How SuiteCX CEO Valerie Peck grew 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 most difficult for everyone to deal with because it was it was uh a lot a lot of effort on either side to be able to mitigate that so fortunately I have a really good m a uh attorney and tax guy and he came up with some really good solutions that helped mitigate that so we got over that speed bump what uh well one or two of the things is how you allocate your resources and r d fees so how much you can write off from an r d uh development perspective and then um what we actually did interestingly enough is a couple of my shareholders said that they would waive their shares so that we could then pump those up a little bit and uh the two Founders who did most of the work my CTO and myself we get a little bit of a bump so that that allows to have a little bit of a lower selling price so that we then uh all came out as a win-win so what was that your key there is get a great tax person and a great account when you're doing this yeah so what was the headline acquisition sort of deal price not cash not earn out like that just the the headline deal number yeah it was uh well if you were looking at three years it would be about probably two million three years well because we did an installment sale another thing that's very typical in an uh I'm opening my uh total umbrella here uh in an installment sale allows you to well allows the buyer to make sure that they're buying something that's going to keep going and keep making money and the seller has some satisfaction of being involved in that over time so think of it as a house right you have a down payment and then based on your terms and conditions you have subsequent payments to not only the the team that is staying on but the shareholders that are probably going to be bought out I see so three million dollar headline price looking at all the potential earnings over the next three years how much of that was cash up front um I'm not at Liberty's say based on our agreement but it it would be if you were doing a three-year agreement one could assume that it was be close to something like that like one-third yeah yeah fair enough yeah yeah so so why let's again we're talking about hypotheticals now because you can't confirm or deny this but you know the company's already doing about a million a year in Revenue right you know if you sell for three three million headline pricing let's just say hypothetically only a million about us up front and why not just keep running it yourself you're already doing a million a year very interesting that again that was a significant decision point of what we should do whether we run that or not right and there were a number of good reasons for it the the first good reason was the opportunity for me to grow back into my Consulting routes and to do more of what I loved and less of what I really frankly didn't like which was software sales so that's where Mark Mandel comes in is uh he was part of this uh introduction and deal he loves doing software I hate it right now I get to be free and have a global Consulting practice as a Capstone frankly to my career and the software side gets well taken care of by Mark and his sales team so that was a big consideration from a lifestyle perspective so Mark has been retained by question for now he's an employee of questions he is now VP of sales for North America very interesting yeah for CX yeah so uh and again so that that was very helpful um a couple of the other people in the team wanted to step out and do less so that gave me the opportunity to let them do that and to bring some new people in and uh probably I I don't know I mean I've done a lot of work when I was at uh KPMG and PWC and money trading all those elements is you probably well know is that money in the hand is worth a lot so in order for it to me me to make that headline I would have had to triple in sized personally and in order to do that I would have to then go back to my 401ks and Rob them again of almost that much money to be able to make the money back again so having an investment like that over the period of time that you're saying is far more uh the cash flow is far better when you're doing an alignment in a sale like this as compared to trying to make it yourself bootstrapping when you talk about when you talked about the qualified SB 1202 company I believe what you're I think what that is you're talking about qsbs right yes yeah yeah so guys just quick quick breakdown this because I want to ask about the three million deal price qsbs if you are common if you're a common stock owner or and you've held your stock for more than five years and you sell you can shelter a huge up to about 10 million dollars assuming you're not setting up a bunch of trusts or something like that so it's 10 million dollars with lots of red lines of what kind of company it is as well yeah so so they've tightened those rules quite a bit theoretically though like if you sold for three million bucks I'm making this up now at this point and you and you personally made a million dollars in cash from the deal theoretically you shouldn't have to pay any taxes on that correct correct correct now part of that overall deal though is salaries and benefits and perks and spiffs so if you look at that total deal it is not just a cash price deal it's a mix which is another thing that that was again for where we are in in um you know if I was 28 I might want a different day deal yeah so help me understand that so I'm not following does that make sense with a 50 cap gains cost for vivec and the buyer I guess I'm not understanding how that correlates with the qsl okay so if I had to pay taxes so say it's a hundred thousand dollars right he's going to give me a hundred thousand dollars to sheltered right or he's going to give me 150 000 that's taxed but why would you choose to not shelter the money you make on this you have qsbs because he wanted he wanted an asset deal because he can write 