How REVteam CEO Damian Thompson grew to $691.2K revenue and 12 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is damian thompson he is building a company called rev dot team rev.team scaling he's been scaling businesses since 1999 helping b2b founders grow from 50k to a million mr by building high performance revenue teams will focus on that today damon you're ready to take to the top let's go so just to be clear rev.team is this a business like is this a sas software you're selling or no it's an agency yeah so it's a service business right now but we're actually literally building out our first piece of it's always been i call it a sas sas it's a service as a software as a service business i'm trying to figure out where how to create the software right now the first thing i'll get will be a bit of an ats applicant tracking system okay so let's talk about what it is today so it is an agency what is the agency delivering today so we work with uh b2b founders 80 software people that's where i come from that have found product market fit say 50 to 100 000 in mrr and they want to grow to a million two million a month and they know they need to grow a revenue team but they're product people so i come in and i help them by building sales lead gen the functions the tools the team the tactics and how many of them are paying you like monthly right now to do this so i've about had a dozen people right now it's a dozen companies i'm working with um it's growing it was fluctuating around kind of like seven or eight but now actually built a team out to actually deliver a lot of it and so we've been scaling quite fast the last few months um because there's actually we've productized basically i would say 80 of it and when did you launch the business uh i mean this is kind of version three of it to be honest with you i mean you know it so it was originally it was a company called sales ability uh which was uh heavy on the training side um but this incarnation of it i would say is uh january of last year mm-hmm okay so 2020 and um where did you get those first you know one or two customers from uh so i you know i'm pretty dialed into the that kind of bootstrap entrepreneur software market the you know the rob wong's the world and microconstant those guys and so i've been coaching on clarity fm for a long time and so they're just kind of my people they're kind of the people that when i i've been selling them some version of service to help them it's the last decade and this was just kind of a the original plan was more a training coaching type business um and then when after covid really kind of turned that business to zero and because it wasn't a very wasn't important enough and i decided i said i gotta find that uh you know gotta find something that's important so not just a nice to have but a must-have and teams it was they wanted to grow teams yep and so what are these teams paying you today to use your agency services yeah so there's basically two models uh either you pay me 2 500 a month and i meet with you once a week and i tell you show you kind of what you need to do when you go do it or you pay 10 grand a month and i come in and i'm essentially your fractional exact your your vps sales one day a week it's not exactly a day that's the idea as we move forward now it's about deliverables so every 90 days every quarter we want to deliver something so you want a three person team plan territory recruiting done you want to have outbound created you know ready locked in 90 days done so we really focus on kind of a deliverable that's going to move the revenue needle every 90 days and how many of the 12 are on the 10 grand a month versus 2 500. uh it's a great question uh so i think almost half i'm just under five so for forty eight hundred mrr right now yeah like 12 says something like that yeah forty forty eight thousand or forty eight hundred no yeah it's about forty thousand revenue right and monthly revenue yeah that's great and what did you finish last year in total revenue collected uh well so i was zero in june of last year so you know i've gone from down low to zero and so finished jan december at uh i think just just over like 30 500 and we're at 47.5 to be exact right now yeah that's great and and um so ignoring like runway how much cash did you collect last year for this agency business rev team yeah so about so i did about two a little over 200 000 that's great well there's a step down so i've been i can run a consulting business to 300 grand every year 25 grand a month that's kind of that kind of ceiling uh so did 300 grand the year before under the sales ability banner doing the coaching and then but we had i mean the first half of last year was literally zero for the most part and so uh yeah did all that in the second half we'll do a million dollars this year mm-hmm and who is we so well as of uh three weeks ago it was just me still royally um but i actually have a small team now so i've actually bought on so i bring on some people around the recruiters i've got a full-time recruiter now that actually helps me do one of that police and it's someone that's actually helping on the rev up side around the process so there's three of us three of you guys okay um and do do they have any equity or you're the sole founder mr b okay and bootstrapped are raised bootstrap we love that as you know we love that what are some other great you know i have a lot of bootstrappers that listen to this and sometimes we just feel lonely it's like okay we have microconf we have indie hackers but like any other places you found to kind of sort of hang out um so you know it's funny because you know bootstrapped is such an interesting thing now because i think it's kind of like even rob talks about like fun strapping rob you know the king of the bootstrappers is you know doing some sort of capital raise right so i think that i think the spirit of bootstrapping still though i would say you know the earnest guys are pretty good the the founders summit you know those guys are i hang out with them a bit the no co who puts on who puts on the founder summit um uh it's the uh earnest capital oh oh yeah tyler and those guys yeah um so but i i really gravitate towards the no code communities because i just find there's kind of uh there's a hustle there to them they're generally you know it's kind of a bootstrapping mentality versus uh you know throw a bunch of you can't afford a hundred thousand dollar developer right so let's figure out how to make this work on something and so i'm spending my time there uh and then well what do you mean you spend time there so where is there what's so sorry yeah so i'm i so my plan for last year was i had about 10 or 11 events that i was going to speak at or kind of attend in some fashion i'm a networking kind of guy and so that's what i was going to do then of course covet happened and so in trying to figure out what to do next i ended up joining 90 different slack communities last year and uh and then kind of went through