How Volie CEO Scott Davis grew Volie to $14M revenue and 2K customers in 2025.

1.2M MRR and $14M/Year in Revenue Our monthly revenue, it's going to be $1.2 million this month. You said you're doing 1.2 million a month, right? So, you're doing about 14 million a year. When I hear BDC, I think the publicly traded business development corporations. What does BDC mean for Voli? In automotive speak, that means business development center. Our software, if you've ever submitted a lead for a vehicle and gotten a call back or you're due for service or you've got a recall, the dealership's called you, that's what we do. Our software does it. And Scott, how much do you and your other co-founders still own of the business today? My family plus one of our co-founders owns about 85%. Someone offered you 70 million all cash today for 60% of the business. Do you take the deal? Hey folks, my guest today is Scott Davis. He is the president and co-founder of Voli, the leading communication platform for automotive BDC's. He's got over 20 years of experience in automotive retail operations and BDC strategy. Scott, you ready to take us to the top? Yes, sir. How you doing, Nathan? I'm good. It's good to meet you. Okay. Now, is this like, you know, if people are going on the road and they see cars for sale on the side? It's a car dealership. Are you installed in the dealerships as well or just the maintenance and repair shops? We're we're franchise auto dealers is who we work with. So, there are 18,000 What Volie Does (Automotive BDC Explained) in the US. We work with almost 2,000 and uh and hopefully uh we'll keep growing. And Scott, that's 2,000 individual locations or 2,000 logos, brands. Yeah. 2,000 individual rooftops almost individual. Okay. You said 2,000 individual uh rooftops. Again, that's just that's the maintenance shop, that's the car dealership, that's the sales center, whatever it is. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Very cool. Um Okay, take us more sort of into the story here. So, we have your uh product featured here on our website. Walk me through I mean, where can I find or where? Tell us about your most popular product. So, um most of our customers use us for their service BDC. Uh we replace their desk phones or manual processes. Basically, we built an automotive data matcher on top of a contact center solution. What is very common for dealers prior to Voli is to not have software for this. They use desk phones. They printed off lists and uh and we, you know, we put a system in place that they could actually make money in their BDC. Mhm. Okay. So, can you point to me somewhere here on the screen? Is there like is this a shot of that part of the software product? Yeah, that's the call call screen that they're in. Um the agents go from record to record. Uh there is no robo dialing Replacing Desk Phones With Software in volley. they just call, email, and SMS. But um what we've done is we've helped the dealer build a plan and they go from uh action to action and you know the dealer is 100% visibility into what's happening. Are you selling them leads as well or is it just to manage their current leads that they generate? Yeah, we're 100% sass software. Um we're not we're not selling market fulfillment or leads or anything like that. So we do integrate with most of their data sources. Uh we've loaded 5 billion human beings into Voli and dduped them down to about 244 million customers. So we just make it easy for them to run their business. And and help me get an understanding if I want to use all these software products that you just gave us an overview on. What's the average dealership going to be paying you per month or per year? It depends. So a single dealership is going to pay between $1,500 and $2,000 a month. Most of our customers are dealer groups. They use them at the enterprise level and we do it by the size of the store. So we have a a tensor group that pays uh $6,000 a month. We've got a tensor group that pays $13,000 a month. Okay. And when you say size of the Pricing: $1.5k–$20k per Dealership Group dealership based off what number of cars, number of leads, what uh based on their consumables. So average number of repair orders a month, average number of car sales they sell, etc. Dealers don't like variable pricing. So, we've got to kind of bucket them and and uh take the good with the bad with what we sell. I guess I'm not following that. So, 10 store group paying six grand a month for car sales or average number of repairs versus a 10 store group paying 20K per month. That feels like variable pricing. They're paying more if they do more more car sales and more repairs. Well, what I mean is is the size of these dealerships is a lot different. You may may have a