Surefire Local Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2022)

please welcome to the stage Chris mariantis with Surefire local tie together a lot of the things it's kind of interesting every entrepreneur has a story and this is going to tie together a lot of different stories because we've gone through the Outsourcing the um you know how to get culture right how to get leadership right and all those things so hopefully you'll get something out of this um so the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about how we bootstrapped our company from 2010 starting with the managed services company and then evolved to a SAS company it allowed us to keep control of the company and have a majority of the company and right now we're actually sitting at about 26 million in ARR um in doing that we had to really think about how we had to change leadership over time and the culture of the company because it's really different having a managed Services leadership group and having a SAS leadership group and I learned that the hard way and I'll share some of those lessons I learned and then how we thought about Capital we really didn't raise any Capital except for myself and a few other folks putting in some money until 2016 you can see where the business took off this is the reason why Nathan wanted me to talk you could see that spike in 21 and 22 but the key thing I'm going to talk to you about is what it took to set the company up to be able to do that because I tried to do that at different periods of time and it never worked and some of the lessons I learned to try to get there so what we're going to learn today is uh or let me tell you about what we do we're a local marketing Cloud for Professional Services type companies like contractors attorneys Home Services type companies so we built really the Adobe marketing Cloud for the specific use case of local marketing and delivering that at a price point that our customers could afford and in an easy use that they could they could use it what we've really become is a big data company and you'll start to see that at the end when we start to put together all the different data sources and how we use those so our story started when I was um I was a CEO of two venture-backed companies I was brought in to help some founding entrepreneurs that needed some adult supervision and I learned two things that are doing that number One never do that again because you end up not really controlling the destiny of the company and number two um I realized how Venture Capital works and at my stage of my career my life I didn't want to be the one in ten that works because they're going to do is give you a pile of money and then they're going to tell you go fast and they want you to either fail fast or keep on piling in more money and take away ownership and that's the issue that I saw so I started this company with the idea I wanted to create a real business that started with a book I wrote and the reason why I wrote that was in honor of my dad my dad was an HVAC contractor and I saw how technology could really change the game and give back control of marketing to these entrepreneurs and they didn't have to rely on agencies that were not very transparent and not really honest and and then or knit together a bunch of Point Solutions so from that we started a scaled managed Services Company because people were asking for help on implementing that plan we put together the system we put together that system is still the DNA of the SAS platform that we created it really just automates all those things that we put together in that system around 2014 apis are becoming developed enough that we could actually create that adobe like Cloud that I was talking about sketch that out put in a couple of million dollars just a few of us to do that and then started to test that with their own customer support people we called them coaches in those days because we were a managed services company and what we saw is our gross margin starting to go up because we're able to do a lot of the work in a more automated way be able to do reporting easier to our customers and we saw a lot of benefits to that so when you scale with technology it takes human error out and it gives you easier ways to implement things around 2017 we got that software mature enough that we said let's give this to our customers and let's test the assumption that you know smbs will actually use software and not only use the software but use all the different pieces of the software because we're all in one we had a lot of different pieces will they really get that idea when we launched it to our customers in 2017 we saw adoption month over month just continue to go up and it was going up with all the different pieces of the functionality that we provided to them we knew we're on to something we learned a lot from that and then we said let's launch the next generation of this software and LeapFrog from where we thought we were and we did that in 2019 and it was clearly the best product in the industry clearly the best product in the industry but as we tried to start this to now shift to selling software my leadership team in sales in customer support in marketing really wasn't able to make that shift with us and I knew that was super apparent so in 2000 2020 I started thinking about new leadership and brought in someone by name Mike Pierce who had four different scale opportunities at scale opportunities and selling in the SM into the SMB space and had a really different approach than what I was at that time uh doing and the rest is history in terms of our growth so what this you know Playbook sort of consists of and I'm thinking about this word at executive level is number one you know the idea of committing to a process and that commitment means spending some money on the enablement of that process not only in talent but also in technology and also in um you know in in like leadership thinking about how to implement that process and you might be wrong like we had we were committed to a process before it was just the wrong process and that's why we weren't growing the way we wanted to secondly I knew we had to have a different culture we were moving to a transaction more of a transactional sales model and I'll get into that in a little bit but that transactional sales model requires super high energy really granular data at the uh at the salesman level so you really know what they're doing so you could train them support them understand you know and be have prediction about what your next month's going to look like based on the output of what they're doing and then you know next we really switched from a inbound model I mean I I didn't know a whole lot about SAS so I read predictive Revenue like probably most of you guys did in the room and said Gee I'm gonna commit to that model and I did that for three or four years and it wasn't working that was primarily inbound SDR multiple steps advertising a lot in Facebook and and our our customer acquisition costs were fairly High we had a high ASP but still a super high for what we were doing and then Mike came in and brought in this transactional model that was really outbound first so today about 30 percent of our revenues from inbound we're still doing inbound but outbound creates a predictability of Revenue if you do it right and you have the right types of Technology right kinds of management and leadership in that so we have we're very very kpi driven company at this point