100 of the cost of the company down and immediately in year one so you this is USPS it's not a full sale if it's an asset sale you could correct if it's not a sale of stock Stock's the thing so this is the the friction point that the tax code has set up that buyers and sellers have to navigate because it makes it so that it is either uh you know a benefit of to one or the other uh which are almost opposite right so if he if if you if you buy stock the buyer can't write off those assets if they buy assets the seller has to pay tax on the stock I sail you can't use qsbs coverage there correct correct so that that makes it that makes it and again there's probably I don't know what the subset of those types of companies are but in in the valley and where I grew up in in the Bay Area that that was something that you know 15 years ago when we started Suite TX that was a real feather in a cap of somebody who was trying to optimize their career of having this particular thing so that's where attorney came in and said you know let's grab this opportunity because it is a big one well Valerie congratulations on your Capstone what an exciting moment for you and I can't wait to see what you and vivec do today though we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh right now actually it is peppers and Rogers managing customer experience Edition number four if you're very consistent that was also last year well I think it's my it's all dog geared now and I give it to everybody there's a few others that are good as well number two is our CEO you're following or studying uh interestingly enough I'm following what's going on with First Republic right now yeah number so the CEO and team there uh I think are they have navigating a really difficult situation quite quite well from a customer experience perspective yeah money is certainly a confidence game and we're seeing that number three what's your favorite online tool for building suite CX for building sweet TX ha uh actually I'm having quite some fun with chat cheap BTS there you go I just did a poem for sweet CX that's awesome how many hours of sleep are you getting every night I am now back to six hours of sleep again it's awesome that's great and um I think last time you said not married six kids is that still accurate happily not married for 17 years now with my significant other who is our CTO yeah you are married nope nope we're happily unmarried for 17 years oh amazing okay six six kiddos six kiddos yeah and did you celebrate a birthday since we last spoke you said you were 67 last time yep about 68 yeah so I'm yeah happy late birthday last question on the right side of the turf that's right well you got you've got the energy of a 20 year old so I can't wait to see what you do next last question Valerie something you wish you knew when you were 20. I wish I knew how difficult it was to actually start up and run a business Beyond knowing the thing that you know all the things that went around it so I could have gotten smart sooner 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 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 Valerie thank you for taking us to the top my pleasure you have a great one don't do anything I would do one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m 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 fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlocka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support alright I'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hey folks my guest today is valerie peck she focuses on driving customer success customer experience management segment-driven marketing demand generation and a lot of other things for both b2b and bdc companies as well as tactical retention acquisition and loyalty programs she's got a lot of experience in this space over 20 years actually in the space and is now building a tool called sweet cx to help other founders do this at scale valerie ready to get to the top absolutely all right so there's a lot of sort of big categories you mentioned in your bio take me back to the origin story is this a crm is it a demand generation tool what is it well it's a little bit of both we often say that we are psychology needs technology so for years marketing technology uh used to be called crm that got stolen then it was cem then it was cx these tools all are about getting to understand uh what customers are thinking feeling and doing and being able to act upon that either with messaging or campaigns or improving the experience they have so the tools origin was actually in doing this with vizio and uh sticky notes on butcher paper and what year was that when did you write the first line of code for the platform 2013 was when we first said okay enough of this let's do something different got it so 2013 you get going on this and did you sell fun to the start or do you raise some cash we did we are totally bootstrapped with no debt i love that Bootstrapped even today bootstrapped absolutely no debt i love this okay very cool so today when companies are signing up for your platform and again you do a lot of things what's the average company paying per month to use your technology well we do an annual subscription because uh that's preferred by most of the companies because we can make the product a little bespoke so it the annual enterprise view is a roughly twenty six thousand dollars and then there's a ten thousand dollar kickstart to get people going we have clients who pay us over a hundred thousand dollars a year to guarantee their time so that we can coach them and help them as well so it's a it's a range so just be clear your biggest sort of software contracts are in the hundred thousand dollar range per year yes and they can go down as low as a proof of concept of 5 000. yup yup okay and i love this model so you charge your average customer today it sounds like pays 26 000 bucks per year right correct and you charge on average almost well call it call it you know what is almost 35 40 of your annual contract in a setup fee which is good for a variety of reasons help me understand how that helps your business sure well it gets people more productive quicker so that gives them retention that gives them confidence that gives them the ability to talk to others and bring other people internally on board so that helps the company uh get a better upfront uh reputation when people talk to analysts like forrester or gartner or aragon what we find is they say we can be really productive quickly or migrate off what they had quickly and speed to roi is really important in this business yep i hear you there okay and so how Currently serving 30 customers many customers are you serving now today we have about 30. 