them i'm currently a member of about about i'm just about 30. um and people always get crazy about that one yes i spend a certain amount of time in there but it's also it's an ebb and flow so i'm not as good as you you're the king of batching and kind of controlling your time but uh but what i'll do is i'll come in at certain periods of time and there'll be there's times that the rev-ops communities i'm part of make a lot of sense i got something i can contribute there there'll be times that i'm in communities like with the bdr market actually name actually name a couple of these communities absolutely so i got uh well i've got part of well let's see here you know what let me do this real quick yeah you can bring it up right i'm going to do that but come on you must know the ones you're most active in by heart yeah right yes i mean so the big ones are so i'm a big part of rob's so that's the tiny c which is kind of microconf connect what's called is the slack community so i'm in there uh i'm in uh i'm in the founders summit one so the founder someone online uh i'm in the uh so i mean yours i'm in your sas your sas community uh i'm in a couple of hubspot communities uh i'm in the dynamite circle but it's pretty quiet they've gone kind of over back online um i mean what's the tactic you've seen of slack owner used to really engage the audience really well that's not like a usual strategy yeah um it's a good question you know i think someone who's kind of crushing right now is a sam thompson uh what that's what's jetpack is what he's calling it and he is uh it's he's done a really good job of engaging he's pretty young it's like it's like two months old like that but i found it just it felt i felt welcome to the very beginning um in the kind of paid non-really slack um drew uh for trends is crushing it on circle i really love that community like i really feel he does these daily stand-ups and he's kind of gamified it a bit that's really good um and so i find that it's now the community the community community the community slack where they call themselves like the i for that they're good and they're very good i would hope but i don't think it's the forum or the kind of the the platform as much it is just how committed you are to it what you're gonna do and are you trying to sop it from day one are you trying to do it yourself are you engaged um and if you're not engaged then you have someone that is right do you have like a true community person and i know communities that new hotness right now but you can tell the difference i mean i've been in a lot of them you can see the ones that are there just because they think they have to be and the ones that actually truly believe there's value damian five minutes left here i want to switch to actually what you know best rev teams right so scaling revenue teams what's the biggest mistake founders you know do when they hire their first sales rep they hire two way too soon um so they think that hey i want to get some i played i hate this i don't want to do this i'm going to go hire somebody and they're going to come in they're going to come build it for me uh that doesn't happen that person does not exist there is no such thing as a rolodex not only a role that's not a real thing anymore it never really existed even in theory right so anyone that could go build a business for you is going to build it for themselves so you're hiring an employee well i don't care they're very expensive employee if you're hiring an employee should that first sales rep have a quota or no uh yeah i mean well so second problem is you shouldn't have one should i or two always hire two um if you hire one there's only yes or no they either fail or succeed you hire two you get fail one fails and one succeeds that gives you that third data point that their data points important because now you know whether it's your problem the process problem or it's actually your personal problem so but yes absolutely it should be measured measured from day one and pushed hard sales people sales is the one role that even if you're great at it it takes work ethic forever it's like going to the gym you don't get to all i'm big enough often i don't have to work out ever again sales is the same way you still got to pick up the phone you still got to make the call you still got to go do the work and so a lot of times what will happen is people get there's some there's a lot of laziness there and so you've got to hire for kind of work ethic as well as kind of aptitude and that's difficult to do and then founders come in and then once they come in they don't push them hard enough when they get in like you have to stay on top of them so i tell people all the time if you hate sales you can hate sales management even more so you really need to have your processing should the first sales rep get equity in the company i think it depends i mean i don't know i i've got equity in a couple companies i i think equity is overplayed i mean very few people actually ever capitalize on it um and so i think that sharing in the wealth absolutely i do profit sharing i do bonuses i think that's absolutely valuable but equity itself i guess if you have a plan for an exit sure but most companies don't ever exit yeah all right damian let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh first break all the rules number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh ceo sorry yep you're following or studying sorry about that a ceo you're following or studying yeah i mean so i'm a huge i'm gonna show my age here i'm a bill gates fan he's the gangster number three what's your favorite online tool for building rev team uh so hubspot number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh recently before four and a half okay that's not a lot man that's not healthy it's not it's very unhealthy what's keeping you up oh just i've just been busy i told myself this time i wasn't gonna scale out the team until i got to 50 000 um a month and uh so that was just a lot of work but now i'm just scaling the team out so i'm trying to get some sleep all right what's your situation married single kids marry two kids okay and how are you i'm 48 48 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh then it doesn't matter you know just you know there's no answer there's it doesn't matter i didn't figure out what i wanted to do until i was 48 so you know so it's uh it's it's uh it's a journey enjoy yourself don't get so caught up in you know worrying and and got to do the right decision all the time just enjoy it guys rev.team it's an agency that helps sas companies hire and build their scales and their sales and rev ops they've just they did 200 000 in revenue last year that this year now though doing 50 about 50 000 a month across 12 customers and building out a sas tool that he'll be releasing here shortly sometime this year to continue to scale damien thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan 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