How Thebettersoftwarecompany CEO Steve Cody grew Thebettersoftwarecompany to $10.2M revenue and 4K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is steve cody he's a serial entrepreneur he lives and breathes franchising he started several local and national successful businesses in the technology rental service e-commerce and retail markets which have generated hundreds of millions in sales he identifies the creation of be pro which is again better software as the main contributing factor to his success in franchising his businesses steve are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right when i hear franchises and i hear process i think engineering you have an engineering background no no actually uh left school in uh in grade 10 uh was very dyslexic my grandfather had saved 1200 dollars so i used that money and i bought a ladder a squeegee in a bucket and started a window cleaning company interesting and uh how'd that do oh really well so it's still around today uh it's been through two different owners we ended up being the largest in our city uh moved from that got into swing stage rentals then we opened up a scaffolding rental company uh then we became a jlg dealer uh lyft company uh sold that to hertz uh what year was that uh that have been 20 years ago yeah it had been a while ago so that's kind of when the kind of when all the different rental companies started uh merging uh we sold our lift company and our bobcat dealership to hertz took a year off uh got into the party rental business what was the sale price on that um many many millions okay it was it was it was good was it did you actually own physical assets or did you it was just you're selling them software no no no no so this is before i started the software so this is myself as an entrepreneur yeah like web i mean i was i was i sold it on my 30th birthday and we had 6 million in debt at that time so it was all when you know you're buying big lifts boom scissor lifts bobcats all that kind of stuff so uh and that's so that took a year off did you own if i want to get in your head when you were 30 here because a lot of our listeners are in that age range six six million in debt you sold it for many m did you sell it for more than the debt did you pull at least a million dollars yeah i did yeah my goal was to become a millionaire by the time i was 30. did you from that deal yeah absolutely okay literally on my birthday so post tax steve sorry even after you pay 30 tax on the on the on the income there yeah no it was a very good deal all right very good okay so you take a year off then what uh my mom was getting married wanted to rent tables and chairs uh did that didn't like the experience so i said i'll get into the party rental business and uh so renting tables chairs dishes and that was uh so we started that night while we're celebrating our 20th year in that business actually and uh driving to florida with our kids so we live in ottawa so it's about a 30-hour drive and i picked up this audio thing called uh audio um cds that we could listen to emeth revisited yep so i don't know if you've ever heard of her yeah and listen to that all the way there all the way back i think all my kids have still memorized it and that was my aha moment where i needed to create a better system to run my business and that's really that's when i started building the software that ran our businesses and then we did that for several years decided to franchise the business um looked around for software and the software we had created was always our competitive advantage and when we started looking for something in franchising we couldn't find anything so we said well let's just modify ours so that we can start franchising with it and sorry define yours though it was a piece of it was a process it was a system software so you would log in yeah yeah at this point it was pure software we called it the ceo at that time so it would you know somebody would log in all your quotes would be there like it drove the whole process for the entire business it would remind you to follow up on quotes you know remind you to cash out at the end of the day you could set availabilities for trucks for drivers uh so literally did everything you needed so steve just to be clear the piece of software you're running today the better software company these are essentially software tools that you've built for yourself and now you've productized so that other franchise owners can use them to more effectively run their franchising operations exactly yeah i see interesting all right let's let's spend the rest of time on on on this idea uh and it's helpful to understand the backstory of how you got into this so thanks for that um the better software company any specific kinds of franchises in particular gyms painters etc or no really anybody really in the services business so if you're doing restaurant if you're pure retail that's not our space but if you're serving people home services window washing carpet cleaning uh classroom gym any type of thing like that that's where we can help you so if you're scheduling and those are also just be clear those are also your customers those are who pay you directly exactly okay on average i'm sure there's a ton of different cohorts here but on average what are these franchise owners paying you per month to access your software uh so the price will range between 100 per location to 250 per location and what we've done is we allow a person have unlimited users uh maybe not a great business choice a lot of people charged by user but our belief is we have a core belief in wanting to make that business become more successful and we believe that our software and our process will help them become more successful and if we start charging by user people kind of play the user game some people are using the system some people are not so we said you know what ultimately we want to we want success is what we want for the business owner so when somebody uh uses our software they can they can sign up as many people as they want to use it because we want everybody using it and you know i mean sorry that makes sense when did you officially productize this what was year one for this company in terms of business launching yeah so i'll just go back a little bit 2013 we had we had developed three franchise systems at that time our son passed away june 2013. we had to sell those companies i was in bed for about nine months uh at the end of that all i had was the software that i had sorry see were you in bed be just because of the loss it was just traumatic yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know so anyways that's uh so at the end of that all i had was the software so august 2014 is when i uh incorporated the better software company that's when we decided okay let's take this software and turn it into a business uh and then we started actually rebuilding it january of 2015. okay and how many locations have you scaled today uh we've got about 4 000 on there right now okay great across how many individual franchise kind of owners are operators uh we i mean we don't give out those are uh i would say probably around individual i'd say around 400 in around there oh wow small and large so just to be clear the reason i asked that question if someone signs up with you on average they're running about 10 locations yeah right now our average is actually a little higher than that but yeah okay yeah 400 customers 10 locations gives you 4 000 locations okay that's great now can i multiply the four thousand locations times your minimum 100 a month price point you're doing about you know north of 400 grand a month right now in revenue yeah we i mean we get we don't give out revenue numbers but yeah i mean we're doing fairly well yeah well and i don't want to i don't want to make up numbers i'm only using numbers you gave me you said 100 per location and 4 000. so i'm just assuming you're north of that okay what does growth look like so where were you if you're north of that today where were you about a year ago so what happened with our company is when we started so we started january 2015 we raised about 9.8 million through vcs i didn't really like that process they were more really focused on hyper growth and valuations so i ended up actually leaving the company last june and myself and my partner gentleman named bruce linton uh we bought it back this january so little transition and so we bought a back really wanting to and we used to serve small business owners when we bought it back we said we're just going to service the franchise industry and that's all we do so how did you know this is i have to break this down because there's a lot of entrepreneurs i think would love to do this same kind of thing when you bought it when you bought it back did the investors get their 9.8 million out or do they have to take a loss yeah they yeah they took a loss okay so uh yeah how did you how did you get them to agree to take that did you really have to leave the company to create leverage they couldn't replace you and then you said hey listen you're not growing a thing let me buy it back yeah we had somebody on the team at the time that i didn't again they weren't bad people i think they're just the business model drives them differently than what i'm used to um and i'm used to like if we can make our customers say well...