How Oleeo CEO Charles Hipps grew Oleeo to $13M revenue and 400 customers in 2018.

hello everybody my guest today is jeanette master she's the managing director and head of america's at a company called olio at olio she drives growth influences the product and helps customers leverage technology to transform their recruiting efforts jeanette are you ready to take us to the top i am i'll do my best all right very good so titus and first when was the company founded and what year did you get involved sure so company was founded in 1995 which is relatively uh on the older side for a tech company i actually got involved with the company first as a customer uh back in i think it was 03 or 04 and they made the jump from a hr practitioner and a customer to heading up the americas six years ago now so it's been uh quite some time got it so you joined in 2012 2012 yes if i did the math it's 2018. yeah that's got it so they did they have any footprint in the americas before you joined uh we did not physically but a number of customers like goldman sachs and the time i was at credit suisse before that i was at lehman brothers which also was a customer which is a whole other story we could do i'm sure a whole podcast on the demise of lean i was about to sell i was gonna say okay the story i'm getting the story now it's starting to piece together here okay so uh okay 95 founded you found you joined about 2012 you're leading the americas for those that are not familiar with the product tell us what the company does sure so um oleo is a innovative talent acquisition tech company we really focus a lot on using artificial intelligence to help companies find the best candidates really quickly find the best match to you know find them engage them and ultimately hire them in a really fast way so that's really our sweet spot is helping companies like morgan stanley bank of america and bc universal with their uh high volume hiring needs and what is the uh what's the pricing model is it a peer play sas company here um it's a mix it is it is sas but then we do have a bit of uh professional services as well okay more if you look at the last 12 months of revenue more than 80 to sas yes okay good so majority sas majority set got it and so every kind of talent or hr tech company i've interviewed prices differently here in terms of how they batch their different levels you know the old way was you know 30 to first year salary that's kind of out the window with new firms like you how do you batch your pricing is it like a number of hires per month or per year well you know it's a great point we've actually changed our pricing model um a fair amount over the past few years because we used to be a little more old old-school yeah to your point um so we we price on number of employees um and then number of products that because we have a whole full suite of talent acquisition products as well so depending on you know the more our tagline is more powerful together so the more the more you buy the more powerful prices you get this one is more powerful together so it's a combination there makes sense so help me understand i don't want to go down every customer cohort but on average what's a sweet spot customer going to pay you per year i'm assuming we're probably talking six figures here we we are you know um yeah uh we we always talk and and tess on mrr monthly recurring revenue versus arr so uh you know we we have customers paying you know we work primarily with a lot of enterprise size customers um given the names i threw out so eighty percent of our customers have over a thousand employees so we have some customers paying us they're buying just one of the products like you know two two to five thousand a month all the way up to that six figures um a month so a big big change but all in that big enterprise piece would you say a fair kind of average would be somewhere in like the five or 10k per month range is that is that fair yeah the majority are it's closer to that range and then we have some you know the runaways as you say i think the interesting piece that we've certainly seen in the market over the past a number of years is the pricing um in in sas and within hr tech certainly has has come down so a bit of a commodity pricing you know the the the prices that we used to be able to uh look at and people were willing to pay years ago uh that that's come down as you know the hr tech is you know the amount of investment going on and competitive nature we've had to you know many companies have had to readjust this what's your guys's investment history look like i assume you're probably not bootstrapped at this scale how much have you raised it yeah we're actually a public company oh you guys are public now okay great public uh went public um back in 2000 so um during uh the the dot-com boom back in back in the day so yeah so uh but but we did start out our founder and who is still our ceo and founder and chairman um ended up bootstrapping and starting the company from a previous company he had used that investment dollars um or were actually based in the uk originally so pounds i should say yep interesting so you're public so the revenue stuff is all public because you have to report it what size are you guys at today sure revenue is depending on the exchange rate um it's about 13 million um dollars so not you know compared to my days at a credits list a little bit different but but that that's that's about where we're at depending on exchange rate of course were you there when the company did go public or you joined after i joined after okay joined after yeah i mean so like in the states obviously you know i interview i want to say maybe 10 of my interviews are with founders doing between 80 and 150 million a year and even some of them are like not looking at going public i mean in the states to really go public in the sas space you've got to be you know somewhere in the 80 to 120 million kind of ar range with some other healthy economics why do you i mean do you have any instincts into why they went public so early back then i think that certainly who was going public was very different model uh back back in the day versus versus now um uh very different the other interesting thing that's very different with the uk based company versus us that we found is we are profitable uh we always run into profit so the economics now of companies that want to go public you know profitability doesn't really matter it's more about the revenues um so we find that to be an interesting challenge um these days um competing in the us so what what our you know what we're trying to do is a little bit different from a profitability standpoint not just revenue yeah i imagine there are some probably large companies you compete with that are still private in the states with significant funding and way away from profitability yes that makes my job very interesting yeah i can imagine what does growth rate look like so if you had about a 13 million run rate today where were you a year ago yeah so um over the past two years our growth rate has been double digit we grew about 25 globally last uh we just look at the us two years about 33 growth so big bit you know bit big growth there um which we were you know particularly given i head up the americas we are excited about yeah so for people listening that are thinking about hiring their next head of europe or head of the americas or head of insert region name what is your day look like i mean what are you managing my day is crazy but everyone's day is crazy so you know i i focus on for better worst a little bit of everything whether it's you know product and what you know where we're moving the product and how it's going to look and feel you know i was as i said earlier i was a hr practitioner so i wear that hat of the customer um so you know attending a you know it might be a roadmap meeting um followed by you know i'm involved sales marketing so figuring out hey what's our marketing strategy where you know what what are we going to be doing what's the campaign look like um all the way through talking to a head of sales you know what what what's going on what deal you know what's the deal looking like um you know how many are coming in the pipeline what can we do better so lots of meetings throughout the day i tend to do my quiet work at night working on you know i do a lot of speaking so writing presentations and looking things over happens late at night after i put my children to bed yeah that's great and what have you so what have you scaled to now in terms of total customers on the platform uh we are over 400 um employers that that use that use of technology that's great yeah that's great so i mean i can take kind of a million a little north of a million a month right divided by 400. each one pays between 2 500 and kind of three grand per month something like that something like that quick math yeah i can't do math in my head no that's that's okay that's okay when you come in when you're building the sales team out for the americas help me and actually let's go macro and then micro so what's the total of the whole company total team size today total team size we're a little over 120 employees globally...