little rural uh VW store that does 400 repair orders in a month. You may have a one in in the city that does 2,000. So when I say variable, we charge the dealer based on how big their dealership is. And we've used the size of these dealerships to estimate the consumables and and uh and what we need to charge to make it a good deal for them and for us to make the margins we need to make. Okay. And of the 2,000 roofs, right, that you're servicing, to use your your language, how many store groups is that? We have uh we send about 300 invoices a month. Okay. Okay. So, pretty then the average store group has about seven seven or eight routes. Yeah. Yeah. That's a pretty good guess. A lot of our dealerships are enterprise customers. They want to uh combine this all in one view and uh they make it easy. And you just gave an example of a store group 10 paying 6K and another same size paying 20K. If I tried to pin you into an average, is it fair to say the average store group will pay something like, you know, 10 grand a month, 15 grand a month? I I think the average rooftop for us uh pays about $1,000 a 2,000 Rooftops and 300 Store Groups month. Now, that is for our core product. We've we have another um we have another product. Have you ever received on your phone a uh call those labeled potential spam? Yeah. So, um dealers are it's epidemic for dealers. Um a lot of customers uh will flag their calls as potential spam. So, we will uh we bundle that into Voli. We also sell it separate. About half of our customers just buy that from us and it's a few hundred a month depending on okay between just just say it's an average of uh $300 to $400 a month for our average customer. Okay. Well, Scott, because you have two you have car dealerships and then you have store groups and they're they're different. 2,000 roofs and 300 store groups. So, the price points sort of are over, but but I guess to just sort of make the math easy for my audience, if the you said the average rooftop is paying about a grand per month, right? Yep. Yes. Okay. And I can I multiply that times the 2,000 car dealerships sort of back into your monthly revenue. Yeah. Our monthly revenue is about Well, it's it's going to be $1.2 million this month. So, that's incredible. Congrat. How's that feel? Um, we bootstrapped it. I I love what we How the Math Gets to $1.2M MRR do. I wish I didn't feel like I had to learn every lesson the hard way, but uh we're we're pretty proud of it. We need to do a lot better, but it's going to be a great year. It it's up to us to do a good job. When did you launch the business? What year? 2017. Um we we put on four customers and we ran with them, myself and a couple technical co-founders. We ran with them all through 2018 and uh practiced on them. We started selling to vendors of automotive dealers first uh just to build out the product and we started selling direct to dealer in uh late 2020 of course coming out of co so um put our first dealer on in March 2021 and it's been fast and furious from then. Do you remember your first million dollar year? Yes. Yep. It was uh um it was uh 2020, so sure felt a lot easier at that point, but uh um I wouldn't trade it. You were still at four customers there, right? Or no? Um by 2020, we had uh about uh 40 automotive vendors using it. So, okay. 40 callers that that service dealers. Yeah. So, you were sort of in a pilot phase with four customers from 2017 to From 4 Customers to $1M Revenue 2019. and you really hit the gas in 2020 and went from zero to a million dollars of revenue basically in like 18-ish months across 40 customers. How did you get those 40 customers? What was the strategy? I had a um just a nonsense part of the story here, but I owned a bunch of pizza places and uh I hired a marketing person uh to run it for my stores and pretty soon I'm doing all this database work for this chain that we are franchising. And I started working with automotive dealers in 2002 and uh it was a company called Driving Loyalty. We sold it in 2015. I had a pretty good network. So we didn't actually add a sales manager till 2023. And so how big was the team in 2020 when you hit a million revenue? 2020 we had uh 10 full-time employees. In uh June of 2023, we had 19 total employees, 15 full-time, and now we have 63 employees, 58 full-time. Okay. Wow. Well, and if you're doing, you said you're doing 1.2 million a month, right? So, you're doing about 14 million a year divided by that 63. I mean, you you that's really good. What is that? That's 230,000 of revenue per employee. That's pretty efficient. With my old company, I always felt like I could never make good decisions because I was always adding the person for when I got big. And so I had very strict rules at the start since I...