How VendorPm CEO Emiel Bril grew VendorPm to $11.3M revenue and 600 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is emil brill he's the founder and ceo of vendor pm his mission is to modernize the way property managers work with service vendors all right emil you ready to take us to the top yeah happy to i'll give a quick origin story here i started my first business when i was 14 years old was the shitty family situation had to make some money to help out my mom and sister at the time so i started going door-to-door in my neighborhood selling window cleaning services of all things because at 14 years old where else are you gonna get a job and make money uh ended up actually being quite decent at it brought you know my friends along they brought theirs and before we knew you know we had this team of 50 60 really really hard-working dedicated uh like-minded individuals at a young age and we were all selling door-to-door and we started you know building this relatively large business we're doing about 10 000 homes this summer at the time emilia where were you oh this is toronto okay great this is toronto yeah and so we built this business throughout high school very early days of university uh eventually sold that business and then i started heading up sales for a high-rise window hold on so when did you sell that business how old were you that would have been around 21 i believe and what'd you guys sell it for uh in a relatively small amount but also just undisclosed and we'll keep that private for now why did you guys decide to sell it at that why was that the right point in time to sell it you know we were doing the same thing for for seven years um and felt that we had learned everything that we you know we wanted to at the time the initial motivation behind it was certainly monetary simply for the fact that i wanted to help my family out once that you know was addressed and especially at that stage in my life high school university your needs are not you know what they are when you're you know later in your life i felt that i met my monetary goals and i also felt that i'd learned and expanded that business to a stage that i was comfortable with and i was ready to take on the next challenge and what was business before we move on to the next challenge the scale of that business when you sold it was about how much in revenue that year yeah so i mean again this is a seasonal business a because most of your staff are in school high school or uni yeah yeah but i mean are we talking like 100 in sales or like 2 million no no roughly a million a year it was where we were sitting yeah okay got it and there was four of you you said oh no no this was i mean this is myself that had started that business but there was you know a relatively large team it was a labor intensive business not just on the actual completion labor side of the work but also um from a sales side as well okay now take us into after 21 what happened next sure sure so i started heading up sales for a high-rise window cleaning company it's still you know within that world that i was familiar with and i started getting an idea of you know really that sticker shock when you go from we'll call it single family home to commercial and by the way just for definition purposes when i say commercial we're talking about office condo apartment hospitality hotels anything that's not consumer single family homes and really really got that sticker shock reason being is you know to clean the windows let's say just the exterior windows of a single family home one two hundred dollars to clean the exterior windows of a you know an average condo or apartment building can be ten twenty thousand dollars or these contracts is multi-year contract to be you know in the seven figures right and so i'd gotten really excited by just how much money property managers because i'm selling to property managers not homeowners anymore are are spending on something like window cleaning and so i thought to myself well if they're spending this much money to make their windows shine and sparkle how much are they spending on literally every other building service okay and that number annually in north america is over 400 billion dollars so it's a very hard number to ignore now from there i was evaluating the way that they're spending this money their work flows in sorry personal context you're you're skipping college you're in college doing this so i actually did graduate um i never went to class it was pretty much just you know i went to mcmaster hamilton and i would you know just drive over to hamilton cram the night before and do my exams but the focus throughout my university days was certainly on business 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 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview two questions why do university and do you do university but also why go join a high-rise cleaning company as head of sales if you just sort of sold your company for it sounds like potentially a you know nice chunk of money for a 21 year old yeah so twofold okay so the first question um was sorry could you repeat the first question again nathan why go to college oh yeah 100 so listen if i could go back and do it again i don't know if i would uh the truth is that you know both my parents are immigrants there's something that's super important to them i said to myself look if i can do both and it really doesn't come at a material cost to growing a business then i rather make them happy and especially my dad being ill this is something really important to him you know i it came at a little cost and it was something that i justified as being worthwhile um and listen again this is you know we're talking about soft skills here right it's not something that you necessarily need to learn through a textbook when you're studying hard skills i mean that makes a lot of sense to complete your education so very different conversation in a whole other rabbit hole um but to your second question around you know why join this company because the scale the requirements the knowledge it's a completely different world you're talking about you know in a single family