How Connectandsell CEO Chris Beall grew to $25M revenue and 400 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is chris beale he's building a company called connect and selling he's a software technologist that really is now turned into a sales geek helping reps 10x their conversations when they use his software chris you're it takes the top yeah yeah all right so were you in sales or something and built this for yourself or how did you get the idea no i stumbled on this a former employee asked me to talk to sean mclaren it was the guy who came in and made connect and sell real five minutes later i was at breakfast with the guy and i said i'm in and he said what do you mean what if i'm not hiring this is a free country you can choose to pay me but i'm working for you now that's amazing when did you join the company uh 2011. okay so you've been there a while yeah because you came on back in i want to say february of 2019 i believe right i do believe so i was just in my new house in reno i remember that yeah that was a while ago so give us an update on the business right for those that are not familiar with what you do are you selling into any specific niche or it's any sales organization anywhere any b2b although we do some b to c pretty astonishing actually how well that works but it's b2b organizations they got to want to grow um you know so we look we call it curating dominance we we look for companies who want to dominate their industry dominate the market and we help them have 10 times as many conversations at the top of the funnel so they can simply uh eat up all the opportunity before their opposition makes a move you had 400 customers in 2019 how many today it's pretty similar we don't really grow that much in terms of customers we kind of grow in the intensity of them we're consumption based so the ones that are doing really well will consume more and so we sell a thing called a fully navigated dial which is it's essentially a flavor yeah a fully navigated dial it's a way for a rep not to have to do anything in order to talk to somebody on their list but just push a button just like all in an uber you push a button you wait you get a conversation we do all the work in the background and so when you talk about consumption what's the unit of measurement is it number of calls yes it's the number of number of dials that we're making yep how many dials did you guys do last month uh we did about well we do about 50 million a year so you know it's uh it's run rate of a couple hundred thousand a day something six million or so yeah that's impressive okay uh so six million across 400 folks and what are they paying you on average per month uh they pissed think about it more by the dial so an average dial will go from they'd start at 95 cents they go down to 40 cents and if you're buying millions at a time so they tend to be kind of more heavily weighted toward the guys buying millions so they they'll tend to average about 50 cents yep interesting i mean so 50 50 cents times 50 million dials it puts you at like a 25 million dollar run rate today is that something like that that's great now you were at about well you're at a like 29 run rate a couple years ago are you sort of going the slow growth model but stay bootstrapped in all business or what yeah we're bootstrapped we're profitable our tam is obviously everything in the world um we don't like giving up control to people who don't know how to run companies we think that's ridiculous and we have very low capital requirements our backend may have hundreds of people you know we have 500 people inside the system making it go but we've arranged to have zero capital required to grow that from 500 to a thousand to 2000 to 10 000. it's amazing and you told me you were making about 166 000 a month back in 2019 to the bottom line is that still the case in terms of profitability yeah it's it's a little bit better than that now yeah so uh you know we don't track profitability super super closely because we can just dial up uh go to market and r d as we want and kind of manage it but we like to make sure we got enough on hand to you know enough flowing and profitability-wise to do what we want to do in the market we think there's going to be a big growth year for us for two reasons covid is great for us i hate to say it but you know work from home came kind of attractively packaged in a global pandemic that also hurt the economy and when the economy is hurt people pay attention to capital efficiency and that's us for sale so that's good people got to figure out how to manage work from home teams that's not easy we give them perfect visibility and control and the reps love it so it's kind of a combo plate that's working really well right now and of it has all been tailwinds for us so we're looking to put on a big growth here and we've added a new product we call it flight school so believe it or not we finally figured out that we got to teach people how to talk on the phone manny medina asked me to do this about four or five years ago over a bourbon he said chris you're the only guy who can start a training a training class or training program that'll fix these darn reps out here and we need that and i said no no no we're not going to do that well we kind of got dragged into it kicking and screaming and now we love it it's a big part of what we're doing and we're launching it as a brand new product that's simple it's six people four big sessions they make money while they get trained which is amazing and it's all in ninety five hundred bucks if uh are you still close with manny you know we haven't spoken for a little while he's such a busy dude you know he takes all that uh that capital he's building that big thing but we're neighbors up there in seattle now so when covid's over i'm sure we'll get together if he offered you 250 million bucks to sell a whole business do you take the deal today no really i was fit that was quite quick now this is much bigger than that this is this is big big this isn't kind of big do you think you grow up bigger though be you know if it's part of outreach you know it's tricky when you uh when you get acquired by anybody it's very tricky to maintain control of where you're going i mean you're part of their thing instead of part of your thing and this is a very distinct way of looking at the world we have we believe conversations are the key to business we know how to produce them at scale and at a cost that is unbelievably low and we're talking to some companies much much bigger than them not about buying us but about them actually incorporating connect and sell into some surprising products like insurance imagine pipeline insurance being sold by one of the biggest insurance brokers in the world that's great you keep saying we what's the team today how many people uh 33 in north america about 500 and some 500 and change when you include everybody who works for the company under vendors of different places it's kind of an unusual structure we have a bunch