How Silverlinecrm CEO Gireesh Sonnad grew Silverlinecrm to $54M revenue and 200 customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is garish sonat he is the ceo and founder of a company called silver line crm now setting the corporate vision and mission for the companies the technology leader and cloud solutions expert with proven abilities to execute and achieve business goals greece you're ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it did i make a mistake it sounds like you might have been brought in at a later stage are you also the founder or no i'm the co-founder yeah oh you are okay very good i love that all right tell us about the company you are the reason i'm looking forward to this you are in a very very crowded space which means you must have figured out some mousetrap to allow yourself to survive and thrive and i want to learn what that mousetrap is so what's the company doing how you guys making money yeah sure so silverline is essentially a salesforce implementation shop right so what we do is we help organizations who are looking to make digital transformation moves using a crm platform like salesforce um take the best advantage of that platform and do it in a way that most uh is most advantageous for their business yep now are you is this a professional services player is there a sas component underneath it's almost entirely a professional services play so most of what we do is is just what you think about consulting work and sort of timing materials type engagements yep okay that makes a lot of sense so walk me through first off who's feeding you the sales force leads or are people like they buy salesforce they google some pain point you know they get stuck on and they find your articles i mean what which which aspect are you fitting in on well it's a little bit of all things but primarily today we are a channel based organization right so one of our sales channels if you will is salesforce itself and so making sure that we're staying very close with those teams and very close to their partner alliances teams so that when the right customer comes along they think about us first and because you can imagine someone is out there looking to buy salesforce one of the questions that they ask and one of the questions that we and salesforce recommend is that you look to help okay and so those customers are always looking for guidance who is the right customer and uh sorry who is the right service provider and how can they help me yep and so i mean how do you fit in though i mean there are hundreds of companies that would put themselves in the sales force kind of partner category for you know consulting services so how do you get leads from salesforce that's a great question and something we chose very very early on was to focus very tightly on specific industry verticals so we you know salesforce is a huge place there's a lot of things you can do from a platform we very specifically said we are experts in financial services and healthcare and life sciences and a few sub verticals underneath that and so what we have told the marketplace is if you have anything that touches any of those ideas no matter how complex we can definitely solve those problems if it's outside of that area we'll help you find the right partner it's probably not going to be us that's really smart that that is your mousetrap that allows you to survive as you can say we don't do everything but we are the best at these two so you should win almost every deal of a sales force implementation on a fintech you know company we should yeah all right very good walk me through the history here when did you launch the company what year so we started the company in uh 2009 it was formed as actually a merger of source an unofficial merger between myself and my co-founder both of us were sort of the single man sort of consulting shops running around new york city with their heads cutting off trying to figure out how to put this thing together salesforce didn't have an office in new york they didn't even have an office on the east coast at the time and uh so we were in the network in the ecosystem found each other and said hey we think there's more to this whole idea what would happen if we combine forces and went after it together that makes a lot of sense now what does that actually look like from like a captive works perspective you guys just split it 50 50 or what oh yeah well and this is something that i tell a lot of people who are thinking to do this i mean one of the things that was great my company was a little bit smaller than his by revenue but we had a little more relationships and vice versa we agreed right off the bat split it 50 50 right down the middle it helped us focus on what was necessary to grow the company as a combined unit and so you know the cap table has changed a little bit over the years but um that's how we started the company how we operated for a great majority of the time it was only super powerful so what's the team size today how many people we've got about 325 people okay 325 and then most agencies are obviously bootstrap very rather do you see one raising i assume you guys are bootstrapped right we are bootstrapped uh but we did actually take on some investment last year um uh with uh an equity partner named pamlico capital and so we basically are recapitalizing the firm for continued growth and uh it went very well how much did they put in in what in what regard how much do they invest uh well we're not it's not actually public how much they invested but uh there is they're a significant investor in silver line and sort of recapitalized us in the right way going forward well let me ask a different question um a lot of times especially you've been around for almost 10 years now when i hear stories like this i'm like oh yeah it makes sense founders want some liquidity so most of that investment is probably actually the secondary not going towards operations is that what happened here you and your founder just wanted some cash no this is a majority investment so there yes at some level that was about taking money off the table but really it was about putting the organization in the right footing so that the next 10 years uh are are backed appropriately okay um sorry i'm not following it was actually most this money you didn't sell you and your co-founder did not sell any equity in the secondary it was all going that it's all winning the companies to operations no no no sorry uh it was an equity sale and we did sell okay we did sell the equity in the company we did take some money off the table yep um and we did sort of make sure that uh you know we got the benefit for something that what we've done over the last 10 years yeah i know i think i think it's great i think it's smart i have nothing i have no qualms about this i think you it totally is well deserved no well thank you i appreciate that and we did you know that was part of it but really what it was about too is to make sure that as we as organ as founders you know had bootstrapped the company to your point and we wanted to make sure that the company could continue to grow with the appropriate amount of sort of financial backing and appropriate amount of sort of power behind it right and so we did it in a couple of we added the pamlico folks to the cap table to sort of help with that yeah no no that's great do they have a a history of getting into kind of agency companies like this or why do you like them we love them because of that specific reason they have a cloud thesis that focuses on founder-backed companies in the sas based sort of services space so they knew very well the challenges we were trying to face and they knew very well what it meant to have a founder run or found an organized company and how to help that let me be ultra specific here um this is sometimes a shortcut to getting kind of access to other companies they've invested in if you sense that you could service a massive pool of you know customers that one of their other companies have like daxco which is a financial management solutions provider they invested in was there any kind of conversation or strategic analysis by junior co-founder going if we let them invest we'll get access and be the salesforce provider for all their other investments too especially the ones like dax go in the financial management solution space no not as a primary aspect of that whatsoever i mean really it was about us putting the organization the right footing to continue to grow with the pipeline that we have now sure that would be nice you know and if there are ways that we can sort of extend our network to find new customers in different places fantastic we'll take it yeah because they help that primary strategy they do absolutely for sure absolutely very good yeah okay and then give me a general sense so if a fintech companies by the way we have a ton of sas companies that listen to the show um a lot of them are in financial services our fintech specifically if they're thinking yeah we just bought salesforce we're totally lost what is like the typical customer going to pay you for implementation i'm sure it ranges but you know typically what's it look like well right now so our focus is around sort of the mid to to to mid-high in terms of company size and so we're our our engagements are looking to be a few hundred thousand dollars okay one kind of one time like per project or is that annually or something that's kind of one time i mean certainly we structure things a lot of different ways...