home space two-story three-story homes and now you're talking about 60-70 story buildings um so there's simply a learning curve and i wanted to de-risk by by learning from you know someone who's been there done that and built a successful business in the space so fast forward here what year did you launch vendor pm launch vendor pm in 2020 and i'll give you just the quick 30 seconds of what i learned and what led to that being in that high-rise window fitting world so a the massive spend uh you know the gmb in this markets for over 400 billion dollars annually the workflows today are completely manual and offline they're heavily reliant on email excel word of mouth and remember i sat on the supply side of this dynamic and i saw this transpire thousands of times every single time this would come at the expense of property management right and i just want to clarify we're not talking about the manager of an individual condo unit or a single-family home this is institutional property management they're managing entire assets buildings right yeah yeah the water flows hot cold going the right way the fire pumps working the hvac working correctly at paint jobs like that kind of stuff exactly and that's what led to starting vendor pm in 2020. i see okay got it so you're out of college at this point out of college at this point yeah i just graduated how's dad doing uh not doing anymore uh i'm sorry to hear that okay so so did well i guess i mean since you sort of shared that as part of your story did did i guess his passing have any impact on you saying you know what i'm gonna go try and hit a home run for myself here um quite candidly i don't feel you know that it had much of an impact i know that his wish wasn't for you know for for business or wealth or any of that sort he just wants me to live a happy and balanced life listen that said every time you you know be quite candid and honest with you every time you hit a major milestone you go oh it would be great if he was here to see this to celebrate this right but uh but no it had nothing to do with it directly i would say and what about your mom i mean listen she's uh she's an amazing woman um you know she lives quite a simple life and i all have to say she's she's seen this um you know let's say one degree out i've seen us grow vendor pm over the past years and you could tell that there's genuine pride there which is obviously a great feeling that's amazing okay so let's let's sort of not bury the headline fenn gates a customer uh a vision young you know uh bental green known coming off your website right community living in toronto as a customer what are these companies or these sort of uh owners of properties paying you on average per month to use your vendor management software right so at a high level i'll just talk about what acv is on both sides of the marketplace because this is a software enabled marketplace acv on the property management side some of the names that you mentioned uh is relatively nominal right it could be anywhere between six to ten thousand dollars a year where we do monetize is predominantly on the supply side and that's on the vendors and so acv on the vendor side could be anywhere between let's say three and six thousand dollars a year but that's at volume yep yep well let's talk about that so how many vendors right have made at least a dollar got at least a dollar of work on your platform over the past year yeah i mean i wouldn't have those exact stats but i could tell you that in the past two years just a couple quick i guess headline points on both sides of that marketplace is that we've gone from virtually zero on both to 5 000 buildings on the property management side on the demand side and 35 000 vendors on the supply side now that is all in canada we're launching now in the us and so we do have a big backlog of both supply and demand that's being implemented being onboarded but i um yeah i won't speak to those numbers yet a because they're so fluid and b i don't have them off the top of my head yeah we won't talk about the us but but look there's a lot of marketplaces that build a lot of demand but they can't get people to actually use the marketplace to transact so how do you manage an active building are all 5000 active uh yeah the vast majority are and and you know it's it's a very good point especially our market is our yeah our market is rather uh we'll call it behind as far as technology and adoption goes so there's this massive change management piece that you need to deal with you know we're predominantly competing with manual processes emails phone calls right so it's very difficult from a change management lens and we've over indexed on product engineering and customer success as a byproduct to mitigate that and we've done a good job doing so so but just be clear how do you define an active building is it a dollar spent in the past 30 days or what yeah no it's predominantly based on what we call wallet share so we have this tool this feature in vendor pm where they're actually planning all of their services and all their contracts through vendor pm that becomes the benchmark what we call the scorecard for success and you can take a fulfillment rate based on that i see i see okay and obviously there's buildings and then property managers but a property manager could have a lot of buildings so how many property managers are there that manage the 5 000 buildings yeah roughly 2 000 uh so the way that it works is yeah so the way that it works is yes you do have i mean listen you could have triple a office assets where you have a team of three or four even five managing one building and then you get a b and c class assets where to your point you have one property manager managing let's say two or three buildings uh per person right and then quickly same set of questions on the other side of your marketplace how do you define an active vendor right so an active vendor would be are they responding to rfqs and rfps that they're receiving from the property management side in the last 30 days yeah i mean listen the way we measure marketplace success is what are the percentage of rfps that are getting three