How eWorkOrders.com Hit $3M ARR with 300 Customers and a Team of 9 (Interview with Co-Founder Jeff Roscher)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

0:00Hey folks, my guest today is Jeff Roscher. He earned an MBA at Rutgers and now works and is building eWorkOrders. It's a computerized maintenance management system. Think work orders, preventative maintenance scheduling, asset tracking, et cetera. Jeff, you ready to take us to the top?

Jeff Roscher

0:15I sure am.

Nathan Latka

0:16All right. What got you into this space? It's a unique ni niche.

Origin Story: Starting with a Brother in Pharma

Jeff Roscher

0:20Well, many years ago I was working with my brother and he was he was an intern at a large pharmaceutical and really was working in the maintenance space. I was working at a different pharmaceutical in their IT department and they were about to offer him a full time job and I said, Don't take it, let's just start our own company and we did. So we actually offered them a discounted rate. For consulting in exchange for owning whatever we built. And one of the first things we built for them was a maintenance management system.

Nathan Latka

0:58I love that. Jeff, real quick, your audio is going, it's really volatile. It's like it's it's going between your microphone and then not using your microphone. So I don't know if the batteries are running low on your headset maybe or if there's another audio setting you can test.

Jeff Roscher

1:08No, they're they're high. it it it's good. I mean I could switch to a different microphone if you want, but I'm

Nathan Latka

1:15Yeah, it's happening even right now. It basically was super quiet, then really loud. It'd be really hard to fix that in post production.

Jeff Roscher

1:22let me change my audio. Do have to leave and come back in to do that? Or wait, there it is.

Nathan Latka

1:25No, you should be able to click the little audio icon in the bottom of your screen and change.

Jeff Roscher

1:29The other ones I have are grayed out. Yeah, it won't it won't let me change it. It's fully charged, I know that, but

Nathan Latka

1:36Yeah, so I I

Jeff Roscher

1:36And

Nathan Latka

1:37see you have three options a microphone Schultz Loop one ten, an HD Pro webcam, and default. Which one are you using?

Jeff Roscher

1:44I'm using the the shocks loop. That's the one here. It's

Nathan Latka

1:48Shock's loop. Yeah.

Jeff Roscher

1:50the one I use in Zoom all the time and it seems to be really good. And when I try to switch to one of the other ones, it it's grayed out and turns into

Nathan Latka

1:56Okay. It seems like it's more stable now. So look, I just I wanna be up front with you. If we record this and it is bad at the end, like we won't publish it, but it sounds like it's better now. So we can go ahead and keep recording it just as long as you understand the risk. Okay. All right.

Jeff Roscher

2:08Okay. I'll try and talk a little quieter, maybe that'll help.

Nathan Latka

2:11No, like it's perfect right now how you're doing it. It's like sometimes though the mic it just doesn't pick you up, and then you get really quiet and then it's really hard to hear you. So we'll keep going, okay?

Jeff Roscher

2:18Okay. Okay.

Nathan Latka

2:20All right. So you get going with your brother, your brother, Brian. You built this back in nineteen ninety-five. So you've been at it. I like I like the the focus for over 20 years. that first company you built it for, are they still a customer today?

Jeff Roscher

2:34they're not a customer today, but kinda through a chain of different names that they've gone through, we still have they they eventually one of their sites became Bristol Myers Squibb and they're still a customer at this point.

Nathan Latka

2:49I love that. Okay. So you're scaling, you're scaling. You're obviously seeing the dot com boom. You're seeing Saskett going in two thousand and six. What's the company today? respectfully, when I go to the website, it looks like, you know, you maybe you put some AI on it, but it looks like it's sort of, you know, it's pretty same. It doesn't look like some sort of AI pilled type thing. What are you guys building today?

What eWorkOrders Builds Today and AI Features

Jeff Roscher

3:07Well, we actually are building some AI stuff into what we have. you know, we are a true maintenance management system. you know, w we just keep improving what we have in the product. So like with AI, recently we we put in like an asset reliability report. So it looks at everything about the asset, it looks at labor hours, it looks at, you know, all the parts that were used, everything about the history and what it knows about it, and develops a full report. That a maintenance manager can use. Normally a customer would need like a reliability engineer to do like all this investigation. But our system will just do it with that, with a printed report right on their desk. Other things are like, you know, a work order comes in, something needs to be repaired on the piece of equipment. Our AI can recommend what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, so that a brand new technician can get in there right away. And and do what needs to be done.

Pricing Model and Shift to Enterprise Per-User

Nathan Latka

4:09And so if we go to your pricing page here, is this like one off agency work or is it recurring predictable revenue? That's high margin.

Jeff Roscher

4:16This is recurring predictable revenue. we started with like the starter package. In fact, we had a cheaper package than that, which is really like in as many users as they needed, and they could just use the maintenance system to do what they want. Over the years, we've added more features. We added mobile, we added document storage, things like that back in the 90s weren't really common. now it it it's much more common. and what we've been doing, we started a few years ago, we're trying to grow off of that unlimited user model. into an enterprise per user pricing so that we can scale faster. and about forty percent of our customer base now goes with the enterprise right from the get go.

Customer Count and Acquisition Channels

Nathan Latka

4:57Very cool. And how many paying customers do you have today?

Jeff Roscher

5:00We have over three hundred paying customers.

Nathan Latka

5:02How how are you getting those customers? Is it SEO, out do manual outreach, outbound? What's the strategy?

Jeff Roscher

5:08So it's SEO, it's AEO, it's sites like software directory listings like Capterra. You know, probably forty percent of our customer base comes from Capterra. we're we're the highest rated system that that's been out there for any significant time. we beat all the big guys out there with a four point nine out of five. We're also a four point nine out of five on G2. and lately what we've done the last year and a half, two years. We've really been investigating new channels. so we've been doing a lot more of Google ads, meta ads, bing ads, you know, things like that. And Google's really working out well for us. So

Nathan Latka

5:53Okay. So but but forty percent of your new customers per month are coming from Capterra today.

Jeff Roscher

5:58Well, forty percent of our customer base is from Capterra. but

Nathan Latka

6:02Okay.

Jeff Roscher

6:02you know, we've been around for a long time, so you know

Nathan Latka

6:05Well, on a go forward basis, so like this month is August, you're gonna add how many new customers this month and where will they come from?

Jeff Roscher

6:14we've probably had five or six and probably about half of them will come from Google, half of them from Capterra.

Nathan Latka

6:21Okay. Okay. And the Google experiments you're running, those are that's paid sort of CPC model. Okay.

Jeff Roscher

6:26Yeah. Yep.

Nathan Latka

6:27What kind of keywords are you bidding on and how'd you come up with that bidding list?

Jeff Roscher

6:31I have an outside agency that's really handling most of it, but most of it really is like preventive maintenance software or maintenance management software. we target competitors, you know, whatever it is that seems like it'll bring people in. So

Average Contract Value and Seat Counts

Nathan Latka

6:45I see. And and if we look at your how you're pricing, because we want to understand, hey, how quickly do get paid back? You spend the money on the ads, they sign up for pricing. What's the average customer paying you per month today?

Jeff Roscher

6:57The average customer i well is paying about ten thousand two hundred per year.

Nathan Latka

7:03Okay. Okay. So so like eight hundred, nine hundred a month.

Jeff Roscher

7:07Yeah.

Nathan Latka

7:07So the pricing page we just looked at together, does that mean they're buying multiple seats at the enterprise level, forty five dollars to hundred and twenty per user, you know, five, ten seats?

Jeff Roscher

7:16yeah, yeah. Twenty, thirty seats. Some buy more than that.

Nathan Latka

7:20Help me understand why. What's the use case where someone would need, you know, ten, twenty, thirty seats from you?