I have my kpis I do weekly with my executive team but for the sales leadership that their kpis look more like this on the outbound side it's really around starting with dials you know demo sets you know you know dials to demo sets demo sets hell demos win rate mrr and by really looking at those in a micro level and even more so by team by vertical we're going after it gives you a lot of Rich data to help you better understand how your revenue is going to shape up in the next month or two but also where you need to spend time and focus with your sales organization so it's super important that you have the infrastructure to be able to do something like that so the next section I'm going to talk about is um is about leadership and culture um so when we started this transition and to bring in new uh new brought in new leadership you know in my our philosophy on this is you can't take your new leadership and go into a conference room and you know whiteboard what do we want our culture to be it's it's not authentic and it's not going to be something that's going to be bought into by your people what we ended up doing is we did a survey of all the people in our company and we said we'd like you to describe in words all the good things you think about the Surefire culture and all the bad things that you think about the Surefire culture and you know sort of like uh the analogy of this is like when you're on a diet you don't want to focus on eating so we do want to focus on the bad things we want everybody focused on you know working towards behaviors that are the good parts of our culture and I'll just walk you through we ended up you know sort of putting all these ideas into five sort of pillars of our culture one is driven by purpose our purpose is really around helping small business owners create wealth they were getting ripped off by agencies and they've got their overwhelmed confused pissed off most of the time because they really don't understand this new world of marketing so we wanted to make it super easy for them to understand it and how to be successful in it and that is our mission that's our Quest so we're all you know the people who come here have that same purpose and we make it clear in the interviewing process all these different things that we expect the second thing is this idea of keeping it real some people call it radical transparency radical Clarity right but the idea is to have engagement up and down the company and that's the way you really great create great results right if the more people engage the better results you're going to have everyone needs to feel like they're able to have a not a say but comment and freely discuss some of the things that we're doing and hopefully add to those things the next one is connected deliver you know in this you know a world of distributed workforces and not having an office everybody goes to it's super important to have people form connections not only within their department but across functions so we're really intentional and deliberate through physical events through technology acknowledgments All Hands things like that to make sure people feel like they're connected to each other because then they can have those transparent conversations and then empathy is really key to really win ever having some empathy for the other people in your organization what they're dealing with helps you better uh communicate and communicate in a way where it's going to be a positive uh development between the two people and then never settle we're a company that never settles we we are always looking to get better by the evening that we were in the in the morning we've done that with our technology we do that with sales we do that with everything in the company we also align the executive team to be um streamlined so that we could be built for Speed so um we have uh we have two offices here in the states we also own and operate a company in Manila that does a lot of the help desk support and Engineering support for the company but we've got our president Mike Pierce that drives all the customer facing organization that's the biggest part of the organization that we have he also runs people operations that's probably the most underrated part of our organization I really thought of before but now looking at in hindsight it was the single best decision we made to bring a really strong people operations person and then you'll see the effect that it had in the company and then we have CFO and and CTO uh separately with their organizations and the result of all that is we want Inc best workplaces this year Glassdoor 4.4 our employee net promoter score globally is a plus 74. we're a remote first model and we have world-class benefits that are head of people operations able to get by having someone just focused on that the last part of this talk I'm going to give us about capital I know um you know it's a big Focus for Nathan here we are we're not Venture funded but we do have a debt cattle that we raised once we thought it was the right time to do it and that's the key is understanding the right timing to raise debt Capital because you get yourself in serious trouble raising debt Capital too early so you know right now we're uh eight you know 22 about 18 million in bookings 19 million in bookings will end this year about 30 million in ARR but we really raised our first debt capital in 2016. it was only a million dollars but that was when if you remember we were just about to launch our platform to customers and we knew we needed to grow our sales force to start to amp up the velocity a little of our of our platform sales and it was uh really done with a venture bank so it's fairly uh fairly good terms and pretty low cost for what we did and you can see we got a little bit of a spike in bookings when we did that today we have 11.5 million in debt and that was done in a couple of trajas the the first big traj of about uh four and a half million was done in uh 2019 when we launched the second version of our platform and I knew we had to make a big bet on new leadership and I needed to get the money to do that or we would still just keep growing 20 25 a year we're growing now about 75 80 percent a year um so that's when we started the Austin office now our company has more people in Austin than our headquarters up in the DC Metro Market so the the key lesson I'd share with you is you don't want to bet the ranch with debt Capital unless you're using that money to grow they give you a sense is we I I 5xed the value of my company so some people said you're taking that Adventure debt it's gonna be really expensive for you right I mean you're paying sometimes all in 16 17 percent but when you think about the valuation in three years of my company and what we've done it really was super efficient way to do it the other thing we're able to invest in you know we broke things like the last speaker was talking about from pendo we so we forexed our sales and and really months four or five months and you can imagine when you do that and you have a customer success team that's not used to that velocity you could break a lot of things so we realized we had to start to get really systems and data sophistication in our in our company so we built an infrastructure stack that I think would right now would be one of the most sophisticated in our industry we have a service desk that now helps us manage all the cases that come in from our customers whether it be tickets phone calls whatever it