How ServiceMax CEO Neil Barua grew ServiceMax to $150M revenue and 400 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is neil brewer he's the chief executive's officer at service max and a member of the board of directors he's got an extensive background in the tech industry and improving track record of growing businesses previously he was a ceo of ipc systems and during his tenure sold the company and led assassinated transformation of the company more recently he served as an operating partner at silver like the global leader in technology investing earlier in his career he was part of john legere's a leadership team that helped transform global crossing through consistent growth neil you ready to take us to the top let's do it nathan you're before my time what was global crop i was born in 89 what was global crossing oh you're you're a young one i'm actually turning 45 so now i've become the old guy in the room but uh global crossing was a very infamous telecom company that actually the world is benefited by now they laid undersea cables by which internet was able to go across continents and it was one of the hottest startups by the way i think the fastest to get to 15 billion dollars a market cap at the time startup that was formed by a founder called gary winick and uh i actually came to global crossing the day uh the company was declared bankrupt so that was my first day was the dot-com boom happened and uh the bust happened and global crossing had its financial issues and the ceo that i became part of john ledger ultimately also the ceo of t-mobile who did a great job over the last number of years uh him as well as the leadership team which i was part of we restructured the company and ultimately sold it to level three about eight years later so um it's part of the it was a little ahead of its time but uh you know we we got it back on its firm footing and uh it's doing great things for the world right now well congrats on that i wanted to obviously now shift back to service max i want to congratulate you but my research is a little confusing there was a pr up piece put out september 10 2021 that says it was announcing your second quarter fiscal year 2022 results but i don't know how you have a press release before 202 but you broke 100 million dollar run rate effectively in that release so i want to congratulate you but where am i wrong why is my timing messed up you know in the saz in the enterprise scale sas world that we're in like salesforce when they when they put out their earnings release the fiscal year is actually a year ahead because our fiscal ends january and the january and so it's a little clutchy but we didn't get the math wrong it was within calendar year 21-22 so uh we are very happy about the progress of the company for sure and way above 100 million dollars right now as i look at the arr as well as we currently are at the company uh at service facts what when was the last thing you guys disclosed publicly in terms of revenue run rate you know we were we were getting very close to going public at the tail end of last year in december and fortunately we've got great investors we're all as i said by silva lake who owns about 80 or some a large percentage of the company as well as ge and then salesforce ventures and we create a process to go public thank god we didn't go public because of what we're watching in the marketplace and as a private company we're able to still stay focused on customers and our employees versus all the mayhem that's going on with public companies but uh um i think the last disclosure we made was we were approaching 150 million dollars plus of arr so um really when was that as well as getting operating profit and free cash flow positive as well it's a big point of differentiation that we've done over the last three and a half years as a standalone company coming out of ge now that is that is impressive when did you announce that you passed 150 million run rate do you know i think uh november of last year november okay interesting exposure yeah now it's obviously hard to grow you know companies most companies dive on are doing 10 20 30 million bucks in ar they're venture backed they need to be grown 100 100 year over year it's hard to grow 150 million bucks to 300 year over year what's something like you target in terms of your growth rate you know our q1 run rate we're private company but i target it as 30 plus on organic and uh organic growth that we've been getting out of the business so we've been doing a 20 to 35 is kind of the the kind of vicinity where at scale it starts to make sense plus then you know view around profitability and free cash flow which we've been really focusing on as well in addition to the growth uh nathan 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 2 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 second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.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 and that makes sense considering your pedigree coming on a silver like which we'll get two more in a second but first let's like jam out on product here for a minute what is service max doing who are you selling to and what are they getting this is the best part of the conversation in my opinion so company was formed 15 years ago by much smarter people than me founders athani and hari uh built the company actually and was one of the hottest startups which ultimately got sold to ge i think in 2016 nathan for close to a billion dollars so did a phenomenal job with answering a question which is what we still do 100 focused within the field service management marketplace where in essence a product so i'll give you a real example i think this will kind of resonate with all your viewers and yourself phillips healthcare which basically does most of the medical equipment when you and i our parents go to the hospital mo a lot of the equipment is actually built by phillips healthcare right so phillips healthcare is a great customer of ours they procured our sas offering by which they have their technicians that fix those products and those medical equipment in those clinics or hospitals our software allows the technician to actually get scheduled route the right technician to the actual appropriate hospital it needs fixing get to the equipment and within the equipment nathan we within service max allow the technician to see what part to fix what's actually covered by warranty when do you actually close out the job by which the customer gets notified when do you actually then come back and maybe do uh additional maintenance plans beyond the standard maintenance plan so gives phillips healthcare an ability which is very important to have that service revenue resilience and customer satisfaction to that clinic or hospital by which if one of us or your parents or family members goes hospital that equipment actually works right and that's what our our product does from on a sas platform as you know um and a very compelling piece that we're the leaders in the marketplace six times magic quadrant leader uh for this specific niche which is an awesome niche to be in particular what's going on in the world who's who's in second and third place so i you...