How Safety Evolution CEO David Brennan grew Safety Evolution to $650K revenue and 155 customers in 2022.

guys safety Evolution broke 54 000 a month just recently up from eighteen thousand dollars a month a year ago a lot of that growth came from acquiring 450 000 bucks of ARR when they bought their smaller competitor called Safety Tech which uh which they gave uh 40 equity in the combined company in order to get that deal done it was a non-cash deal which is great he's proven either you have an Enterprise motion they've got their biggest customer already paying 55 000 bucks per year which is currently about eight percent of their total ARR he's obviously going to look to continue with that motion as they look to break a million dollar run right hey folks my guest today is David Brennan he's an experienced CEO SAS co-founder and safety professional he's driven by a passion for technology he's focused on creating user-centric software that is disrupting the safety industry he's passionate about building and creating High performing teams at safetyevolution.com all right you ready to take us to the top David yeah let's do it all right so so what does this mean safety for who and how is a software so um it's our uh ideal customer profile is oil and gas service and construction contractors so we focus in on that 500 to 1000 employee range and so that gives you a little bit of an idea where we're going but we really um look at safety as a as a function of your business and so we have spent a lot of time digging in to better understand how we can change safety from compliance to an actual tool that that helps your bottom line and protects your Workforce and is proactive in what it does so oiling mainly oil and gas companies uh oil and gas service companies and construction companies interesting what kind of service companies so so what we do is the the uh the differentiation for us and the way we narrow it down is there's a lot of companies that are the prime contractors on a job site and so what we actually do is we provide software for the companies that service them and build their projects so construction companies would be like the Electrical Company the plumbers the the uh form you know companies Carpenters that type of stuff oil and gas would be like Wireline uh Frac companies you know anybody that's servicing the main players in the industry interesting okay so I run a service company that dispatches plumbers to fix toilets in a certain zip code in Austin Texas and one of those plumbers took the thing off the top of the toilet dropped it on his big toe and like broke his toe and is now wanting to like sue me if I had safety Evolution you prevent that or tell me how you fit in so uh that's a great example so think of it this way when we build uh so whenever we have employees we need to make sure there's there's three major things that stop events from happening the first one is that they're um trained that they have experience and that you've verified that they have experience so your safety program does all that plus then it gives the tools uh to the worker and I think this is the big changes like so many times workers would fill out a document because they were doing a Compliance Document just to protect the company and what we're doing is we're moving companies away from that to where the workers filling out that document for them and so that process is really designed for them and and so there's so many constraints with things like uh with with paper and those type of communications that you can't actually see what's happening in the field so I'll give you a little bit of a story on like how this kind of comes into play on a major project if that's cool with you Nathan yeah yeah give us context first though on uh to tell where the average customer is paying per month and then tell us that story okay perfect so right now our our average monthly is about four four hundred dollars so annual contact values yeah we have to talk about that because that's up significant that's up over 2x from 2020 when we last spoke so let's make sure to talk about that that's climbing fast Nathan just so yeah so we pulled some if you want the business side of it there's some really really cool things that we've learned in the last two years of course I want the it's a business show of course I want it okay man well let's give you the let's give you the dirt so yeah so so just for everyone has context was saying okay when when we spoke in 2020 you were doing you had about 43 customers at 170 per month you were doing about a hundred thousand bucks a year in Revenue right yeah 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 the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your 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valuation 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 how did you take those customers are they the same customers paying more or did you fire those customers and just bring on more mid-marker Enterprise accounts so those customers are still there and so they are still significantly uh keeping the average down I'll say um since we last talked uh currently we've got 155 uh companies um we're at about 650 in annual recurring Revenue we purchased one of our competitors safety Tech um rolled them in in June and um did about a 180 degree pivot in our product and went from a very rigid uh system to now that was very designed for those smaller companies that's why the contract value was so low to now we're you know uh putting out proposals and and uh and signing contracts that are anywhere from you know 20 to 60 000 a year David what's your biggest custom what's your biggest customer paid today not contract you have out actually closed customer they paid yours close customer is is 55 000. wow okay got it so you have your biggest customer makes up almost 10 of your total revenue so this is a pattern that you've built technology that does have Enterprise motion you just now need to get more of the fifty five thousand dollar your customers how are you doing that so we have it's been really interesting to see because there was like a lull a covet law where companies were really I think they were just kind of worried about uh taking on new technology and so what we've seen here in the last probably six months is a significant shift in those companies that are we'll say contract value anywhere between 20 and 40 000 a year um they they pretty much make up about eighty percent of our pipeline now and so it's been really really amazing to see I mean we've we've had to go from a demo closed process to now it's full uh Discovery demo proposal and we're selling into a very well we're selling an enterprise process or or flow really and so we're seeing that in the contract value so that's that's where we're seeing the shift and and we're we're really um seeing a big pickup there in that in that uh vertical and if you're doing about fifty four thousand dollars a month today which is a 650 000 a year run rate you just shared with us do you remember what your run rate was exactly one year ago today foreign I think it was about uh 150 180. yeah that's you told me the email 200 so right...