How Promys CEO John Breakey grew Promys to $6M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is john braky he created a tool called promise which was created as a single solution that could support the growth and complexity of a multi-office iet full-service business they achieved the status of a highly respected integrator by developing industry best practices check them out again at p r o m y s dot com john are you ready to take it to the top i'm ready all right so on your website you say the company is the world's best crm help desk and professional services automation software what does that mean tell us about a customer who's paying you so what happened maybe just understand the background that i used to be one of our customers effectively and um so i really understand the business that our customers are experiencing and the issues the problems the challenges and so forth and so the product was really built with best practices in mind you think about a services-based business that also does the technology you name one john as you tell the story so it's a real story yeah sure so well the company that i was involved with was called eunice lumen and it was the third largest cisco partner in canada and it did an array of services from um you know if you think about from a consulting design implementation and post implementation services or what's now called uh managed services and so if you think about a company that's doing service-based business most of their profitability comes from their services not from the product sales that they do and so it's really critical when you do in a service-based business to really manage your utilization and to make sure that you're not losing money because you're doing work that didn't get built in addition to that as you're growing and you know our experiences we grew from 30 million to 50 million to 70 million and so forth and every time we grew at a fairly good clip it really put a burden on our cash flow and so it's really important to be able to think about how you're building customers how fast you're building customers and so forth so all of those best practices were integrated into promise in addition to that if you look at most people in the market they're using two three sometimes four different products to cobble their business together whether it's in the sales process the order admin process the delivery project services and the ticketing side of the service post implementation and what we wanted to do is have a single place where every time i updated something it updated across the whole system so john if an agency is listening right now with a hundred people working at the agency they can use promise so all their reps and all their workers can manage their time their inputs what clients they're working on how many hours worked things like that so you never miss a billable hour correct and also understood and when did you leave that bigger company to launch promise what year so it was there was a parallel process or cut over a few years but in 2011 i went full time to just drive the promise business and are you 100 owner of the promised business or does that agency own a bunch of the business no i'm a majority owner but there's a secondary uh owner as well uh was that an investor did you raise money or have you bootstrapped no we actually uh took money that we had from other businesses and use it to do our own investment so it's an actual partner uh not an investor if there are they also a customer of the tool no they're not active in the business anymore they're all doing some other things so they're just really acting in the border by a board of directors oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a 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go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview interesting okay but you own call at 60 70 they own 40 30 something like that exactly right right okay interesting so you launched this in 2011 uh tell me more about these customers these big agencies that use you today on average so what's sort of a sweet spot that they pay you per month to use the technology how much do they pay per month on average yeah a sweet spot yeah so well if you look at it it's based on a seat license and there are two seat licenses there's a field license or technical license and a full license for the sales people and the admin people and so you're looking at on average about if you blend those two rates together about 59 a month per seat and how many seats is your average customer um the average customer is about 40 45. okay so you're talking these are like these are like sales motions where you're selling 2300 2400 a month plans uh roughly yeah that's right yeah okay interesting and do you have a big sales team what's your team look like today how many folks no there's only about three and we do a lot of it through marketing and referral and like all of our sales are done remotely we don't have to visit the customer sites which is kind of interesting in a code world and the sales cycles anywhere from about a month to about four months roughly uh our customers range from the low side about 10 users on the high side about 150 as an average but what they do and they're in sectors so we have people that are in the it integration business we have people that are pure msps or managed service providers we also have a group of physical security and fire suppression and fire security and fire alarm system companies they all have the same common problem they sell equipment they need to quote the equipment and the labor they have to deliver the equipment and the labor and then they want to do post implementation support and that's really the sweet spot for our stuff and that that account that's 150 users i imagine that's your largest account what does that acv represent is that like 100 000 year contract uh that's about right yep okay wow and um have they been with you since since the beginning most of our customers have been around for five plus years uh in that case some of the larger ones have been around for almost 10 years and where we lose customers is actually sometimes they get bought or they go out of business these are the smaller ones yeah and how many how many customers are you working with today john so we both have uh i guess approximately about 150 200 oh wow okay that's a lot you're managing 150 customers at 2 300 bucks a month with a team of three people no no no no that's the sales people are three people oh what's a total team uh the total team's uh 15 plus another five that are subcontract on the like so that if you it breaks down into support uh like customer service and so forth implementation training and the other part of it is the dev development we're always doing um uh updates and releases sort of you know adjusting to what what's the need for in the marketplace so we do a new release every two to three months actually but john is my math right can i take 150 customers times 2300 a month on average to get your monthly revenue or no um i'm not sure i don't do math very well but oh that that would be that...