might be and escalate things really quickly and triage them really quickly between our Manila help desk and our U.S customer success people we have omnichannel communication for our customers so they can reach us anytime anywhere through voice chat text email and a bot that we launched we also connected all these systems including our marketing cloud with you know voice to text so we get all that data in from all the phone calls we do with customers and all the other data and it's super powerful I'll show you some examples of that in a second and then we were able to start a Marketplace in our platform where now all of our uh our uh our service providers we don't want to be in the service business or able to hook into this and get the benefit of all this information about our customers as well I'm not going to walk you through this but it gives you an idea of the complexity of all the different systems feeding you know our platform right now so we this is why we've become really a big data company this data is super powerful for our customers to give them insights about where they could get their best bang for their buck and markings spend in Roi but super powerful for us because it creates predictive models of customers that might be ready to churn and where by the way we're we're probably not even 50 through implementing all this it's all stood up and going but we're not even through implementing all of it one of the partners I want to highlight here is a partner called involve.ai and what they do is they simply ingest all the data that you could give them through apis and they've got data scientists that then create really sophisticated models that start to look at predictive churn like in the next two to three months and it allows you and your customer success team to really start to get ahead of that you in effect I start to feel like I know more about my customers mindset relative to their relationship with us than they do or before they do and it's super cool then we feed that information into an application called churn zero so our customer success people again narrow that down into turn zero unpack what that customer is doing and find ways we could get that customer on a happy path and we could also do automation around that so we could do pop-up messages emails um you know in-app types of messages in Mobile or desktop so that we start to try to move them to happy path and answer all their questions so churn zero ends up becoming a playbook for our customer success people that helps them get that customer on the on the happy path and the results of that have been grossing that churn or roasted that retention that's going up and to the right and we're in a SMB space which is really tough to get a positive um you know nrr but we feel we're on course to get at least a neutral nrr by q1 next year leveraging all these tools and what's really neat about our business is and with all this data now that we've got you could you know we've we've evolved from a managed services company to now a technology company we've brought different uh customers on with a different brand promise at different times so now we're able to sort customers by time period to take a look at how they behave differently and you could see why they did because of the brand promise and they were selling our bit or our application at that time but what's really interesting is the new customers meaning brought on from 2020 forward those cohorts are doing incredibly well and are at 2.5 percent gross churn and we're starting to get towards one percent net churn with those new cohorts and that's because our velocity is so much higher now becoming a much bigger book piece of our book of business so to wind up what I talk to you about here is the idea of bootstrapping to retain control your company we're we're at a stage now and we're going to do a private Equity deal or strategic and you know that's going to probably be somewhere in the 125 to 150 million range and I still own most of the company so that makes me super happy so debt could be a really great instrument at the right time to give you that control and also the better payout when you're done um establishing a strong culture and Leadership is critical to be able to enable when you do these pivots or when you do these evolutions of your company you really need to be able to do that um have a strong leadership and then raise Capital at the right time and I think that is a great instrument when you feel comfortable that you could add the kind of add water and it'll grow that's when debt becomes a big opportunity for you thanks [Applause] [Music]

Introduction what is going on youtube you know we are just two weeks away from founder 500 in austin texas on september 1st and 2nd there's over 500 b2b sas founders all coming together you don't want to miss it ticket prices increase every three days i have it on automatic accelerator every three days and we're almost sold out you can see there's about nine left when you go to the event bright link about nine left and it's updating real time so check it out today it's founderpath.com and then in the upper left you can hover over our product drop down and click the event stream i'll also put in the description here of the youtube video i'd love to see you there hey folks my guest today is chris marantis he's a technology entrepreneur and business leader on a mission to help small businesses leverage the power of digital transformation he's the ceo of surefire local and has focused the company's efforts to build powerful marketing solutions that give smbs cost effective easy to use tools usually only available to the big guys he's having a lot of success doing it chris ready to take it to the top yes let's go all right now pre-show you were just telling me how capital efficient you are i don't know what you can share or not but you gotta brag a little i'm giving you permission to brag a little bit can you share a little bit about how capital efficient you've been well you know we've been doing this for 10 years and we also recommend to make a transition from managed services to now being a software company but you know one of the things having been around the block and a little you know sort of older entrepreneurship i say is is making sure that you retain control your company and you talk about this nathan all the time in your blogs your interviews everything you do but you know two things happen when you raise a lot of money early you know one is you lose real control operational control your business um but two you really you know own a small fraction of that business and in all likelihood you know you're going to continue to lose more of that business because you know the whole game in the dc world is let's get in and fund this company get them to either fail fast spend a lot of money you know um or or you know if we see them spending money and getting some traction we'll put more money in what does that do that continues to dilute you so you know they are not on the same um operational plane as an entrepreneur and you know that's a it's not to say vc money isn't good or they're not good people or they're not yeah i don't wanna you know just cast a dispersion over them but you know if they're not you know they're not in the same um you know the same objectives that you do as an entrepreneur i started this to serve a market and by serving that market to make money for my family and myself and my investors and what year was that when did you