30 okay so 30 enterprise customers and taking back to your first customer who was it was it vizio you said well actually our first customer was me because i have a consulting company and i told my significant other who actually wrote the code uh if i did one more time of doing what i used to do with the sticky notes on butcher paper and the word uh documents for each uh touch point and then piling printing and pining up your entire website on a table with this thing pinned to the wall i would have killed myself so uh i was the first customer because it saved us incredible amounts of time when we were working with customers and surprised our customers said we want a license at school we like it and so sweet cx was born because we thought gee what a great idea so um our clients to begin with were folks like lexus and wells fargo uh no small names uh and most of the the clients we have were still with us because they've found that it is a very valuable tool for their ongoing uh success 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 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 attraction 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 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 and again if we fast forward to today 30 customers valerie at 26 000 a year on average would put you at about 800 000 bucks in arr or about 65 000 Monthly recurring revenue bucks a month sure today in revenue is that about right yeah and then you add on top about double of that with consulting with uh pretty much about a 90 margin and uh the two companies are doing well so when those when those are they are they the same company like the consulting could be the setup fee well interestingly enough we divide professional services which are set up fees and consulting which is bringing our brains to the table as it were from a coaching uh and a diagnostic perspective you know the software game uh when you have consulting associated with professional services and software it devalues the ebitda instead of increasing it so go figure it makes more money but it is it is separate from a operational and a structural viewpoint so let's ignore the consulting for a second if we just look at the setup setup fees and the sas fees from the sas business 800 correct i was going to say about 800k and what do you think you'll do this year in that business i think we're actually on track to grow another 20 we've already had uh three significant sales in the first month of the year so uh we've been growing about 20 percent a year year over year for the last two or three years and and with coven congratulations where is most that growth coming from is it expanding current accounts or brand new accounts brand new accounts and how are where are you finding those folks what's that emotionally they find us so we have a good reputation we're in the top quartile of forester wave and several analysts uh i do some work with the professional association called cxpa and so people are interested in uh companies that are know what they're doing and are hardly focused and so in general we get a lot of referrals from existing customers and the analysts mm-hmm okay got it so that's a lot of your inbound now forrester you know the fortr can also be a pay-to-play model so what did you do to sort of get that relationship going there uh well we spent a lot of time and effort nurturing their team whenever they call up and say that they're doing a white paper a blog or something and can we get them smart on it we take quite a bit of time and effort to make sure that we shine uh in the knowledge that we share not always self-serving from a sweet cx perspective so we've done that over the years we've been blessed with a pretty stable group of analysts at forester and at aragon so over the years we've built up relationships with them and we're very responsive and at times proactive that's great well again it's driven you nice amount of growth here being bootstrapped um do you ever does anyone ever try and hit you and say yeah valerie but you're not funded you don't have a big valuation uh not the only thing we hear from customers is the fact you know when we're dealing with these giant elephants is that you know g we're small but then when we show the fact that the consultancy has been around since 2002 Profits bootstrap have been profitable and sweet cx has been around since 2013 and sweet bootstraps and profitable generally we don't get much pushback occasionally we find somebody who comes around who's interested in us from a investment or acquisition perspective and they see we're small which is a challenge but uh we consider ourselves pretty mighty as well when you launched the agency in 20 2002 help me understand the scale of that today how much revenue does that do annually yeah so we we range we've had three million dollar years okay um and we have on average now about half a million uh in pure consulting that doesn't run through sweet cx yep and and how many customers that pay you for agency work end up converting to a recurring sas customer in suite cx we have we are blessed the past two years we've had 100 conversion uh we had one company drop out because they decided that they weren't going to focus on cx anymore