Jeff Roscher

7:26Well, in order to really use the system to get the best advantage out of it, you really want all your maintenance team using it. So every guy, you're in you're in a factory, you've got hundreds of pieces of equipment, you can't afford downtime. Downtime is extremely expensive. you're not delivering product to customers, you don't have you know, your your staff is just standing around waiting for the machinery to come back up. You need to keep that stuff running. So they have a huge team of maintenance people, they really want to predict what's gonna happen with that equipment. so the only way to get all the real data is to have every maintenance guy with a smartphone in his hand, you know, tracking what he's doing, when he's doing it, telling him when the next thing is that he has to do, where the parts are that he needs, so he can get it as quickly as possible. So yeah, every maintenance guy has to have it. And then all the management team that runs the maintenance department, they have to have it.

Nathan Latka

8:21This makes sense. So can I take three hundred customers times ten thousand two hundred per year on average? That would put you at about a three million ARR run rate today.

Jeff Roscher

8:31We hit three million yesterday for ARR.

Nathan Latka

8:34Congratulations. How'd it feel?

Jeff Roscher

8:36Thank you. Thank you. It felt really good. It felt really good. You know, it it

Nathan Latka

8:42What made it what made it feel so good?

Jeff Roscher

8:45you know, it's been a long time coming. There's been a lot of ups and downs. And you know, with with the model that we have, we don't get an automatic growth every year in the number of users, you know, when we we're selling a lot of those single departments. it it's a little tough to grow. So you know. It it really felt good 'cause we've been seeing it on the horizon for a long time and we've we finally eclipsed it. So

Nathan Latka

9:10And do you and your brother still own a hundred percent of the business? Are you bootstrapped?

Jeff Roscher

9:13We're bootstrapped, one hundred percent.

Nathan Latka

9:15Congratulations, man. That is so exciting.

Bootstrapped Philosophy and Legacy Plans

Jeff Roscher

9:19Thank you.

Nathan Latka

9:19So many people celebrate sort of, hey, go to the valley, go to New York, raise a bunch of money, go try to be Elon Musk and go public. But you've quietly built a cash machine serving customers you love for the past 20 years.

Jeff Roscher

9:33Absolutely. I mean we we built this as like a legacy, you know. Maybe we pass this down to our kids. I mean, maybe eventually we sell, but I mean that's not really our plan, you know.

Nathan Latka

9:43Mm-hmm. So Summer offered you ten million all cash today to you and your brother. Do you sell?

Jeff Roscher

9:48No. No. And we I can tell you

Nathan Latka

9:51You already have a nice house behind you, I can see.

Jeff Roscher

9:54th this is the vacation house, so

Nathan Latka

9:58He's already got a vacation house. I love this. Well, Jeff, look, I want to dig deeper now because there again, I I believe if you're trying to build sort of a life you love, it's actually much easier to do that if you bootstrap and play the long game. And you've done it. So, like, I guess what lessons have you learned along the way? Maybe start with just the story. So you launch in ninety five. What year did you break a million of revenue? Do you remember?

Jeff Roscher

10:23I don't remember for sure. I could probably pull it up here. Yeah, that was probably Well subscription revenue break in a million AR was like two thousand eighteen.

Nathan Latka

10:36Okay. Okay. That's great. A million. So look, that's a long haul. I mean, how w how were you supporting yourself between nineteen ninety five and twenty eighteen when you were still doing under a million of revenue with you and your brother?

Revenue History: From $11K in 2005 to $1M in 2018

Jeff Roscher

10:47Sure. So I was actually working at Merck full-time until ninety-seven. I quit at the end of 97 to do this. This wasn't even our first product. Our first product was a product called Treasury Docs. It was a signatory management for really large companies. It managed who could sign for what on which bank accounts. And when somebody would change, it could generate all the documentation for all the banks. So we got into a lot of large pharma manufacturing, energy companies. had a really big, big name customer list. and then, you know, we start we actually launched eWork orders in two thousand and four. in two thousand and five was our first year that we had revenue on eWork orders. That was about eleven thousand dollars. The whole time all along we were really doing consulting. You know, Y2K came around, we had a whole team of consultants out there doing things. in the meantime we're building software the whole time, you know, and Most of it was client server and another Fortune 500, besides the one that we partnered with, wanted in with the maintenance software. So we kinda we were it was still client server at the time. They kind of forced us onto their their platform, their database, their operating system. It was really painful. It took a lot of our time, a lot of our effort. and in the end, they didn't want to pay. So we were kind of looking at that and we we got them to pay. It was really difficult. But that's when we decided we're never building on somebody else's servers. We're gonna own the infrastructure. you know, SaaS wasn't a thing really in 2004. people were still calling them application service providers. And but we built the infrastructure on the internet so that we could control the access and we can control everything about it. And then we wouldn't have to deal with the IT departments when we approach customers because We could just roll everything out, all they needed was the browser and they could just get into the system.

