How Execvision CEO Steve Richard grew to $313.8K revenue and 50 customers in 2023.

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 top 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top dribe this week's winner of The 100 bucks that I give away every Monday is Kim dust she's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side Kim congrats for you guys this chance to win 100 bucks every Monday simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to officially enter again text the word Nathan to 33444 for after you subscribed so folks something very nerve-wracking happened while I was on my way home for Christmas I was on American Airlines flight 1272 flight 12d I get off the plane and I realize I left my MacBook Air 11 in in that back seat pocket I panicked cuz I have so much sensitive data on this computer because of all these companies I'm acquiring I mean hundreds of due diligence stocks so I needed that stuff secure I'm using a tool called jamp now which allows me to manage on my Apple devices I'll tell you what happened and you'll learn if I got my knock book air back Midway through this episode in the meantime try jams now at Nathan la.com secure that's Nathan la.com secure Nathan lka here this is episode 5:32 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from Kate and Tim they' raised 1.5 million bucks and just passed 100 Grand a month to recurring Revenue by helping 800 customers manage and track documents Top Drive good morning Nathan laa here our guest today is Steve Richard and his mission and life's work has to help as many sales professionals as possible become wildly successful he's been featured in numerous Publications including the Harvard Business review the Washington Business Journal and the Washington Post outside of work Steve enjoys scuba diving skiing running and watching lots of football he lives in Arlington Virginia with his wife Ellen and their four kids all under the age of seven Steve are you ready to take us to the top let's do it your company CEO and4 kids what are you drinking in the morning believe it or not not coffee generally I'm out of the house running at 5:30 try to get back just in time for the kids to start wake up and get them breakfast that's great all right tell everyone real quick so you're you're founder and CEO of execvision doio tell us what it does and how you make money yep exactly so the whole idea is uh business and sales organizations have all these conversations these conversations are assets to a company and what we're missing is the way Sports coaches uses use Game film on the field going back to football in the uh in the bio when you started out and as a business owner myself I was always frustrated we've got a lot of people on the phones a lot of people doing demos screen sharing meetings I was frustrated that we didn't have the ability to do anything with those there was this call recording Paradox so it's uh execvision is a software is a service product and it's being used by about 50 organizations at this point to improve the conversation is there 50 paid organizations Steve 50 paid correct that's okay and then walk us through exactly what they're paying for tell us about the product sure sure it it allows you to access analyze and share call recordings and understand what's going on inside because there's like I mentioned before this call recording Paradox I always our business had call recording Nathan and nobody did a darn thing with them we had this big pile of unusable call recordings even doing something simple like listening to it and and then saying oh you really need to hear a minute 309 something interesting happens here was virtually impossible so we solved all those problems and and we're also solving problems around reporting on things like are your salespeople talking too much versus are they listening enough are they asking questions um how can you build a library of the best calls for onboarding new people in your organization and okay so I have some questions about the product before I do that they'll help us understand just kind of customer size so on average what's kind of the average customer paying you per month sure on average uh 17 $20,000 per year um and and it ranges in size we have one customer that has five people that are on this five sales people customer success all the way up to Someone Like A HubSpot okay but if you do do a weighted average it's about a 17 to $20,000 annual contract value typically that's correct okay so is it fair to say I can just take 50 customers uh uh obviously do the multiplication you're doing a monthly arpo somewhere around 1500 bucks at that ACV value and then uh can I do 50 times 1500 to get somewhere around uh what is that 70 grand at mrr you you you you you can estimate pretty closely that's right okay good okay so let's go back to the product so look there's a lot of things you know Uber conference records your calls says hey you were talking too much and gives you percentages thing you hear all these different tools that kind of touch on different things that you do but the question I always end up talking to CEOs about that are in the space is just like adoption right I mean even the name exec Vision if I'm an employee I'm going I don't want my Executives to be spying on me like I this PR how do you convince people to actually adopt this thing and use it on a daily basis well the funny thing is they love it so um one of the things that lessons that we learned now