How Richter CEO Robert Cornish grew Richter to $12.3M revenue and 15 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is robert cornish he's the founder and ceo of richter and companies he started the company which is a bootstrapped in 2008 beginning of the economic collapse currently he owned six companies and made the inc 5000 list five consecutive years today he works with many of the largest b2b companies in the world robert you ready to take it to the top ready to go all right so tell us how you're working with so many of the largest b2b sas companies in the world you know for i mean for us it started uh you know we boosted up the company started very small and it just started to really kind of elbow our way in quite frankly i mean to get the initial logos i remember getting um sap and getting hp and and sort of getting traction there but it was very hard initially we had to really aggressively sell and and kind of fly under the radar on some some companies like maybe win a little sale and then get the logo and get in and win some people over and then from there it kept building but i've been obsessive about it for probably eight years what's the what's the product though robert first oh yeah so for us we do a lot of video content um that was the that was usually the foot in the door we created a lot of video content for the sales journey so when you think about any one of these enterprise level sales that they're doing they need content to help support that journey so video is a lot of what we do nowadays we've kind of evolved to doing a lot more but video is a big part of it yeah so on the website you talk about video campaigns enterprise and then you list many of your large clients disney cox netgear etc so did you come from these guys i mean how have you landed them as logos yeah just being scrappy no i didn't come from them um i did grow up in a business that um you know my dad helped build to a significant size over a billion dollars and and so i think there was some familiarity for me quite frankly i i think there's some lesson there from being close to it and seeing it and that always kind of stuck in my mind but um and so i always wanted to go after those kinds of companies companies that are a billion plus and and it just came down to networking it just came down to cold calling and just doing the work and making the calls and making the relationships and i think when you're brave enough just go do that you can break in and we just continue to break in break in break in make those calls and i think a lot of people are sitting there going how do i get att or how do i get this company but you know the truth is these people are are people just like you and i obviously and and i know you know that you deal with all these people and you've interact with everybody and and i think that ultimately you have to understand that they are just people with problems that they need to solve and you have to find a way to get to them and and have a compelling offer so we'll dive into one of those real stories in a second you know how you landed at t what you actually did to sort of weasel you can get your way in there nudge your way in i use the word weasel that's negative i should say forcefully push your way in um but let's start let's start from like macro level for a second so revenue total revenue in 2019 was what 2019 was about three and a half um that was actually a really tough year for us to be honest we were actually down my mom passed away uh and and i had to buy out my partner in 2019 it was a really tough year um you know we we typically do around four or something you know for better and it was it was a rough one for us what did you do in 2018 uh 2018 was about four okay and what do you think you'll do this year uh just under five yes okay got a four eight and so let's sort of break that down right when you did three and a half million last year um you know talked about like one of the services that one of your big customers paid and maybe tell me the story of how you delivered yeah so that was our that would be our enterprise program and so what we ended up we sort of moving away from transactional and moving into what we refer to enterprise and that's looking at the entire sales journey from start to finish so when you think about a b2b sale and you think about everything that they go through from the initial contact initial lead all the way through to a closed deal and you start looking at all the gaps in between and think what do they need if you're in b2b sales selling something that's enterprise um we look at it from a product box cube that we created which is basically marketing sales training and customer experience and so by breaking that down to how do we help support all those different things that's what we did essentially with att and it just happened with them that they needed a huge amount of training so we basically ended up mapping out their sales journey they were launching directv now okay uh the product directv now and they had like 2 300 sales reps on the ground that needed training and there was inconsistencies in terms of what was happening and what they were doing and so our job was to basically build a repeatable scalable training model and so we helped do that to train new sales reps selling this direct cb program right and the people on the ground so they're all saying and doing the exact same thing so they could take those that series of content that we created we built out a series of nine videos some drills and some other things and they can deploy that through their lms learning management system to make sure that everybody's doing the same thing and those are there were 2300 reps you trained on that yeah well they they they would deploy that through the lms how many reps though were taking your program watching the nine videos doing the drills somewhere around there 2300 reps yeah okay and so so that the reason is i'm curious how you build do you build based off number of reps that are consuming the content or something else no we we just have like an enterprise contract a budget that they commit to per year uh i think in that scenario was two or three hundred thousand or something like that um it wasn't all for that but it was part of that went to training what else goes into the if they pay you a quarter million bucks what else what are those they get you know some of it's just alicar to be honest different divisions that need different different things related to sales enabling um but it could be like i said it could be from marketing sales training and customer experience so for example we might be building out um when you look at the sales journey might be mapping out their sales process and arming the team with everything that they need to help follow up and follow through and nurture the sales cycle we found that on average people follow up about three times but it takes 18 plus contacts to actually close a deal so there's a big discrepancy between those two and you start looking at go why are they not following up and you start finding that they're running to call reluctance they're running out of gas so these large companies are spending a huge amount of money on driving the lead in the first place but then they're not uh really supporting the sales enablement side enough to actually see through and get a close deal so we start creating content whether it's decks case study material uh experience trailer content all the different things are going to help win confidence and and and give them tools to save the course and close the sale and in a given year like 2020 here it sounds like you work with what between like 10 and 20 customers something like that well right now i mean you know we have 200 projects going at any one time and right now we we have many many customers we don't have like a large agency where they only have 10 or 20 customers that are working with um so we actually have quite a lot more than that so how many how many how many customers are you working with today who are paying you for for your services you know uh you know right this minute it's probably somewhere around a hundred um but in terms of the enterprise contract uh you know it's probably probably somewhere around 10 or 15. yeah okay that's i'm because i'm backing into 5 million sales this year 200 or 300 000 contract prices that would be somewhere between 10 and 20 customers right and so we're in the middle we're in the middle of transitioning to more of a more contracts right you know we want to have we want to have 80 contracts and and 20 transactional right now we still have probably 80 transactional and moving in and twenty percent contract so that means this code for your moving downstream you want more customers paying lower prices so there's less concentration risk yep why make that decision a lot of people go the other one go the other way it just seemed to work it's working for us and and it's it's the numbers are showing up in terms of you know our growth and what we're doing and also it allows us to really invest in the company like with att we can really focus on helping them solve problems and put more people internally on a t to deliver better customer experience better work hire better talent right now we're talking to some some people who are bringing on board...