Team Size and Keeping Headcount Lean

Nathan Latka

12:47But still twenty eighteen, you do you break a million of revenue. I mean, how do you make enough money there to pay yourself a living salary along with your team? Did you just keep your team really small?

Jeff Roscher

12:55yeah. Yeah. Our team was really small. back then I don't remember I think right then was kind of when we started expanding more. But in the beginning, I mean it was always meant to just be me and my brother. and then we want kinda had to bring some people on to do tech support and and do some other roles. But I mean, even now, there's just nine of us, so

Profitability, Rule of 40, and Employee Benefits

Nathan Latka

13:16That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay. So there's nine of you. I imagine someone watching this might be going, okay, yeah, Nathan, listen, I love it. This is the anti-VC strategy. Jeff has full control. But like, does he make enough profits so that him and his brother can take distributions or his team can take distributions? How do you think about that?

Jeff Roscher

13:33yeah, we're very profitable, you know.

Nathan Latka

13:35Is that like forty percent net income margin, eighty percent, ten percent?

Jeff Roscher

13:38Well, I'm not gonna tell you our margin, but what I can tell you is we've got your rule of forty beat. So, you know, last year we grew up fifteen percent. we got the rule of forty easily beat. you know, and we reinvest a lot of what we make. So, you know, it's going to an automatic contribution for 401(k) for everybody. We've got a cash balance plan, we've got a profit sharing plan, we pay for health insurance, you know. So really, you know, we're taking good care of our team, you know.

Nathan Latka

14:07What's a cash balance plan?

Jeff Roscher

14:09Cash balance plan is a type of retirement plan that the company funds for everybody.

Nathan Latka

14:15Okay. So reading between the lines, if in twenty twenty five you hit rule of forty, and rule of forty is growth plus net income, and growth was fifteen percent, that leaves twenty five percent left for the net income part or the EBITDA part. Is my math correct?

Jeff Roscher

14:29your math is correct. It's a little low, but it's correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:33I love that. You're living the life, man. You're taking care of your people. You're doing so I can see the joy in your face. You're financially secure. I can see the vacation house in the background here. What other advice would you give founders listening today that are maybe around the same age you were in nineteen ninety-five?

Lessons Learned: Early Mistakes in Sales and Targeting

Jeff Roscher

14:48Well, I would tell you not to do it the way I did it, because in the beginning we had this great idea and we were really worried. Our biggest competition at the time was a company called IBM. They had a product called Maximo. They're still out there. they had all the money to squish us. And we really wanted to stay under the radar. So I was kind of going out and I was the only one doing sales. I was calling people, cold calling, and I was mostly working towards government, like Department of Public Works type customers. we found out you should not target government. It's difficult to get in, it's corrupt, they just they take a long time to pay. you know, so we have a ton of verticals. That was the wrong one to start with. so that that's one of the reasons for like the really slow start that we had. was just really I didn't know anything about sales or marketing. And I was our sales and marketing department. So

Manufacturing Vertical and Predictive Maintenance Partnerships

Nathan Latka

15:44Which one of these industries I have on the screen right now is the one that you're most excited about, making the most revenue?

Jeff Roscher

15:48manufacturing.

Nathan Latka

15:50Why?