Nathan I actually did not build this technology from the ground up we acquired it we were the customer a customer of something called team visibility okay and uh and and we found that people hated that it used a camera that sat on the on the top of a person's computer and it was almost like the eye of moror watching them um they revolted they aimed it into the ceiling tiles um but what we learned from it was was really relevant people want to have the opt-in program and people are looking for feedback especially Millennials in sales jobs customer service jobs support jobs they want U mentoring feedback from senior folks so we uh what we do is for our customers we we put a a coaching request button into whatever their system of record is Salesforce whatever dialer they're using something like a sales law insidesales.com something like that and then they can go and say Hey I want to have feedback so after they they're done with a call after they log their call they say coach me so now all of a sudden what we went what we did is we went back and put that into our our Salesforce and watched what our people did in our services business we've got 35 people on the phone in a separate Services business that funds this technology and what we observed was fascinating every month the percentage of calls where the Reps asked for coaching and feedback went up it was almost magical and I've got the data to prove it and and we see the same exact thing happen in other organizations so it's a question of how do you make it be the right flow so that a it's easy for managers to do something with they can action it they can listen to it what are you doing what are you doing with that what are you doing with the audio and or visual content so that the manager doesn't have to go back through and actually listen to the hourong phone call is there something you're doing to translate kind of voice recognition into text or something to then drive action that's exactly right all the calls are transcribed all the calls are keyword searchable all the calls are indexed based on uh data from CRM like Salesforce um other crms as well so that rather than going in and saying hm what what should I listen to and there's this big pile instead you go all right I only want to hear late stage opportunities where the salesperson use the word value I want I want to hear what what that part of the conversation sounded like and how the customer reacted the prospect reacted to that value conversation so that takes an exercise that would have taken before probably an hour and takes it down to 30 seconds do you have to then train a salespeople to use like the keywords to actually make the thing searchable like what if I use the thing okay hey I'm glad you like our features let me talk more about what you get exactly with this pricing plan or I could could have said what you get for this value like how do you in other words how do you train the salese and relate that back to the Search terms to actually make this stuff valuable you you find out what the best people are doing differently and you clone them you finally have a way to clone you know we've been looking for a way to clone our top performers forever but we really didn't know what they did in their sales calls now we know so when we identify something they do um the customer in the customer's instance of exec Vision they can tailor the keywords on the keyword display you can search for anything else Nathan but just like any other human thing if it's right in front of their face they think about it so if they're looking at 15 different keywords that we know are critical or topics that we we know are critical for a salesperson to hit on it's kind of like jazz it's like hitting the notes in jazz then in all the rest of the conversations once we teach the salesperson hey you got to hit these notes then after that you go back and you say are they hitting the notes and it's either yes or no sometimes you pull up calls and you see all those 15 words that are critical they get a zero next to every single one of them well what what what what are we talking about here because we're not talking about the right stuff got it makes good sense okay let's go through some of the economics now that we understand more about kind of what the business does what is the so you said you bought this thing what were you doing beforehand or are you still running that other company that you were doing before you acquired this one we are yes so there's a company called foresight V RS ght it's an outsourced appointment setting business um really interesting Market in that there's more demand than there is Supply so at any given time all of the different appointment setting vendors out there are raising their price and they have no trouble because there's more people who need meetings than people who are willing to get meetings you can think of it as like sales development reps on demand so we've grown that to 35 sdrs For Hire um being contracted by companies like tipco maretto corporate Visions those kind of people at the end of a trial period can they go in-house or no uh so what in that business most people pay us a fee per meeting some people pay us a fee per time and for the most part it's a supplemental to something they're doing inhouse so they do a little bit themselves Outsource to us as needed that's what we see and we use the we use the profitability from that organization to fund exec Vision we also pluck the best talent