bits back see because that means that you have look right there that gives you a liquidity of supply which is fundamental in the marketplace it's not used to anybody but that's also what the successful value exchanges for a property manager you see the way that i look at i love i love comparing this to uber right you you down you download uber you press a button and that that's your aha moment oh this is so cool a car is coming to me that car doesn't get you to the right destination you're not using uber again you don't have a successful value exchange so that metric that i just defined the percentage of rfps that get three bids back that defines both a successful value change for the pm and the liquidity of supply so that is our service level guarantee that's what is that number so today in major metropolitan cities it's over 90 and some more we'll call it secondary tertiary markets it's about 75 and i'll give you just some context here only six months ago that number was at one five fifteen percent so a blend a weighted average of across both so something like eighty percent then up from five correct correct correct yes what did you do to how what leveraged people to go from fifteen percent to fill rate to eighty percent listen i i mean it's a really corny line um and i can't remember who said i think it was jobs but essentially focus is not what you say yes to it's what you say no to and the reason i say that is because we've been you know we make a point as a company value of being so hyper focused and over focused on solving the direct problem in front of us that this simply wasn't to focus until we reached that part within the process so i mean there's a i wouldn't say there's any one silver bullet it was simply shifting our focus because it was the right time and place to do so and then a whole slew of lead bullets that led to improving this and we're not done yet there's still many more lead bullets that are going to get this up to 100 or very close to so in february your last full sort of month right of of operating how many rfps were submitted through the platform oh yeah uh probably between five and six hundred six hundred okay interesting and and then um i guess tell me how you built the team out you mentioned uh you mentioned some team sort of categories earlier but what's your full size today yeah so full size of the team today is around 65. um we have some exciting news that i can't i won't talk about now um but how many how many engineers uh engineer i i actually need to go back and find the specifics and i wouldn't want to speak to those specifics right now either i mean is it heavy engineering or is this way more about you know signing up new vendors new pms um i don't want to say it's not heavy engineering um listen at the end of the day you're selling a technology product and your engineers are you know one of your greatest assets so hey listen we're not building antimatter here um but this is largely an execution play as most marketplaces are so you're definitely over indexing on on areas like customer success as an example and how have you decided to fund the business date are you bootstrapped no uh venture okay so tell me about sort of why did you decide to raise when was the last race completed so the last raise um that was announced was in june or july of last year um that would have been our seed round and look the reason is ultimately that sorry how much was that for so that would have been a four million dollar round okay got it and then you know some venture debt on top of that as well tell me more about that a lot of people don't use vendor debt that early why'd you decide to go that route an insurance policy don't need to draw on it but i i'd like to de-risk you have to pay unused fees no no one uses on the debt okay interesting do you bank with the bank that also gave you that line no so there's no deposit relationship they're banking on no interesting okay got it so four million seed um uh and then it sounds like you've got an announcement coming up people can infer whatever they want about that but that's great um talk to me a little bit about look if you do this math right you said three to six thousand per vendor right and obviously we can take 35 vendors or sorry 35 000 vendors times 3k a pop i mean i don't think you're doing 105 million in revenue no see there's a freemium model and i don't want to go into the details and specifics here but but i will say there's a freemium model um and we have yeah we i mean our model uh has very strong triggers um and retention that results in these conversions and and you know and the revenue growth have been able to achieve today i don't want to speak to those numbers either but well i mean by the way emil that's your genius that's why we do the show right so there's a lot of marketplaces where you're everything you just said but you know what they're duds they do nothing they're worth nothing because no one uses them right so how are you activating these vendors which you define as they were responding to an rfp in the last 30 days correct that's the trigger as that's defining activation that's also the trigger for upgrading in a lot of cases yeah but the question is how right a lot of people can sign up 35 000 vendors they can scrape craigslist and do that in two seconds the genius and what you're doing is you're activating them right so why are they responding to your rfps and not other people's rfes because the alternative for them is phone calls emails and word of mouth the same manual processes and heavy cost sales that they've been relying on for the past three four decades and what would you consider again it sounds like you don't want to show your own numbers but for a general in a marketplace what would you consider a good conversion rate right on this side of the marketplace well it really depends on the triggers i mean and sorry the channels because there are multiple channels which you know vendors are upgrading um our strongest channel you know is is north of 50 um but look ultimately there's so many variables you couldn't give a solid answer that question you could be talking about a b2c marketplace