Jeff Roscher

15:51because we're we're right now in the process of partnering with seven other companies that do predictive maintenance. So they go into these factories and they put all kinds of devices, all kinds of sensors on everything in the equipment and basically it feeds that data back to our system. Okay, so we can tell when machines are gonna break. There their systems will identify when things should break and they'll generate work orders in our system. And then our, you know, their people will upon it, track time and materials. We can even automatically take material orders from some of these systems and put them right into the system so they have the full history of what's going on with their plant and can make better decisions going forward. That's going to make

Nathan Latka

16:34I love that.

Jeff Roscher

16:34us make it so that we can really upsell a bunch of the customers that we have now on some of these bundle products into enterprise products. Because they'll

Largest Customer: $185K Per Year Across 45 Locations

Nathan Latka

16:43How successful have you been on upselling? What's your largest? Don't name them, but what's your largest customer paying per year today?

Jeff Roscher

16:50Hundred eighty five thousand a year.

Nathan Latka

16:52Well, that's surprising.

Jeff Roscher

16:54You know? Yeah, they have about forty five locations using our software.

Nathan Latka

16:59Wow, I want to ask more, but I don't want you to give the company away. Can you share any more? Is it just because they have they have so many doors that you manage or so many data centers or manufacturing plants?

Jeff Roscher

17:08they they're retail and they have a lot of retail locations and it's pretty intensive retails w with a lot of equipment at those locations. So yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:18Really interesting. Interesting. Well, Jeff, this is quite a story. If people want to follow you as you continue building, where can they find you online?

Jeff Roscher

17:26they can find me on LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

17:28Guys, LinkedIn, eWorkorders.com. It started off as a sibling project in 1995 with Jeff and his brother Brian. Jeff said, you know what? I see enough here. I'm gonna quit my full-time job at Merck. That was in 1997. By 2004, eWork Orders had launched a cloud-based CMMS system. And ultimately in 2018, they broke a million dollars of revenue. Last year in 2025, they hit the rule of 40. Now here in 2026, they just broke $3 million of revenue. That's exclusively launched on the show because he just crossed it yesterday, which we love, with this team of nine people. And he's really taking care of them with cash balance plans, 401k contributions, doing this interview from his vacation home. This is the life, my friends. Jeff, thank you for taking us to the top.

Jeff Roscher

18:13Yeah, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Nathan Latka

18:15All right, guys, cut. Jeff, what'd you think, man? Is that what you expected? You have fun?

Jeff Roscher

18:19it wasn't what I expected, it was better than I expected and easier than I expected. So that was great, you know.

Nathan Latka

18:24What do you what do you think was gonna be tough?

Jeff Roscher

18:27you know, I'm not really a good numbers guy and I know you're a real numbers guy, you know, and I'm not because I'm not in the VC world, I'm not listening to people saying all these acronyms all the time and I thought you'd be hitting me with a lot of acronyms, you know.

Nathan Latka

18:42Listen, we don't need acronyms when you're printing twenty percent net income.

Jeff Roscher

18:47my god, you know, it's it's great.

Nathan Latka

18:49I wish more people would do it. I mean, honestly, in the age of AI where anyone can code, like the path to financial freedom really is building your own company and being very happy with four or five million dollars bootstrapped with thirty percent of income.

Jeff Roscher

19:01Yeah, you know, I don't know where like what our kids are gonna do, you know. And so if our kids take an interest in this, it's like come right in, there's something for you and it it's a great source of revenue. And, you know, it it'd just be a shame to give it away to somebody. I watched all my competitors sell out and like all their products get rolled into other products, they become a feature, they're three levels deep into some other big conglomerate, and as soon as they get bought out, like they disappear. Like you we don't see them as competition anymore. when when we're talking to customers and like MaintainX just got bought out and they're raising all their rates and I mean we j that one that we just closed yesterday, it was down to us and MaintainX and of course they picked us. They're like, We like your product much better. It's like, you know?

Nathan Latka

19:45That's awesome. Well well, thank you so much. You were a real joy to meet and I enjoyed learning your backstory. All right, Jeff. Take care. Bye bye.

Jeff Roscher

19:52Yeah, thanks Nathan. You too. Bye.