Salesprocess Revenue (2023)

hello everyone my guest today is darren ong he's a passion executive director and co-investor for high growth sas and private equity and the private debt sort of ecosystems he invested in food fintech and sales process dot io early on darren you ready to take the top yep okay so so tell us about sales process dot io what does the company do and why did you invest sure so uh sales process is basically in three uh keywords is growth consulting programs so uh what we do is we've actually had about 1200 plus client successes in really clearing the product market fit the client mindset as well to grow their business at the maximum like per day you know tweakings for sales and marketing and legion outbound prospecting and so far so the consulting program yeah grows their business der sorry let's try and be specific here so you've worked with a bunch of different sas companies time hero is one of them explain to me what you guys did for time hero so so time hero uh we actually looked at the initial um product and platform and what it was is we found that the team were still not you know getting the right product market fit so the ideal customer profile that they had was really you know targeting a certain sector of of niche and that's where you know the consulting helped them to identify niche and made even pricing adjustments to their packages that you know resonated with the actual sector that they were very uh compelling for and you know that really ramped up the sale sales and that you know spearheaded them also going for our program where it's a remote sales install where we actually do hiring vsls and video sales letters to you know high candidates to become their remote sales so just be clear for time here time hero paid you to do pricing work product market fit work and they also hired you to basically for you to hire sales people on your payroll to sell time heroes product is that accurate not really uh the remote sales is going to be uh time heroes sales uh remote you know in terms of their team but uh you know everything they do we we do a coaching as a service so you know ramping the the sales wrap up you know through the whole year-long execution program so what does it cost typically what's the customer paying you per month per year so our gold packages come at 15 80 15 800 per year and it for platinum it's at 21 800 per year and uh for our diamond package which where it's one on one with nick cosman it's at 55 000 u.s per year and who is nick cosman next uh basically a dot-to-dog you know uh in fact he started off you know with the sales evolution that has you know come to at this stage where he started dollar dollar sales and he actually scientifically worked out the foundational copyright um and he patented it trademarked it then you know that uh had a slew of you know other um scientific uh methodologies like product market fit yeah just to be clear nick is not a scientist when you use scientific that's you kind of putting marketing driven he's not a scientist but he he's a great copywriter and he's an experience he's engineering he's an engineering graduate yeah and he built a system for his process yeah how did you find him what year did you meet um so about three years ago i was like really looking at how to you know uh spruce up my own uh sas uh software what was the software called uh so it was called uh in fact was the first uh version of fluid fintech it was called good mobile g-i-r-t grit mobile okay so you met him you paid him in 2017 to do work for you yeah yeah and and it really you know from 800 000 u.s it just ramped up for the whole year up to 5 million u.s so what happened to grit mobile what was it today now it's uh it's fluid fintech so good mobile is now you know renamed rebranded to fluid fintech and what's it do so uh we have distributed ledger technology fintech uh it also covers uh even payment remittance solutions so um the whole commute of uh you know remittance uh we actually do for businesses credit unions financial institutions it's been doing really well uh so now about 300 000 users on the platform so is it b2c or b to b a b to c i got it so you have 300 000 consumers you have 300 000 consumers using you how does influence fintech make money so we it's uh based on the transactions that uh you know the 300 000 uh we have some that are very basic and then obviously intermediate and then advanced transactions so they pay you know different sort of transaction fees for different programs that we have for fluid fintech so when you say grit mobile hit 5 million in revenue back in 2017 that means you processed 5 million in transactions through your platform yeah okay and you were taking about what percent one or two percent uh actually we had at seven percent okay got it so you're taking seven percent got and so obviously nick comes in he does work in 2017 2018 it's now fluid fintech today and obviously so we can understand the impact of nick's work help us understand in 2020 or in 2019 how much transaction volume went through fluid fintech so it's now uh looking at touching 18 million are you guys still taking seven percent uh at the moment it's more like you know prorated sort of about six percent okay why do you look like you're thinking deeply about something was that a confusing question it was no it was like you know 6.3 but it's it's going to it's six six percent okay so 18 million flowing through the platform last year and you taking about 6.3 percent means on a gross revenue basis the company did about 1.1 million in gross revenue before expenses is that accurate yep and are you still involved with the company yeah yeah i'm a director i'm actually expanding uh for the asia pacific and middle east yep interesting okay got it so so what would you say nick helped you do to grow from 5 million in total transaction volume in 2017 to 18 million in 2019 yeah okay great uh question so in terms of the website the landing page the branding um what you know the foundational copyright for our solutions for fluid fintech was