where you know the average you know we'll call it transaction is in the hundreds and as a byproduct of that you don't have a strong of a trigger and and therefore the conversion is lessened um i think you know competition and what what tech stack the market is using currently plays a big role leading or i guess tying into your previous question there's just way too many variables and they're unique to each business and channel you talked about economics on both sides of the marketplace but do you ever try and get to the point where you can actually quantify the money that vendor pm can generate from each rfp like submitted and done through the platform and if so like how do you think about that yeah it's a really good question it's i could tell that you're you know very thoughtful because these are questions that vcs would get to very quickly as well um yes it is something that we think about uh something that we were tracking early days we we're no longer tracking it because the business is growing at an incredibly rapid rate and that number is too fluid that it's not what it's incredibly rapid rate you're talking like 100 year over year or something different uh more than that okay got obviously now going from a dollar to five dollars was 500 growth right so that doesn't it's not a not hugely valuable there in understanding your business correct i would say we're hitting you know where what tier one sas metrics is tier one growth you know growth targets would be for our stage got it um we don't know what stage you're at so why don't you talk about what those two one metrics are sure well i mean listen as far as stage goes we did you know we did our seed in january or sorry june or july of last year so so you know the next stage would be your series a so when you get but i think it's it's kind of silly i would think to define a company by by what they've raised there's there's hundreds of companies that raise a lot of money and they do no revenue reflective raised 150 million bucks they did 14 million in revenue and sold for 14 million bucks it was a total doubt right so like i don't think defining stage to what you've raised is a smart move um i would say most series a company i would say most series a companies obviously uh they've got to be growing at least 300 year over year triple triple triple double double right sort of thing um i would say that you're probably finding yourself in a weird spot because you have to convince markets that you're a software company when really your software plus marketplace and so you have to make sure they see that as a strength not a weakness right um and i would say most people in their series a right now are seeing between like a 25 and 40 x multiple if they can convince the market that they are truly a sas movement are you sort of in those ranges uh yeah i'd say yes let's say yes yeah interesting look what i love there's a lot of folks that only have marketplace writer's access is a good example and you are in a very unique position where you own a relationship with these folks you can build unique software specifically for each of them that is pure sas for the pms and for the for the contract on another side do you have any embedded sas tools yet or no uh yes on the demand side we want to build that more on the supply side makes a ton of sense are you doing factoring or is there a lending business here where you're bringing forward rfp cash flows they're 100 will be yeah that makes a ton of sense there too how much do you think you could deploy letting people get the cash 30 days up front you know and then you know getting the invoice paid 30 days later i mean is it is it a billion 100 million what um you know we're taking a crawl walk run approach to it so it's it's such a dynamic sliding scale obviously that the goal is larger numbers but we're going to start small um and do this do this the right way without without too much guesswork yeah i mean painting that picture in a series a deck gets your valuation much higher a lot of folks are treating this fintech revenue like sas revenue which is not equal but it is what it is so we'll see what happens we're rooting for you man a hell of a model here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book i actually just finished reading radical candor um love it i would recommend it to anyone in our stage number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um you know not no not one in particular i couldn't give that answer number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business i mean look i think uh especially when you think about the remote world slack it's just been fundamental it becomes your collaboration and your office when you are remote number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven you sleep well that means there's a big secondary component in this round you're about to close huh yeah i don't know about that i think it's more so i i just go to bed as early as i can fair enough all right and what's your situation married single kids uh i have a girlfriend no kids right now all right and how old are you uh just turned 26 a week ago 26. very cool last question something you wish you knew six years ago when you were 20 how hard it would be to start a tech company guys he cut his teeth at 14 sold his first business at 21 when his uh business was doing caught a million bucks a year in revenue with him and some buddies then went to college got some cut his teeth in high rise window cleaning realized how big the gmv was in that space and said you know what i'm going to launch my own company here called vendor pm in 2020 raised a four million dollar seed round uh last year scaling nicely now he's got over 5000 properties on the platform across 2000 property managers on one side on the supply side the window cleaners the painters the hvac crew all that jazz he's got 35 000 vendors signed up 600 rfps completed on the platform in february with a big announcement coming up we'll see what happens emil thanks for taking us to the top awesome have a good one one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm 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