How TOOTRiS CEO Alessandra Lezama grew to $720K revenue and 100 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is alessandro lazama she is the founder of a company called tutrus as a service provider secure affordable quality child care in real time the company is available online or by mobile app and provides search by location schedule budget and specific program distinctions along with virtual tour capabilities enrollment and pay-per-view payment processing ready to take to the top absolutely thank you for having me here today you bet so first off on the show we usually feature exclusively sas founders software service you are applying software to something but it's really productized service would you agree well it's a sas product in and of itself except for we have the back end as well so we have an operations team that helps enable uh placements when parents and or providers are not connecting based on their requirements but ultimately this is a hundred percent a sas application uh that is also accessible by mobile app that's right and are parents ones paying or child care providers neither isn't that a beautiful thing it's a hundred percent well what we do is we work with employers to incorporate child care as a benefit solutions so employers pay us a fee a subscription fee so that we can incorporate a search based on the requirements of their workforce and ensure that we have inventory ready for placement of those children okay so what does an average employer pay you for that service 19.97 a month per participating employee so and how many employees work to pay on average for a company um you know the surveys typically come in at about 40 percent participation and that's primarily because we're focused on the zero to five age group however uh due to the pandemic and based on this remote learning uh i'll call it opportunities for children to stay home and go to school what we found is that learning hubs is a solution that we could extend to parents through extended child care for school-aged children so i guess bridging the gap currently through covet 19 we're not only supporting zero to five age groups but also school-aged children so alessandra the question i was getting at is how many seats or employees is the average company paying you for well that would depend right on the size of the company so 100 that's why i'm asking the average all right so on average 60 60 uh seats per organization okay so this is sort of reaching middle market potentially pushing sort of enterprise this isn't for a small company with 10 people that have two people that need child care this is for any organization that has a need for it to be honest because there aren't any minimum required seats and currently we are an early stage organization so we've recently launched market actually when uh the first uh ordered the um you know the lockdown in march that's when we came out to market so uh we have exponentially grown the the scope of our services and the delivery of our services through the pandemic and we're we're really scaling up in terms of the size organization that's adopting our solutions so how many unique employers now pay you for your service for one seat or a thousand um if i had to just throw a a dart i would say around 100. okay wait why do you have to throw a dart i remember when i first found my first ass company i was looking at new customers every single day i knew the number like the back of my hand i knew their families their personalities everything yeah well it's a it's a great problem to have because we're on boarding every day all day long and because we're also providing non-standard care and 24-hour care and uh you know weekend care so um we're adding uh subscriptions all day long okay but you think about 100 employers right now and on average one employer signs up for about 60 seats correct that would be on average right so we we have it all over the map you ask for an average that would be that would be the average so 100 companies 60 seats on average would mean you feel you've got about 6 000 paid seats on your platform currently correct 20 bucks on average per month correct which should be about 120 000 a month in revenue correct so you've gone from nothing to 120 000 a month in revenue over the past 12 months now granted this is all yes and so these are subscriptions that will activate over time that means that as soon as the parent is active in our in our platform they will start paying for that subscription they don't start paying for the subscription in advance so they this is an on-demand platform which is a beautiful type of solution for our employers because they can stretch like an accordion right so they can they can uh drop seats they can add seats as those are are uh warranted yeah the flexibility is important so how many paid seats would you say you didn't have today i think we just did the math didn't we nathan i think you just said though that they're not all onboarded correct they they would be so how many are onboarded probably half that okay got it so you're signing up with an employer for maybe they'll say hey alessandra we love the tool yes we've got 30 that we need it for right now but we'll maybe scale up to 60 over 12 months so sign a contract for 60 but only pay for 30 seats until they onboard the full 60. as they they are using the service correct got it got it got it fair enough so you've got about 100 employers with 30 seats on board on average today so you're doing more like 50 60 000 a month in revenue still super impressive nothing to that in short amount of time correct and and the commitment though that we have and the the forecast that we have is that while employers come in through a survey that is a needs analysis it can always scale to higher uh requirements right covet 19 has thrown a wrench into every aspect of of the business and employers don't really know how to ascertain that as they're trying to recall their employees back to the office when when needed and or to the different activities and important to note is that i think that earlier in the lockdown a lot of folks were ecstatic to go home and work remote and i think that as uh you know as we have evolved in this in this pandemic there are more and more employees that recognize that their productivity may not be the same at home so uh what we're seeing is that the need for child care while earlier in this process it was it was um somewhat conservative what we're seeing now is that the demand is returning uh to the market and that's that's also good for the providers because a lot of the providers lost their uh enrollments right a lot of parents pulled out their children not knowing uh what was best for for the little one if you operate in a state like california providers right now are not allowed to operate you can't have people in a physical space that's not true child care providers have the ability to operate and stay open and take in children there are cdc recommendations and there's guidelines that have been uh published right by uh licensing by uh the department of social services that that add layers of scrutiny to uh hygiene and to the protocols right uh the the social distancing and and that but providers are allowed to be open they're let me rephrase there's a lot of parents that will not send their kids to a provider because the risk of that child picking up kovid in an asymptomatic way with 10 other kids of the same provider even if they have all the precautions following