harnessed and re-emphasized to you know the target audience which were the b2c users so that was the first second was you know our packaging in terms of the services you know basic intermediate advanced then also use cases case studies a lot of you know work went into driving the outbound prospecting ad traffic uh so darren sorry the website the website gets like no traffic i mean i'm in the reports right now for ahrefs and semrush you don't even register on alexa traffic rank as a top site not even in the hundreds of millions there's there's only two sites linking into the site there's very little design i don't even see pricing plans that you just described why don't i see any of that are you are you at f-l-u-i-d-f-i-n-t-e-c dot com yeah sometimes it's yeah okay i mean i'm looking at the reports right now there's no traffic i mean so when you say he drives you traffic via ads and built your inbound engine well there's nothing here to show for it there's no traffic yeah so so we we actually have 23 credit unions if you if you have a look at the copper website we market through these uh you know credit union so they are like mini banks so you know the ad traffic is coming from them so the the users as well are coming from these 23 credit unions so this is bar credit union limited tubercarian district credit limited uh st jar lofts credit union etc exactly okay interesting so back to nick you decided to invest in sales process how much did you invest in why'd you do it so i've invested uh almost about 30 000 usd altogether um and you know just just for a mini uh you know shareholding uh in in the you know their common chairs so so how much equity do you own one point 1.2 percent okay got it and how did you i mean obviously you know you have to value the company when you make a thirty thousand dollar investment you're valuing the company you know what is that somewhere around yeah two point eight million your va is the value right if you own one point something percent for 30k yeah yeah so that was back then right now it's you know really spruced up it's touching maybe about 800 000 us a month mrr so you know basically you know it's spruced up quite what was it quite a lot what was it doing back in 2017. what was it doing back in 2017 2017 was uh uh really was only doing about 150 000 uh mrr so yeah it's been the last few years has been you know fantastic because of uh the power of remote selling and kovit has even made remote selling a must now for clients so what was total revenue in 2019 2019 total ar total revenue total revenue uh touched about not touch total revenue you're fine you're filing a tax return you put this number yeah 16 million one six million yep and what do you guys think it'll do in 2020 uh going by the 800 000 it's gonna touch easily easily about 20 20 okay you said in 2019 it was doing 800 000 a month in revenue on average yeah yeah so it's it's already uh passed a million uh in terms of month recurring monthly recurring revenue um the last few months so the last few months has been you know probably month on month been growing about i'd say 15 how did you do 16 million in total revenue in 2019 if the average monthly recurring revenue is 800 000 per month that would be about a 9.6 million dollars in revenue not 16 million where'd the extra 6 million 7 million come from yeah okay so so we have some uh major consulting programs as well that we hit the bigger clients which are you know in the billions i mean the clients that are doing you know sales in the billion so that one is uh also computed into you know on the bigger programs uh so got it that one's kind of yeah to today let's just take a flash point in time what a customer's pound average per month to use the platform i know you have three plans but on average was customer pay per month average is about 21 000 per month uh no uh per year per year so sorry two thousand dollars per month something like that and how many are paying today monthly they are paying uh 1200. you have 1200 customers today actively paying you yes okay just so just be clear over the next 30 days there's gonna be 1200 individual people paying you on average two thousand dollars yes that should be okay that's 2.4 million dollars a month you're requiring revenue you just told me you just passed a million in mrr these numbers are off by factors of 2 and 3x darren what's going on yeah so i mean it might be that some of the 1200 uh you know already paid up yeah you know in full so yeah maybe maybe you know when we look at the monthly recurring revenue it's probably a breakup of half of it so half half of it are paying on a monthly some some are paying you know slightly different programs so you know the remote selling program is a monthly program so the other programs i think they are you know different programs that really you know come from a tree installed base and and some are on monthly monthly how many people are on the team now it's 59 59 people and what's sort of the split how many how many are engineers uh we've got five engineers now okay and and how many sales people sales if you just uh look at salary uh it's seven okay then the rest are all uh commission only how many of the uh are full-time team members not not including commission only people so seven five twelve twelve uh twelve are full time and then you've got like 40 essentially contractors that are commissioned only okay yeah you pay them nothing if they don't drive you sale yeah what commission do you pay if someone brings you two thousand dollar a month customer what do you pay them in commission 25 um for one left for one month or for the full 21 000 annual contract uh for the full uh tcv you know 21 000 contract got it interesting if they if they double team uh then usually the there's usually a discovery and there's a demonstration so if they double team for it it's uh the discovery is 10 and then the uh closing the deal is 15 so got it it's still about 25 and how long how long do these customers typically keep paying you per month i or do they pay and then sort of