of people inside the system who make it go then we have an ops team a development team different folks how many are north america full-time on your team worldwide full-time on the team is 33 in north america i think i just saw a note on that today so i bet it's correct although i what about world what about worldwide worldwide uh well worldwide in terms of full-time employees yeah actually employee employees is still at 33 everybody else is under some sort of contract i was going to say because my team did research i mean obviously research wise uh linkedin says like 80 and 30 sales reps etc but those maybe are contracted people at other companies potentially i i think people love connect and sell so much that after they leave they just keep it up there oh that's so funny they just leave it in their bio good answer how many engineers are the 33 oh none yeah whatsoever and the closest thing we got um that our software engineering team is out of pune with a company called cody tess um i've been very very close with them through the year so we have about spell it cody toss can you spell that c-o-d-i-t-a yes yeah interesting by a gentleman named mid-tool bid it's it's uh the the best leading-edge software development firm on earth right out of pune india people this is like if people are gonna hear this and go crazy because people are trying to find these teams and they they never know how to go to argentina they go to krakow poland they go to bangalore i mean how did you find this team in pune well what we did is my uh my cto hitesha is iit bombay double degree guy uh three companies maybe four of them depending on how you count and one day we were having a beer and talking it over and said you know we got to help something happen that's leading edge development in india and he happened to be living in pune for a while and so we you know we helped nurture something into existence and now it's 300 plus people and it's just simply awesome but no maintenance none of the bs that they do in some places that's fine stuff right but all leading edge development all product how fast are you hoping to grow this year with flight school getting added you know i'm trying to double it i'm thinking you think you need to 50 million this year yeah i want to go on a double maybe you know maybe get to 40 but it's hard to say but flight school looks like just an incredible engine to grow the company and it is sales yet have you sold any of flight school yet yeah yeah we've we've been selling it for years as part of the product we're just going to bring it up and make it the product oh interest and is it it's a coaching product really it's professional productive service yeah it's actually it's like a training class except instead of going to training and coming back with a bunch of stuff in your head go to training you actually talk to customers you make money and you come back knowing how to do your job so it's all live fire and literally make money they make thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars during the training itself because they're really doing selling they're setting meetings at the top of the funnel and driving business during the training process itself hell of a story here man let's uh let's wrap up chris with a famous five number one favorite business book still crossed in the chasm never will be anything else number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh good lord you gotta gotta look at what jeff's doing because he's not a ceo anymore yup jeff bezos number three what's your favorite online tool for building connect and sell for for building them yep oh man gosh i don't know if i have one of those that's a terrible thing isn't it what do you use the most if i open up your internet browsing history what's going to be the most common site it's going to be our own thing connect and sell lightning because i'm always checking to see what people are doing besides your own though besides your own it's a terrible thing right what do i actually use i'm a very boring guy right i build tech i don't use it so i've used like gmail i mean i'm really a boring dude when do you spend lightning out of the film product for teams to manage themselves lightning itself that is oh it is a product you sell it right now yeah yeah connect cell lightning is technology with humans on the inside it feels it acts and feels just like tech you don't ever know that's got people in it but unlike things without people in it it actually solves the problem and it saves you about 85 percent of the money you'd spend doing it with people it's crazy i meant to ask you by the way and saving money the team in pune india how much do you spend per month really on all the head count over there the whole engineering team all together oh engineering i don't really know engineering is like i don't know i don't really know 40 grand 40 grand for the whole dev team maybe i don't know i'd have to go look it's not i don't pay much attention to it i'm not i pay attention to stuff at the top line it might be a bigger number than that but it can't be much bigger i don't know that would be shocking let's see if it's 100 a month that's 1.2 million a year on your dev team for a software product doing 25 million bucks in run rate i mean that would be an incredible ratio of debit expense to arr yeah we have the advantage of being a bunch of old guys who build millions of lines of code each personally so none of us are being bamboozled by engineers who are saying stuff to us that's like later later it's like i just go look that's two lines of code go do it yeah it's so funny i love that okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night five and a half and situation married single kids uh single getting married uh to somebody whose quote is a lot bigger than mine oh i love that okay any kids i have four four kiddos and lost one have four how old are you how old am i oh i'm 66 66 years young what do you wish you knew when you were 20. about me as i do barefoot endurance running so i'll get out for 20 25 000 steps a day trotting or walking or whatever barefoot wow and um last question here what's something you wish you knew we were 20 chris ambition woman was 20 to change things just change things guys connect and sell a rare story bootstraps to 25 million dollar run rate today they eat their own dog food have a team of 33 people all their engineering done in pune india on a team call it they pay 50 to 100 grand a month really incredible he thinks with a new part they've added that they can double or are at least get up to maybe 40 million dollar run rate again totally bootstrapped launched back in 2014. uh they've just launched a new product called flight school again they sell based off how many dials they set up for customers processing over ready for this 50 million dials last year chris thanks for taking us to the top nathan always fun one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday 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