and then that child coming home and the parents sick is too high they'd rather be more unproductive at work and keep their children home how are i mean are you seeing that as a trend and if so how do you sort of pivot so that doesn't impact your business model in a negative way well i think that education has a lot to do with it and transparency of safety protocols when we bring a provider under the tutors scope of services and into our network we have a relationship with that provider so we have an ops team that vets the provider has conversations with the provider and we have an internal process by which we also qualify their protocols and in this case the safety and the um you know the cdc recommended protocol so if you go on our site for example and run a search for covid uh safe programs you'll see some that are tagged right they have a tag right on their uh profile to uh to disclose the protocols that they are following and i think that that adds some sense of um you know peace of mind if you will for parents what geographies do you cover right now all of california with a high emphasis in san diego because our proof of concept was san diego and this is where we had the most interaction with providers so we have the entire uh scope of uh of california lit when we say lit that means that we have uploaded the database of licensed providers we are engaging with them to build the relationship and to verify them we have a category in teachers which is verified or unverified provider and the verified provider goes through that that uh workflow that i was uh referring to here i just did a search in la um where do i find who's verified that you that you have a relationship with so you would see the category when you click on their profile you would see verified or unverified if you go to if you go to the easier search which is why i said uh the emphasis has been in san diego we this is where we have we ran our proof of of uh model and this is where we've started we're headquartered in san diego so where we have the most base of verified providers would be in san diego which would be a better search for you to see i see i see okay got it so i mean how challenging is that for you to scale sort of in the u.s i mean it imagines a lot of work to scale these providers i think maybe what you've done is you've legally obviously scraped a bunch of these sites from a database put them in your software but then you have to actually reach out and build a real relationship with them to start getting reviews verify them etc correct and that that's absolutely true and correct and there's two ways in which we do that we could do that proactively which means literally dialing for dollars right so we have a team of people that can dial for dollars uh but we also do it through a very um you know proactive and aggressive if you will marketing campaign uh we have an extraordinary team that uh has put in place a digital uh marketing strategy that reaches out through many facebook channels where uh these these groups of of providers uh share best practices and things like that so we're reaching out to them and kind of like yelp where you get an invitation to claim your own profile and come in and validate all of the information that we have we reach out to them as well so uh both proactively and and reactively or organically we are creating that validation and that verification again we are an early stage company and so our first market was san diego and we've just recently um turned up anything north of san diego so what you see there the database to your point this is this is all publicly available information all the licensed programs that we have in california and with the exception of some because we also do filters uh for um sanctions on on the records of these providers so we will we will place that filter first and then uh set aside that group of providers because those do need to to be um handled in a you know kind of different workflow to ensure that we're only incorporating quality uh providers and we're taking it to the next step we're also looking at uh you know higher level credentials because our viewpoint is that child care should be an early childhood education process with uh play as as you learn type curriculums and so we are uh partnering with many different organizations like naeyc and others to ensure that our providers are um you know are living up to the uh higher level of education uh standard alessandra before we wrap up um obviously the ultimate metric for you is how many kids do you have going through your system to daycare so their parents can focus at home and the child keeps learning and developing you know recording here on tuesday yesterday on monday how many children went to child care because they're paying you to help them do that that's a tricky question i'll say that we've helped 600 children since kovitz started not all which have paid to be connected with a provider i see and the reason for that are you right and the reason for that is we're a free platform so in the end our revenue model is to incorporate employers so that they in turn can bring in child care as a service uh under their benefits platform and for us adoption is the name of the game this is a gig economy as as you and i both understand it and for us it uh the you know the problem that we're trying to solve is to increase the inventory of child care uh slots or quality child care because we have a severe deficit prior to covet we were at about 44 deficit in san diego alone very close um you know statewide and so for us adoption is key and through the the initial stages of covad we weren't out there selling to employers we were actually making the platform available to parents and uh providers so that they could connect so a lot of those enrollments connections happen without us having a subscription-based agreement with employers that were looking to bring in that service as a benefit if that makes any sense it does alessandra let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book oh uh strategic selling number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um is there a ceo that i follow interesting um not particularly to be honest no problem number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company um salesforce number four how many hours i sleep every night at least six and a half i try eight but i don't always get to eight and what's your situation alexandra married single kiddos i am single by design single body love that no kids running around uh i have i have a son 20 year old so uh he's a usc student and hating life because he's home so he's living uh he's not living the dream right now but he's learning how to navigate tough times all right and last question what's something you wish to do when you were 20 that i knew oh uh that uh no one can hold me back and it doesn't matter what anybody thinks outside of your circle of love and those that that actually impact your life guys tutrus.com helping employers help their employees find appropriate child care so they can be more productive especially when they're working from home they've helped 600 children so far today launched in san diego scaling currently serving about 100 customers those customers are again are employers using them hopefully each of those scaling up on average to about 60 seats representing employers again employees that need uh child care services alessandra thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much for having me