from that organization to put into the exec Vision sales and customer success organization so is this did you launch this boot totally bootstrapped or have you raised capital for exec Vision we have raised Capital since then um but when we originally founded Vite back 11 and a half years ago it was completely bootstrap did no debt no investors for 10 years great at the 10 year mark 10 year anniversary my business partner CEO David Stillman looked at me I'm I'm actually the chief Revenue officer not the CEO but he looked at me and he said hey man what are we doing you know like we've been doing this for 10 years we essentially built a lifestyle business when we were like 35 and said you know are we just going to ride this thing or do you want to go you want to go do something meaningful that's going to change the world and we said hell yeah so that's when we went and bought team visibility um and then since then have have built it up to the numbers that you talked about before and you know more than anything else Nathan the thing that drives us is salespeople getting better you know and and and there there's a lot of companies out there that are tackling this problem of conversations or Black Box lot what's that who else who name oh if you go into the big call centers they've been T tackling this problem forever Interactive Intelligence nice systems baren there's just a ton of of of technologies that do kind of sort of similar things that we do but they're really built for like American Airlines call center got it um if you look at if you look at a a typical B2B sales or B B Toc sales organiz or service organization this is a completely foreign concept to them they never had anything like so back to my original question how much have you guys raised for this concept so far so um between everything involved around a million okay and what did you you said you bought it in what year uh year and a half ago okay so that for people listening to this episode later that would have been early what 2015 or late 2014 it was April 2015 2015 okay so so mid 2015 um you raised it what' you buy it for well it was it was uh all uh uh Equity okay got it so so is the current team still with you guys or did do you replace them they now have equity in the company no there no none of the original people that were involved are still involved at this point but they have Equity yes many of them do got it yeah and I I don't want to go into any any any significant detail there but you can get a sense for how we how we struct yeah no that's fine talk to me about about churn what's your gross customer churn monthly it's over we're retention is over 90% annually annually looking really good and you can you can also run the calendar MTH so we're seeing all of our of the first deals that I sold after we acquired uh Team visibility all renewing right now and they're renewing well north of 90% so when you obviously don't know this because you're you're fairly new but when you're projecting and estimating how much you're willing to spend to acquire a customer obviously you want to relate that back to lifetime value do you obviously it sounds like it's more than a year so it's more than 20K but do you know do you have a back you know napkin estimate what the lifetime value of a customer is uh we we don't yet because it's too soon but you could guesstimate that it's going to be Depending on time value of money multiply times probably somewhere in the range of seven to 10 one would think based on years on the high renal numbers that you would have yeah could be could be that high we don't know I mean the reality is Nathan we don't we're not sure at this point yeah um what what we do know is is we've got a nice ratio of um of uh uh 8 of ACV to to to customer acquisition cost so what is that what's your what's your C what's your C currently Steve just f it out for us cost something ballpark 70% I think it is or 65% of ACV of ACV yeah LT LTV over ACV long term but we just don't know what the LTV is gonna look like Steve let me just drill down on that so the audience can quickly round out these numbers so you said CAC is currently about 60% of LTV or sorry of ACV ACV is about 20 Grand that's annual contract value so so 10% of that or sorry 60% of that take it back out is somewhere around what 10 or 11 Grand per customer Ballpark and where are you spending that is that are those inside sales reps traveling paid marketing where's that money going inside sales all inside sales how many team members do you have right now we have five oh wow okay how many of them are doing inside sales exclusively all of themy are they're either doing sales development or or inside sales okay wait so is this a tech product do you have a tech team oh yeah we of course we have a technology team sure so what part of the tech team is of the of the five people oh Ste Stevie cut out uh we can't hear you say that again total head count in the company is around 15 15 yeah and of and of those 15 people five people are in sales uh there's another person in customer success nice okay good and where are you guys based where's the team based Arlington Virginia very good good texting up there getting there we were we were the most improved player last year according to it's a far it's a far cry from San Francisco and New York and Boston and Austin but it's uh we're getting back very good well Steve before we get into the final few questions of the episode last I always like to ask if you remember