How SuiteCX CEO Valerie Peck grew SuiteCX to $1.8M revenue and 30 customers in 2023.

nice sweet cx360.com launched 15 years ago it's a Consulting plus SAS play the pure SAS Revenue a year ago was about seven hundred eight thousand dollars on track to do 1.8 this year and one of our other podcasts guests heard a Valerie on the show had mutual connections actually bought Valerie's company uh call for a three million dollar headline number she's now happily working at question Pro building that team uh learned a ton and again hoping to grow this year she did it all bootstrapped which we love hey folks my guest today is a familiar face Miss Valerie Peck she's the founder of sweet cx360.com it's customer experience design and Diagnostics you may remember she came on the show a while ago and she's got some news to share Valerie are you ready to take us to the top yeah we've been acquired so it's really interesting we're one of the unicorns uh that actually in this interesting time and age has gotten acquired we'd been talking to a number of people and one of the things that was really important to us was fit right so uh there's different ways of growing your business one of them is getting an investment and more people and The Wind Beneath Your Wings and so in talking to vivec was introduced to us by mutual friend Mark Mandel uh and he'll come to play in a moment as well uh we started finding all sorts of common uh opportunities uh we plug a hole for question Pro because they didn't have a tool to pull a lot of their different products and tools together and they fill a lot of little holes for us because they have the tools that we normally use on the Consulting side of the business so the way the deal went down well Valerian hold on before let's leave this open look so the audience can listen for context guys on Valerie again she came on the show back in April of 2022 and shared that they were doing about 65 000 a month in mrr so about seven hundred eight thousand dollars per year they were serving 30 customers and their motto was about a ten thousand dollar setup fee people were then paying a 26 000 ACV their largest customers paying a hundred thousand per year the smallest was 5K per year and in 2021 they had a nice blend of Consulting Services Professional Services and pure SAS growing nicely she's bootstrap they're going 10 to 20 percent year over year so she retained her optionality to do whatever she wanted he had no board she had no crazy evaluation she had to sell for so Valerie on that note first off correctly if anyone that was wrong but on that note what we did have a board but they are very flexible and have been with me because uh they the two three of them were my my uh Partners or with the founders of peppers and Rogers so um they they all were all for what we were doing in in the loop of all of this and in fact Don Peppers is a good friend of the Vex so one of the interesting things when you do networking and Acquisitions a lot of times the who you know as well as the what you know becomes important so when people try to triangulate around whether a deal is good or not right it often comes down to the people as well as the numbers you so quickly uh put it out so that was really interesting so after it was a good probably four months of up and back with a couple of little halts in the middle uh we came to an agreement and uh we sold the intellectual property of the consulting firm to Suites CX and then uh the team at the question Pro so purchase sweet TX so that was back in October of 2022 and uh we've had a little ramp up since then so we've gotten a little bit of a grace period to start understanding how we're going to integrate our business as well as integrating the products and solutions and in the meantime we got a whale of a client uh one that had been an art client for a couple of years doubled again what they had been doing from a a functional perspective with us and I think our contract was 550 000. so that was a nice welcome present for vivec and his team and since then we've been a paste doing pretty much the same thing as we have been doing and now we're just on kind of the precipice of really starting to take uh an integrated approach so our editorial calendar our webinars all of our marketing tools and tactics and things like that have all been percolating a little bit as we've been running as a fully separated subsidiary but now we're starting to fold things in right so that's going to be really interesting Valerie what do you think inside of later inside of question Pro what do you think just the sweet X business line will do in Revenue this year uh we're expected to do between 1.8 and 2 million okay and are you watching rather than yep rather than the 20 increases uh we're looking for a 50 increase that's great deals like this is five percent there now 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 valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation 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 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 around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your 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 deals like this die a thousand deaths before they close take us into the war path tell me tell me all the time this deal on this died why did almost die what were the terms well there were two really critical pieces critical piece number one was really getting to an agreement on the fit again that was really important to us how would we be working with the different departments and you know the the kind of the bottom line was uh gee I can go to anyone and get surveys now how am I going to deal with getting just a question Pro survey tool are we going to be able to be open for our existing clients because they all have different tools including question Pro or are we going to be closed right so it was important to me to stay open but then uh when appropriate cross-sell the question Pro Tools because that was really an important thing uh from an integration perspective and then uh the second piece was a very interesting one that I think a lot of startups have we are a qualified SB 1202 company which in short terms means that we incorporated under the terms that if we stayed in business for five years and then we sold under this particular incorporation phase we had no capital gains for any of the shareholders now that's really sweet for the person who is selling the company unfortunately buyers are set up so that they want to do an asset purchase and an asset purchase then results in a 50 capital gains cost for the sellers so interestingly enough our tax code is not designed to be particularly conducive to M A so uh it ended up being kind of a decision whether or not uh the the buyer vivec was going to gross up what we got so we would be made whole from a perspective of him being able to right off the assets or as the alternate way of him buying stock not being able to write off as much but letting us end up in a better position from a capital gains perspective so that went up and back and that probably was the...