start by the way 2010. and so are you able to share how you structured your capital stack today are you able to share sort of the equity rates versus yeah yeah you know we we we have you know about six million in in cash that we raised i acquired three companies along the way so you know for all stocks so you know a capital stack of around 10 million and preferred but then you know when we felt like we got the product to a point that um it was the best product in the space and we are right now we've accelerated that um then i knew there was time to make the bet on the go to market and that's when i started we're an austin-based company now um started the austin office with mike pearson and the crew down there and and really took that debt to really accelerate to go to market and and get that go to market motion right and that's when debt really works you know works well i mean it's okay to use friends and family money to get the product right and start to feel like you got that product market fit that is a great way non-dilutive way to really accelerate accelerate growth and get to break even Bootstrapped so how much debt did you raise um total right now about 10 million so more than the or almost equal if you include the dollars for the acquisitions but not equal almost equal it and will like i was telling you earlier we'll Monthly recurring revenue exit this year about 30 million arr growing arr at about 70 percent and you know we'll you know be at break even we'll actually just about there you know any day now we'll get get there again we work break even before that in the earlier days that's why we were very capital efficient and then we started spending money to build the whole go to market and customer success organization and be able to scale that and use debt to do that and now we're getting back to that break even we'll be able to continue to grow you know above 50 percent without any other new capital and you know and i'm able to make with the board good decisions um you know so where we want to go from here 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 traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised 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 valuations and what you can get now inside of founderpath 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 wanna check this tool out if you wanna 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 chris what are the mistakes a couple things on the debt side because you've done a really good job getting fantastic terms um and full disclosure you know guys we missed chris we were too small when he was raising 10 million in debt so we unfortunately did not get the privilege of doing his deal maybe in the future though we'll see but chris for i would do 1-800 nathan well look it's a big space we're happy and we want to chat about all the options so i believe you're working with bridge bank and recurring capital partners and they've been great partners for you help other entrepreneurs understand what are some of the things that a founder should negotiate for when they're raising debt from anyone us recurring capital partners bridge bank yeah so when you're super capital efficient and you don't have a vc sponsor right you know it's tricky because you know the traditional uh banks like bridge bank or silicon valley bank or signature some of the other ones that you've a lot of folks have heard of their you know their their uh go-to-market plan is you know get a company just just raised a bunch of money from a vc give them a revolver and they know that vc is going to back up that that debt play and they're not going to ask for personal guarantees right so we're talking about that without any personal guarantees which is you know important you know for most entrepreneurs um you guys you shouldn't be signing any debt deals where the you as the founder are signing personal grant we obviously don't ask for that but if anyone asks that you should run there's too many other good options exactly yeah yeah exactly so so the way you could do that is really simulate the vc by doing a deal with like founder path with you guys nathan or recurring revenue um you know um there's others you know in the space too in the venture debt space if if you've got you know a good story and you're showing traction in gr in growth right you know you have to be able to even break even but if you're showing that you've got a product market fit and you could grow and you've got that you're somewhat dialed in you know you could go to a venture debt provider and you could get some type of a multiple on on your on your debt and you know once you do that if you start to really show that you're using that debt wisely and you're able to continue to expand then all of a sudden you make the other banks like the bridge banks and others feel comfortable that you know you you're not that kind of a risk anymore still getting all the recurring capital partners first and prove that it worked and then brought in bridge exactly exactly i see um yeah we happen to use tamiya first and then we we settled to me and brought in recurring um for various reasons but we were able to get bridge bank in once we got um the tamiya in place for three million at that time yeah there's all kinds of flavors of terms associated with the tamiya loan or current capital margin and the you know thousands of other not thousands dozens of other players out there let me just fire a couple of you and see how you respond um uh chris um i'm i'm gonna act like i'm bridge bank i'm offering you 10 million bucks do you want a 12 month payback period or a 48 month payback period and how should founders think about payback periods i would move that payback period as far back as you can um because you know it's sort of like a balloon loan for a home all of a sudden you're just going to owe you know a bunch of money and really as an entrepreneur you just want predictability for as long as you could get it so and i hope that answered that question okay let me give you another one i have another hypothetical that i know my audience is thinking about um hey chris um i want to give you a two million dollar loan against your b2b sas revenues i can either give you a flat sort of 16 interest rate with a four year payback or if you want a lower interest rate i can give you a 10 interest rate but with two percent warrants which deal would you take for me personally i would rather not give up the warrants you know um you know uh because you know i mean the whole purpose of debt is that you um that you try to limit you know but it depends on how big the warrants are and what kind of a partner there's i i wouldn't say it's off the table at all um you know and if you know if you if if it's a reasonable sort of warrant conversion and you know and even you can game it where you could put incentives in place for you to you know you know usually this is a bridge to a pri ideally a private equity round not another adventure round right but a private equity round and you know you should be thinking about your sort of how your business is going to mature over the next couple of years what that ideal you know sort of place is going to be and you could you know sort of sort of game optimizing the cost of that loan to where you think that's going to be yup let me give you another one this one's a little bit trickier but i know you've seen all this so you're the guy to answer hey chris i'm gonna give you a two million dollar loan um we're gonna do we can either give you a 15 sort of flat rate and no cash covenant no one percent draw fee no 20k legal bill off the start or you know we can give you 12 capitals a cheaper interest rate but we require you keep a million of the 2 million in the bank at all times you're responsible for our legal fees at the start and there's other sort of backfilled terms how do you think about those two things yeah i'd rather like you know look when you're doing venture debt it's it's it's gonna be expensive and if you're talking about it like when you do that as an entrepreneur you've got to be of the belief that the value creation you're going to be able to do because again the thesis here is that you're using that debt to really accelerate sales you know you're not using it for product development although maybe a little bit whatever but but really you know it's to accelerate sales you know and and i can tell you my personal experience is when i did that debt deal two years ago you know we were hanging around 10 11 million arr had a great product but you know if you so i can't tell you how many people nathan were telling me you're crazy i can't believe you're paying that much for debt okay well i you know quadrupled the valuation of my company for my investors and me you know so is it expensive now yeah that's why the key decision is that with that money you know you're going to be able to really drive value and you're really super confident of that you know and whether it's you get your two points here or two points there you know is is not gonna make or break i'd rather have less cash going out the door so you're able to you know create more value yeah my counter would have been no the debt might be in 19 interest but you know how much the equity would have been worth if i raised and then quadrupled the valuation right it would have been way more expensive there yeah exactly exactly yeah how did you this is i guess the last question on this um a lot of founders are they don't have the confidence to know what they would do with a million to drive the growth how did you build your sort of hypothesis and your thesis around where you're going to spend the money to have predictable growth you know i always had in my mind sort of general phases that my company had to go through um as we made this transition like the first six years was through managed services use as much as you can customer dollars to build the product and test the product and get the product market fit you know um you know uh then you know the you know then once you once you feel like you have the product you know then the next phase is i want to get enough new money in so then that's why you know you could stair step your debt ladder to like get more debt you prove it you get you know you as you are goes up you could get more debts you have to do it all at once right so i said let's let's show that we could get super high growth um so that's when you know i got the team in austin and the leadership like mike pearson and yeah and others um and it was just up into the r honestly it was magical opted to the right you know how was it was it ad spend dollars or partnership channels with referral fees what was the channel well you know what um and this is probably a whole another conversation that perhaps you could do here at your conference but it was really around changing go to market um to from an inbound like more more like like i i i was thinking and had a sort of like a predictable revenue type model where it's sdr inbound whatever and when i might not let mike who was a you know he was a cro at digital pharmacist sold for 12 and a half times to k1 he was you know at main street hub ran 200 personal sales organization yodel you know through all the rest of it he really knew this it's a very transactional model and it's outbound primarily maybe 30 inbounds once we made that change he he actually he said chris hire me and give me six people in austin and i'm going to show you what i can do we quadrupled monthly bookings in four months that's amazing so he he transitioned to outbound so he transitioned to outbound transactional model and it's super sophisticated and a ton of things to unpack because you got to do it right to make it work right and there's a lot to unpack in that chris before i before i forget sorry and then i'll let you will you continue you're giving a you're i can't wait for your keynote at founder 500 september 1st in austin texas i if if your guy in austin is available i would love for him to teach a private like vip session on just outbound it sounds like he's got some interesting things there is he around oh absolutely okay amazing happy to do it yeah great guy he'll love you yeah um and um so then so then once i got that going there was sort of this holy moment because like i said we quadrupled monthly sales but we didn't change our onboarding motion or customer success motion at all so then we brought in a head of customer success who worked with mike at um at main street hub but was at godaddy running all vip accounts and then we we changed all the motion around the onboarding to be consistent because really one of the big changes in sales and you could see it in customers interaction or platform was we went from talking about you know the mysteries of marketing and legion and today's world to showing them a demo just doing a demo saying here's how you're gonna use the platform without even changing the backend motion all of a sudden we saw interaction with all of our new cohorts in the platform going up by multiple historical cohorts of expansion exactly so so then so then we change we spent the latino last year basically we invested like 300k in you know a whole bunch of sophisticated software where we're right now i could say that we are elite in customer support and in knowing there's a whole another thing to unpack around that but super super cool about where we're at and that's now enabling sort of this next phase of focusing on upsell and net retention revenue um what is that today by the way are you above 100 percent no we're not we're not above 100 we're we're just below and it's hard in your space you're arpu it's hard super hard yeah what's your average price point well we have a pretty big it's 11 1100 a month okay but i would say that's still sort of like um on the lower end of mid market i mean you're moving up market but it's i would say it's a lower land mid market still yeah yeah yeah but but you know so so now getting you know you know part of net retention is really under you know having a super clear vision of who your customers are where they are in their adoption cycle and being able to serve the right new ideas at the right time and now we're finally there to do that so i'm really excited about the back happen this year for our company yeah no i'm pumped for you guys um we didn't chat a ton about the product so let's just let's give a call we learned a ton though so far let me go just quickly what is the product doing case any sms are listening that can really use you guys yeah you know what we do is we we're an all-in-one platform where all all the different channels and tools that you use to communicate with your customers and get new customers are all in one place so no more silos data silos and really what we've become is a big data lake and that data becomes super powerful to giving them insights into how to be more efficient and how to be more effective so all the seo all the paid marketing tools and things like chat and a gallery to house all your media and push it around easily and and uh you know and text messaging all in one place on your mobile phone if you're on the go and on a desktop and and you know it just makes it super easy for you to be the most effective person marketing in your local area and we're i'm just going to be clear we're focused on customers that can generate their their new business within geographies like zip codes so professional services head companies white collar blue collar yeah this is a a painter in a small town in georgia that can only sign up you know people within 50 miles exactly yeah i love that all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book my favorite business book um you know i just um i'm spacing on the name it was the coat it was about coaching the um uh say more what was that coaching uh oh uh the the the um the book on bill campbell the the the uh yeah yeah that's it i know it yeah yeah yeah well careful i know what you're talking about um it's like the silicon valley coach or something like that i forget yeah yeah yeah it was really really great and it really helped me they think about my leadership team and how to interact number two is there a ceo you're following or studying you know um i love elon musk i know very binary thing with him but i think that he's super transparent and i think he's super visionary and uh and he's got really good people around him to help clean up the math but i think he and he knows enough to view that he knows enough about himself to do that yeah which is big yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building surefire wow that that evolves over time you know um you know right now my key focus is on charge me you know we um we spent the last eight months wrestling that bear the ground but that that combined with you know service desk and involved.ai and um you know a couple of other tools um gives us super micro visibility to our customers that is very powerful number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night i do pretty well with that man you know i i got one of those sleep number beds where like it gives you your number like when i thought i'm in town anyway that's awesome and um and i'm at least six hours and at least that's awesome and chris situation married single kids mary my daughter now took a job selling for wiz in new york the hot israeli um she was at octa before that she's killing it um doing sales in in sass so one one uh one kiddo yeah yeah chris how are you oh boy i'll just say take a guess i'm gonna say you're you're you're 40 years young all right 40 years young last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. you know something wait something i wish you knew when you were 20. you know um to take along view of your life's progression you know and don't be too impatient because that'll prevent you from making short-term decisions that might not be in your best interest guys sure fire local held the story he capitalized a business with six million of equity raised another three or ish million to do three m a deals along the way launched in 2010 as a managed services business now surfacing smbs directly that pound average 1100 bucks a month this is a painter in georgia you know some small town that needs to sign up 100 clients a month to you know do well all in one solution at surefire local they broke 20 million ish last year now north of you know close to flirting with 30 million very capital efficient chris used 10 million bucks in debt right to drive growth so only a dollar of equity raised for every three dollars of ar incredibly efficient catch him live on stage at founder 500 september 1st chris thanks for taking us to the top thanks david 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 nathan lacka dot 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 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

hello everyone my guest today is chris marantis he spent the last two decades bringing technology and marketing solutions together for fortune 500 companies as the founder and ceo of surefire local their local marketing cloud enables local business owners to maximize the value of their local marketing investments by harnessing the power of the best available applications in one easy to use platform chris you ready to take us to the top i i'm ready all right ready all right i love that all right so first off is this a pure is your is your revenue model a peer play sas company or is this kind of a mix it is now um we started out as a marketing services company 10 years ago and then the last five and a half years we've been building a tech stack because much of local marketing now could be automated um there's some tasks that need to be done that are service driven like writing content and we're doing less of that and really just focusing on our sas platform got it okay so let's focus on this last platform today when did you launch this component we launched that to our clients in uh may of 2017. okay 2017 and what do folks pay on average to access to the for access to the technology about 700 a month for the full stack okay wait would you say that's a fair average across your current base 700 bucks a month yeah yeah okay so most people are paying for the full stack yeah yeah most people play we're just now gonna be breaking that into modules where we're going to have an seo platform an scm platform a finance platform and a nurturing platform okay so we're now going to break those out to sort of uh land and then expand strategy and um as more typical of of you know sas companies um but we've been selling the full stack to date that's great okay so 2017 was launched you've been at it for a year and a half now how many customers have you scaled to we have uh just under 2 000 customers okay 2 000 and again that's just on the sas platform yeah okay so you've gotten 2 000 customers over the past year and a half yeah we have um uh in different you know different parts of this you know i mean uh leveraging different parts we have sold for example the seo platform to a major franchise company that has 400 locations um so do you put four you can include 400 in the 2000 and that counts as one yeah that that's that's 400 so it's two that's just under 2 000 locations okay does each location pay 700 bucks a month or 700 per customer each location pays 700 a month on average okay and you're at 2000 locations today yep okay so that will put you at about 1.4 million a month today in terms of revenue from just the sas platform is that accurate we're we're probably just about at um just under 1 million that's kind of where we're at right now annually or monthly a month monthly a month okay so our cmrr you know is right now about uh you know 9 20 9 30. define cmrr everyone defines it differently um it is a recurring revenue um for all the subscriptions that we have out there yep but how why not just that how is it different than how most people measure mr mrr i don't know i mean i'm not sure how other people do it but where we measure in a typical sas fashion or sas metrics or you know same payback period you know cac you know you know so we're we're measuring just like any other sas company that i know of so what are those metrics today can pay back for a 2 000 a month location our cac is around um [Music] around uh you know 8 000 a month our payback period is you know fluctuates between nine to you know 11 months you know depending on you know what what package someone's on you know we have everyone on full stack but we might have some on uh focused on the seo part of the stack where we just hide the sem parts so we're not selling in modules like we talked about earlier but they have the ability to have that full stack so some of them are at you know 200 a month some of them are at 1200 a month but the average is 700. yeah exactly and so when you say your cac is eight thousand dollars a month what do you mean by that uh not eight thou or or or uh are our cac is eight thousand dollars customer acquisition cost to get a new two thousand dollar a month customer yeah okay so that would put your payback period at four months where do you get 11 months well you know on average based on you know our uh you know you know we have some clients at 200 some clients at 1300 um you know sure but payback period is a ratio so it doesn't matter if it's a 200 a month customer or two million dollar a month customer generally speaking what's the ratio of of cac to arpu yeah from what i see from the numbers that we have it's about uh anywhere between a uh eight month nine month payback period okay so if you have an eight month payback just to be clear if you're going after a two thousand dollar a month account you're telling me you're willing to spend up to sixteen million two thousand dollars a month right sorry sorry 700 bucks i'm sorry 700 bucks a month yeah if you're going after a 700 per month account what you're saying is you're willing to spend up to eight times that or 5 600 bucks to get that customer correct i see what you're saying okay got it very good and then um i want to dive into how you've done this because if i'm understanding you correctly you've gone from no sas revenue in 2017 to about 18 months later 2000 customers paying 700 bucks a month and almost a million dollars a month or 12 million run rate on just your sas business is all that accurate yes see what we did is we took all the manual things that we were doing for example for seo or for sem where we were managing uh ad campaigns google facebook bing whatever and we were uh hand managing those we bought a company uh december 2016 in atlanta which one that had software uh called promo okay um and uh they had software for uh instantly standing up and managing small spend campaigns in google you know facebook bing and um and we did some development work on that got it up to sort of our standards and now we're able to do is take the manual labor out of hand managing those and we've tied into the you know apis and the ai stack of google and facebook and bing for campaign management optimization automation so that um so that they're really self-managed we do have a few people now that oversee those but chris just to be clear though when you say they pay on average 700 bucks a month does that include you're taking a big chunk of that 700 bucks and then putting it into these ad platforms no it doesn't include paid media now okay that's just your that all goes to your bank exactly and and you have typical sas margin you have typical sas margin on that of like 87 89 percent something like that our gross margin uh all in is about 70 71 percent our or our gross margin on mrr recurring revenue not the one-time setup revenue taking that out is about 74 to 76 percent okay so that's still healthy again so so taking seven you're basically taking gross margin if you're doing a million a month 740 is gross margin and then do you i mean are you hugely profitable or do you have a big team size what are you are you even deposited or no we're even a positive yeah we we became even a positive last may of 18 and we became bottom line positive in august and we're spinning off free cash that's great so monthly this now i mean are we talking like you know 400 000 bucks in free cash flow monthly or what no no um end of this year it'll be you know 100 to 200 000 a month it'll be about 12 q q4 this year will be about twelve percent what about like let's i prefer to talk about historical data versus pro forma projection so like over the like last last 30 days it's right now it's about four percent four percent okay good so 40 grand on a million top line per month yeah that's great and are you bootstrapped or have you raised um we uh we've raised by super angels and then through two acquisitions we got two pe firms involved in our company um but uh you know but it's been pretty much you know bootstrapped no high flying so how much have you raised from super angels about eight million dollars including myself you know uh you know i put in over a million dollars and the private equity firms did they just come in specifically to fund the two acquisitions no they came in with those act they owned those companies so when we bought those companies they you know they took a a piece of so you bought them with stock not cash correct got it there was no cash in those deals the promo deal no cash no cash in promo um there was a little bit of cash in a deal we did with a company in the west coast okay in the hvac space that had some really good technology on website you know automated website development okay and the promo kind of stock deal there did it come with any recurring revenue or customer base and if so how much it came with about um somewhere between 700 and 800 000 um you know a year so not about a tenth about a tenth of your current sash stream came from that acquisition yeah exactly yeah uh that's good and then what's the team size today how many people in the us we have about um call it you know 56 57 people mostly at our headquarters here in northern virginia and then we also own and operate a company in manila where we have all of our development you know we have our developers and a help desk you know and um other types of uh operations that's great there's about probably about 80 people there and chris people are going to listen to this and wonder wait how did this guy go from basically no sas revenue to 12 million a year or a million bucks a month in under essentially 18 months how did you sign up 2000 customers so quickly there were existing customers that then we moved on to our platform yeah but how did it so there's a lot of people though that run agencies that try and do this and they fail because you're doing like professional services work basically you built the sas tech stack and you acquired promo and you said okay listen customer a instead of you getting two of my humans responding to your every email at 2 a.m in the morning because you want to change the blue tint in that ad to a little bit darker blue you're not going to you know what i'm talking about you're not going to get that anymore it's self-managed click here to log on to your account and do it yourself that's not an easy transition we churned a lot of accounts yeah um we turned especially we turned two big sort of enterprise accounts that wanted agency you know style services 2018 was a period of consolidation we still grew net cmrr by about 22 but slower growth than we have historically because we uh on the total total revenue because we really um went hard and i read all kinds of blog posts and articles some of which you've been great in providing on companies that did this and there's sort of different methods like rip off the band-aid just go you know get rid of all your other clients start new customer acquisition it's really difficult to do with your current customer base i didn't want to rip out that much mrr because i wanted to use that to fuel and continue to fuel growth and not oh so you still had mrr even in the agency model yeah yeah and we accepted that what but how how did you have monthly record monthly recurring revenue is typically tied to a sas platform not an agency model where humans are doing creative work oh we always even in the agency model 91 of our revenue was subscription recurring revenue like they're paying you a retainer though for work well it it's a subscription yeah i never called it a retainer because it's not like we always pretty much defined what we were doing even in the beginning and we always used sort of a constellation of software out there what we did is we created our own built our own software over the last five and a half years and we took the favorite tools that our customers are already going to use or that we were using and we did is put it into our own software platform got it so just be clear you didn't go from nothing in terms of in terms of recurring revenue to a million a month in 18 months you've been building this for five years you're just it's a syntax thing you went from external software to internal software a year and a half ago yeah well from internal software to external software so we went from using it internally to then exposing it to our clients sorry i meant no you using other people's tools external then you built an in-house internal and then sell it now yeah okay yeah okay good so just be clear you launched really in 2013 right and you've scaled and you changed the model from essentially people paying you monthly which are retainers where it's your humans using software that you didn't own to service these customers to now you're doing a million bucks a month it's all it's it's way more sas now than human driven and um you turned a bunch of cumbersome customers when you did that and over the past 12 months you grew about 20 so from 800 grand a month to about 980 grand a month today yep that's great and what about what about some other stuff so which turn today churn is about 20 gross annualized yep revenue or logo 14 net and we'll grow about 49 this year is that gross annual logo turner revenue churn 20 that's revenue churn okay and then you said net is 14 so what expansion is six yeah and where's most the expansion coming from what pricing x's are you selling against um it's different products like you know we've got a product called geo juice that's around you know everything we do our stack is completely built for location-based marketing so we could add different layers to that so we have a base module that we sell for example for seo and then there are other tools that we could sell on top of that for recurring no revenue right geo juice is something that we built and we own for example that's great um yeah chris any plans to sell the company in any acquisition talks right now no acquisition talks right now i think the middle of this year i'm gonna pick our head up and you know figure out what we want to do but we're going to we're getting to the rule of 40 sometime around um middle of the summer where we're growth rate with our ebitda is going to be you know in that 35 to 40 range and we think that's going to be a really appealing company and we also have our mechanics of marketing and sales and customer acquisition where we can really dramatically grow the company and when we do that we want to get the right price private equity grow but a growth-oriented private equity uh company involved what do you think you're worth today no idea no idea um just you know it's your back of the napkin there's no right or wrong i would say my back of the napkin would be that we're somewhere around three to four times revenue you know because of our growth rate and our profitability 36 to 48 million something like that something like that yeah yeah interesting um very good all right chris let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book um is uh is uh the uh predictable revenue number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now i always love to follow jeff bezos i don't like to follow everything he does at this point but uh but i love his thinking about not focusing too much on competition and build your product for your customer and focus on that i love that idea number three what is your favorite online tool for building the company wow um you have great questions dude um you know i i think that that's probably changing for us over time as we as we get bigger and scale you know what used to work for us what are you using now right now we're using our sort of our backbone as netsuite and sweet yeah you're aging yourself man gotta get that stuff updated chris all right number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um i do pretty well with sleep i probably get somewhere like six to eight that's good and what's your situation married single kiddos married with uh my daughter now is an sdr at sla at um at um uh octa oh yeah okay good so one kid yep and how are you chris you don't want to know [Music] ruin my marketability well we'll say 40 years young something like that a little bit older than that all right very good and less over 50 i'll say fair enough last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um just you know how today is an awesome time to build a business uh there's you know there's so many tools and and i don't mean just like a sas business or i'm a technology guy you're a technology guy but we service a lot of you know companies that just real companies that we make it easy for real companies to have powerful software to acquire customers right but i look at like the person who has a pest control business who builds it to a three million dollar business and they're making five six hundred thousand a year there's like there's a lot of opportunity for for uh for uh millennials youth to build businesses using all these tools that we're creating and um and i think i think i think it's i i'd love to for people to know about that that's the book i'm gonna write well so so tell me what you wish you knew when you were 20 though um when i was 20 i wish i knew that my network was really the value that i could create for myself in the future and you know and and creating a a stronger you know network of of people around me like whether it be you know capital or device or connections guys network is important chris building surefire local launched in 2013 today 2 000 locations it's they service small business locations paying 700 bucks a month so doing almost a million dollars a month in revenue up from 800 grand a month in revenue just a year ago in terms of how they grew he bought company one bought companies one in atlanta for all stock basically called promo to help them build this internal software they now got internal gross margins of 74 versus old agency revenue they had which is obviously much lower gross margin they're scaling nicely they've raised eight million dollars to drive this growth they're profitable right now monthly to the tune of about forty thousand dollars hope to hit the rule of 40 where growth ebitda again equals that 40 number probably mid 2019 have 56 people on their team in virginia and manila 20 gross annual revenue churn 6 expansion so 14 net revenue churn annually spending up to eight grand to get a new location that pays 700 a month so 11 month payback period all looks good he currently values his company i caught 36 to 48 million bucks chris thanks for taking us to the top thank you man appreciate it