what your first year Revenue was in the business do you remember what that was I guess that would have been 2014 going back going if you go back to the foresight business I think the first ge's Revenue was like $120,000 and then where did you round out 2015 at Allin I think between the two it was 5.2 or something like that okay okay but you're currently at 70 grand per month in Mr so a significant portion of that is not coming from exact Vision it's coming from the other company right exactly exactly and the services business funds the technology exactly and just and just the uh exact Vision what are you looking at somewhere around 500k in 2015 uh in terms of what in terms of total revenue yes although I'm looking at it more in terms of like an mrut okay very cool good where is the best place for folks to connect with you online if they want to follow you as you keep building this thing absolutely well you know we do this thing called call Camp Nathan it's free sales training we do it monthly everyone who's listening you're crazy if you don't get involved with this um so if you Google call Camp and Steve Richard you'll find the link or if you go to exec vision. call Camp is all over it um and just have your team sign up listen every month we've got these incredible sales experts we analyze real sales calls for what works so uh like I said free monthly sales training take it take advantage of it so guys I told you at the beginning of the episode I left my MacBook Air on an American Airlines flight in the back seat pocket on the way home for Christmas and I was so panicked from a security perspective and I will tell you so many CEOs that I talk to and entrepreneurs they worry about security so I'm using this tool called jam now it allows me to secure all of my uh Apple devices so iPad iPhone all that stuff and furthermore I can put my whole team on it at the business and if I have apps I want the all to install I can push it to all of them all at once or look we have to fire people sometimes if if you ever have to fire an employee you don't have to worry about them running off with passwords and Hardware you can lock them out very quickly and easily using this again tool called jamp now it's totally free you can try it at Nathan maa.com secure Nathan la.com secure totally free to get started and again use this if you have to lock in employees out keep yourself secure and remember look we have Russians hacking everywhere we have Yahoo a billion accounts hacked you've got to keep your stuff safe folks try what I'm trying na.com secure go there now okay top tribe I have to tell you many people go Nathan you came out of nowhere your website's growing so fast how' you do it the answer is simple so I use host skat I don't know if you guys know that but I use host skater and the reason I do they have like about 4500 free templates I can use cuz I don't code they've got a great e-commerce plugin and guys I bug the heck out of their support they've got 247 support which I love so what I've done is I've worked with them you guys know I make great deals if you go to hostgator.com Nathan you can sign up get your own domain for 30% off and a 45 day money back guarantee okay again I make great deals for you guys go to hostgator.com Nathan to grab that now all right guys we link it on the show notes that Nathan lat.com thetop 532 again/ the top 532 all right Steve let's wrap here with the famous five these are one word answers number one what's your favorite Business book RSVP selling by Tony Hughes number two is there CEO you're following or studying right now uh you you gotta love Tony beats on gold brush number three is their favorite online tool you have like acurity scheduling hour number how do you use Zeller uh because their competitive insights are phenomenal and it's free interesting number four yes or no do you get eight hours of sleep every night hell no I was gon to say four kids startup no way and how old are you uh 36 that's probably the hardest one for me to answer I to think about that one the most yeah I know right it's so la last question here take us back 16 years what do you was your 20-year-old self knew you you got to start with the technology company in the beginning because you're going to create much more impact on people top drive there you have it from Steve Richards start with a tech company will create more value they acquired exec Vision about a year and a half ago now up to 50 customers they raised a million bucks for it did about 500 Grand in 2015 Revenue $1,500 monthly arpo which leads to 20 about a 20K ACV they're spending about 60% of ACV on customer acquisition focused on helping sales teams get smarter with their team of 15 based up there in Arlington Virginia Steve thank you for taking us to the top thank than naan if you enjoyed Steve today go back and listen to Alex Babin yesterday they raised 5 million on a note uh that was the cap in it they're pre-revenue how' they do it top dri I love giving away free money I feel like o we're giving away cars and I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google ads well all of you listening right now yes if you're listening you get $100 in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the free $100 from Google right when you sign up with my website host provider HostGator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com Nathan again that's hostgator.com 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 100 bucks every Monday