How Surefire Local CEO Chris Marentis grew Surefire Local to $30M revenue and 2K customers in 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...