but we have a really high conversion rate of probably about 80 percent and a retention rate of the same as well is that gross or net retention oh it's gross it would be 100 because they're so so we have customers who follow different patterns pattern number one is just a subscription and a license and they renew every year they're sticky because of the interesting things they're doing on the tool and then we have customers who add in a coaching consulting training function and then finally we have pure consulting customers who just want an output and we use the tool as a back-end uh facilitator for them so what would net revenue retention be uh it's about 80 now at least is that sorry you said you said gross was right so so well yeah so we have virtually no overhead uh we work from home we are garage uh think of it it's an awful nice garage sorry valerie valerie i'm not talking about gross margin i'm talking about gross retention so if you look at all of your churned revenue over the past 12 months and then add back the expansion the upgrades you sold that's math i went to usc um so again we're not losing any customers so that would what about downgrades what about people that are downgrading plans okay got it so there's no loss driving over the past 12 months everyone that was paying x amount last year is paying that same x amount today with the exception of one client who went out of the business okay so that is right so that's revenue right so that's 20 20 20 000. okay so then the question is did you upsell other customers to make up the 20 000 yes okay so you're above 100 net dollar retention then correct yeah that's okay great that makes a lot of sense um okay very cool um what would i mean just tell me more about the team how many folks are full-time with you we have five virtual full-time people so we are a gig group where five of us are working full-time several on contracts several employees and then we can expand up to 18 people depending on the workload and what's needed so we have standby statisticians and videographers and other folks that are uh part-time right their gig and we've had a long relationship with them so uh we can gear up and down depending on uh whatever the workload is because how do you know that they're gonna have time for you when you need them since they can't rely on you from a for a full they can't rely on you for a full-time paycheck so uh since most of these folks have been working in the same type of capacity since 1999 uh with me they they make time you know their nights their weekends the good news is most of our work is not fit between nine to five so even if they've gone on and are working full-time somewhere they'll make time to uh uh do the work with us okay makes good sense talk to me about what you want to do with the business you said you've looked at acquisition offers would you ever sell it yeah i think that we're right now we're at the point where it would be really interesting to find a powerful engine big sister brother company who can take on some of the sales functions and some of the back office functions and let us do more in the thought leadership and uh development of new product ideas and execution of them name so we're very open to perfect buyer uh well a perfect buyer might be a business process outsourcing company or ipsos uh from a research perspective or um concentrics from a bpo perspective uh there are some uh grant thornton some of the midsize consultancies uh walker cx all of those would be interesting because they're interested in both capabilities and tools very good that makes a lot of sense valerie heck of a story here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh managing customer experience don peppers and martha rogers managing customer experience number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i i love uh well i used to love bill gates a lot more but i really like his blog and his information and warren buffett is my idol i love that number three what's your favorite online tool for building sweet cx besides your own uh actually uh we do a quite a bit of work with linkedin and social media so that works and uh youtube actually because all of our information is on youtube valerie number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night four that's not healthy well on weekends i catch up but uh you know when you wake up and you've got clients all over the world there's always an email for you yep number four or five here uh talk to me a little bit more about your situation married single kiddos i am in a significant relationship of 15 years and happily unmarried uh he has six grandchildren so that's plenty for me and uh we have two four-legged companions who are my fur kids that's great and valerie do you mind me asking how old you are i am 67. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 that i would be starting businesses up and that i my parents were doctors they had no idea of how to start a business so i could have benefited i i had an mba but later on so i could have benefited from understanding how to start a business without going to jail guys she launched an agency in 2002 does anywhere between three million and half a million a year in revenue on the agency but in 2018 said you know what there is a big sas play here i'm gonna launch it she did sweetcx360.com is the url they're helping folks large enterprise brands over 30 of them manage things like customer onboarding experiences and things of that nature we'll do about 800 000 bucks in revenue this year they charge on average 10 000 bucks and set up fees and 30 000 bucks a year for their sas contract as they look to scale with their team of five all bootstrapped which we love valerie thanks for taking this yay thanks for your time one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm 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 fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanwacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya