention how gross gross ernet scruggs okay lily and our net we change is about one hundred and twenty two percent okay that's on I guess revenue basis I kind of emulate yet yeah that's great and that's annual yeah that's great congratulations um let me let me just I'm gonna dial back up from the numbers for a second so when people go into like a like a we work and they see kind of a sign that I of each meeting door that are like electronic and you can use an app to kind of book them and stuff is that you behind that we the that's what we my there are others on the market but we are considered to be one of the first one of the market the principal minors in market and give me a general sense I know you probably have a lot of different cohorts of customers but on average wondering that what are one of these companies paying you let's just focus on the sass revenue so on a monthly basis I varies wildly we have our probably our smallest Sassy's paying us around a couple of thousand dollars a month than our largest could be paying us thirty forty thousand dollars a month and what's what's the difference between the two is just number of locations or what makes are different with our revenue our subscription model is based on the number of rooms and desks that we have managed within our system okay and and so get let's go micro for a second so what do you charge per room or per desk it varies wildly but but depending on the size of the scale but somewhere in a few hundred dollars it starts had a few hundred dollars a year second start as low as as thirty forty dollars a month if you have it with all of the additions with signage and screens it can go up to maybe seven to eight hundred dollars a month a year okay so just I want to make sure nurse Innes let's say I'm like a solo I'm a single company and I have two offices in my in my building and there are three desks in each office I'm gonna pay a couple of hundred a hundred a couple it sounds like I could pay maybe grand or two grand just to manage those two offices for a year is that accurate if you had three three meeting spaces and you wanted signs and to manage those rooms those meeting rooms it would cost you around for those three meeting spaces question about $900 for the year including the halfway okay okay guy that's that's okay that's reasonably priced great and in one way through the back story here let's put us on a timeline when did you launch we launched in 2005 so we've been about well and and where were you personally at that point or did you join the company at the series a level no I was the founder of the business I founded the business back in 2000 when we were doing we weren't we were doing software development and we developed the Kundera product in 2005 and launched dear so I'm being with the business since the get-go so from 2000 2005 where I mean we're running essentially an agency and outsource dev shop and then you said Oh a lot of people have this problem let's go all in precisely absolutely that's exactly what happened we were you know we had we came across the the problem on the number of times we built a great solution and when guys this is a this is this is a winner and we pushed on in 2005 and dropped the bespoke stuff that was was going on at the time good for cash flow but a distraction once you have a SAS company totally and completely yeah we started life back in the day as a perpetual license company we migrated in 2015 to entirely SAS we've never looked back painful times but it's it's a it's a Socratic place and what have you scaled to another today in terms of total customers using you [Music] our total customer base is around 1200 okay okay so is it a note and as the sales process of no touch or is a pretty high touch of a big inside sales team now we have a we have over you know total sales team sales and marketing accounts for about a hundred people within the business we have a ten man inside sales team we have a 35 man outside sales team we have channel teams we have marketing team so we've got quite a big organization behind our sales or not what sort of team size 400 400 more everyone in London no we've got London accounts for about 120 of our members of staff our team we've got a large development and implementation center that is in Google in India and we have offices we have 11 other offices around the world we've got offices in California in New York across Europe Singapore Australia so we got we've got a wide range of we cover globally and give me a sense of kind about this at this scale you're at today what are you growing at year-over-year we're going around just under 30% you and yeah and now SAS revenue is growing at around 40% new and yet that's great nn you said you raise capital so how much have you raised today we raised thirty million with with Highland Lindsay on the capital yeah that's the only capital we were we were bootstrap for the first 16 years of our life and we then because of our expansion was just getting so great that we we took on some capital from Ireland Europe and that's been a great a great addition to our our business you turn to the dark side you couldn't resist it huh I turn to the dark side but I tell you what I love every minute of it now we're there it's it makes our growth even stronger so it's a great place to be did they prefer you or did you pursue them that you firstly pursued us we didn't ran a process through KPMG and we selected actually selected Highlander who had approached us previously because they really understood our business a small relatively small business a company in based in Europe and and really really you know got to know us quite well over the period and yeah as I say that it's been really good you know confidently reference the dark side but we found it to be most certainly very very insightful that's good now poff I took that 1200 kind of customer count you gave me and you said your minimum contracts are caught in a three couple thousand range I mean if I take three grand times twelve hundred that'll put you around three four million bucks per month right now in revenue is that generally accurate yeah we have about about four million bucks per month the mouth yeah that's great what um when you that's it's pretty impressive watch I want to take that back when did you raise what was the month we're anything June 16 June 26 and what was revenue at the point that you raised about 15 million dollars twelve twelve million dollars oh wow so you've almost 3x over the past six over the past 16 months or so with the money yeah yeah yeah we've grown rapidly during that phase I yes we have 15 million dollars back in the double yeah I want two things I want to get here one is that's incredible growth right bootstrap to get to fifteen million but it's also incredible how you've been able to you know bug people say yeah give me capital I can use it to drive growth and then the pro formas never check out you it sounds like you were able to spend it and the pro formas are checking out I want to talk about both so how are you you know pre-funding days how are you operating the company in terms of team size in terms of what your sales organization looks like and how you thought about...