How Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar grew Kovai to $32.5M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

good evening everybody uh it's a always a difficult session uh after lunch and I hope Dan Martell and James has warmed you up uh to for the for this session so I think you know like when uh Nathan Latka asked me about doing uh doing a session on SAS hope and like you know you looked at multiple options like a growth hacks and SAS metrics and this and that and there's enough content now on the on the market to learn all those things so I thought you know what can I share from my personal experience like uh we've been in the business for over 10 years so I learned quite a lot in terms of uh how to scale the scale the business from 0 to 10 million plus and I I just thought I'll just share more of my experiences uh building and scaling scaling this business so my name is saravana Kumar and I'm a founder of a company called uh called kovai.co so this is a quick a very high level recap of the of the company so the company was started back in 2011. uh I just uh you know I was doing consulting for 10 plus years and I found a gap in the market and I started as a solo uh founder and then slowly scaled it to First from one employee to five employees to 20 employees 50 and then now today we are about 250 plus uh people in the in the organization so we are over 10 million dollars say ARR but they're slightly old number so it's a it's a 2020 21 number so we are above that's a publicly uh disclosed uh disclosed data so we're also a multi-product company like uh uh that's a I'm going to touch base on like why we are a multi-product company and what made those decisions to go into a multi-product company and the the mission for us is you know when you when people ask you like your viewer bootstrap what are you trying to achieve and the objective for us is to to build a 100 million dollar run rate business by 2030 like a sooner sooner if if possible so I just want to go one slide forward so this is a kind of the growth trajectory like how we have grown uh since uh 2011. so it's it's not like a like a hockey stick growth but it's it's organic uh growth of constant uh predictable growth over the last uh last 10 10 years so until 2019 it was like a study study growth and you know like that is when we we kind of made a decision like you know what can we do to scale uh bigger a lot of things changed since uh 2019 until 2019 we were only like 50 people organization uh you know if you wanted to put the number per head counted a number uh per employee like it would have been significantly higher when you compare 2019 data but today we operate more like uh VC funded uh business model so we invest pretty much everything and then we are ramping up everything towards uh towards growth so let me go back okay so today you know like uh today my talk is going to be like more on the personal level like uh like uh as a CEO like uh being a grown up this company for 10 years like what are the things you have learned and you know like I just bucketed it into three different items things you know like at a personal level as an individual whatever things I do and of course as a team like if my direct reports and how do I handle them and what are the things I I practice on a day-to-day basis and at a company level you know what are the things uh things we do so let me start with the with the personal uh personal thing I think one of the key things as you grow as a CEO is when you have like 258 50 people like one thing that becomes super critical is how do you manage your uh manage your time so in in my case you know I'm just I try to keep it as simple as possible and my calendar is pretty much free I keep everything uh in like a one point uh one if this this is how my calendar looks this is a typical week my entire week is the first 1.5 days you know like uh I got but the management meetings on the day one and then some items on the on the on on the on the day to Tuesday and after that you know like it's it's all about uh uh just ongoing activities and you keep it try to try to keep it uh as free as as possible um so so I think that the other important thing is you know like uh what I learned is everybody got an optimal time right I'm a typical like early morning person uh so I wake up at 4 30 in the morning and then first three hours is a completely you know kind of an I brought it more like a non-negotiable so I do only like a really high performing uh activities like you know you don't check your emails you don't check your slack or teams or whatever you are using that time is purely you know like uh you do like uh things what you wanted to accomplish on the day so a lot of times what happens is within the day within that three hours by 7 30 in the morning you know your my day is pretty much over like you're accomplished what you wanted to do on the day because after that once you reach the office around nine o'clock you know you really can't control too much on how you your day progresses so this is something the habit I build up uh right from the day one because the initial days the since it's a bootstrap company and you know the initial days I built uh built the product myself and I was working for Fidelity Investment uh some of you from us that know the company so my day is like in the morning I built a product I go to work and that continued for a year and that became more like a like a habit and the second day you know you know like a enjoy your work and don't try to do things you don't like you know this is kind of a counter counterintuitive but you know like when you're at the early stages or as a Founder like you tend to imitate people right like you tend to you see somebody who's Super Active on social media and you try to try to be that person you know you are you know like you you see somebody a very good in in speaking in conferences but you know like we need to understand like not everybody is same right you have you have a strengths and you have your weaknesses don't try to do things which you are not comfortable with for example you know I stopped tweeting like uh five years ago I don't do I don't get into Twitter anymore like you know like because it's not my cup of tea and same you know talking in conferences not for everybody but if you see like somebody is doing and you try to do it you know the the problem is when you're trying to do something which is not your regular where you are your core strength is it tend to take you know five to ten times more of your energy and you might be losing more you'd rather you know like like do things which you are good done uh and the other the third point is you know like actively working on things uh you know you need to stop working on things on uh taking tasks what I mean by that is you know like you you should your thing your thinking should always be if it's if something comes along it should be more of you know who who can I delegate to rather than how am I going to do it so once you touch something you know at that scale when you have like you know 200 plus people uh once you start doing things of your own it's not the most efficient way you can you can operate because uh it's it won't stop just at that level you know like you do something and then the follow-up comes and it goes on and on it always think about how can you delegate it and how can you you know like pass it on to people when you have like a lot of people uh on board and uh the final point is you know like uh I you tend to do like you know like at scale you tend to do like quality is more important than quantity if you can achieve like you know like a two or three really good items in a given week that's a much more productive week than you know firefighting with a lot of things throughout the week you there's a difference between being busy and being productive right you you want to be more productive rather than being busy like you know if you keep you know engaging too much on your emails and too much on teams and at the end of the day you will feel like a lot of meetings as another Killers you know like if you do a lot of things at the end of the day you feel you'll feel like you're you're so too busy but probably you don't have to achieved anything so you'd rather focus more on you know like uh uh being productive and doing things which will yield you uh the right things when it comes to team the next I'm going to move whatever I explained so far is more on the personal level and the next thing is more on the how do you manage their teams and the first very important thing I want to convey is you know like as a Founder there'll always be difficult conversations right uh either your key resource is leaving or you know somebody is not performing well or the team a specific team is not performing at the at the max whenever this has a difficult situation comes in it's better...