stop after a year yeah so that's what i was trying to get at some some uh you know remote sales is a monthly program so some are you know broken down into three um like payments um and some you know uh you know go on a monthly uh spread so they typically you know it's a whole year uh the clients are very you know uh sticky so we've got you know we had a renewal even you know uh as as we speak this month uh all all was pretty good for renewals uh for this month what is that who's question you have 12 how many what's your churn annually a churn um the churn is about 17 okay got it so if you sign up 100 customers exactly 12 months ago uh about uh you know call it 83 of them would renew yeah got it uh what's the game plan do you guys plan to sell the company or keep driving growth or what i mean this is really a consulting business you're not going to get a sas multiple yeah yeah so um basically i think uh uh nick's really you know leading uh he he doesn't he wants to just you know have a lot of profit optimization uh before profitable is it profitable today definitely yeah okay do you get do you get do you get monthly payouts uh yeah yeah how much money what was your monthly payout last month uh that was about seven nine in u.s dollar seven thousand nine hundred and how did he get to that number so we've we've got valuation we've got you know uh in fact you know the irr and the how how he's um like doing the financial statements and so forth so so he takes it from you know the financial statements that uh come in you know it's quarterly so quality so well i mean maybe a better question is last month what was profit how much hit the bottom line is cash flow i think uh for each um engagement at say at 21 800 the profit looks at well can we just look at the whole business so just all last month september of 2020 what was total profit in september of 2020 september in percentage it would have been around 40 percent what is it in a flat number because we because we we pay the commissions right so that's about you know it prorates to 20 percent or what i understand what's the flat number though percentages are hard 40 of a dollar is 40 cents that's not that impressive even though if it's profit yeah like 20 25 uh is the commission's then maybe another 35 is the implementation team you know we've got to actually have the five engineers working and stuff and then you know another 35 uh just uh darren i understand you have 40 profit margin what i'm asking is what was the number are we talking a million in profit 500 000 a profit a hundred thousand in profit instead this month september 2020 you know like the two or nine you know like the figures just uh upset for 40 of you know the 18 million uh or whatever that you know i mentioned earlier the percentage of the terrible this is this this month just happened sorry i don't understand why you're talking about percentages on projections if you just look at september you're about to close out september what will total profit be in september it's not being computed yet that's that's what i'm trying to do okay what was it what was it what was it in august what was it the month prior then the last month that you completed what was profit enough this would have touched about a million one politics give or take about 440 000 okay and why do you guys decide to pay that out instead of reinvesting it back into the business how do you make those decisions uh yeah so so nick actually has uh you know a lot of mastermind events now so he's he's reinvesting on on a lot more on these strategies for the premium the diamond package where you know he's going to actually have a lot more tracks in terms of the mastermind events seminars and so on so these are more on the uh you know uh his diamond program uh that he he meant uh sort of uh gives a a very harnessed look in terms of you know uh and so on he if you know the background he he was also you know previously uh mentored by all the the greats you know like kylo tai lopez and and so on got it i think people will make their own judgment yeah sure sure those are very different business models than building a true sas business i think people in terms of that space the folks that are respected the most in terms of building a true sas business from that space are folks like russell brunson which click funnels is 97 a month or 2.97 a year or a month it's a clear sas product not selling a one-time event or consulting sort of on the side it's truly a true sas product there is no true sas technology products here correct it really is all consulting consulting yeah yeah very good very good still impressive right great consulting business let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book that be guerrilla marketing number two is their ceo you're following or studying jeff bezos number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company close number four how many minutes of sleep are you getting every night six hours right yep situation married single kiddos uh kiddo already uh trio married very cool and how old are you i am 50 this year 50 congrats last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. i think uh amazon and google shares guys yeah guys very good you just met darren today he's an investor in sales process.io which is a consulting company albeit doing fairly well twelve hundred customers doing about a million dollars per month in revenue highly profitable uh darren put in thirty thousand dollars back in 2017 after he hired nick who runs sales process data to run a project for what's now called fluid finance that company did so well he said i got to invest in this guy he did the company is now growing they've got 12 people full-time on the team about 40 consultants who are commission only sales people five engineers that look to scale and continue to scale the company darren thank you for taking us to the top yep cheers nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sass we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big 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