Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the first year of that product being revenue-generating?

Rob Purdy: It would have started generating a little bit of revenue in 2012. At that point in time, we had 20 licensees for Power2Motivate. The only people using the reward component was us and our direct customers. The other 19 licensees were not using our reward platform. We had $20 million revenue in rewards.

Sramana Mitra: What did that do to your business in 2013 and 2014? >>>

Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 6)

Rob Purdy: It is. It has worked very well. It has been a good ride for all the shareholders who came in at that time because they’ve been receiving dividends for the last three and a half years. The valuation of the business has grown significantly in six years.

Sramana Mitra: These are people that you knew. You basically used personal relationships.

Rob Purdy: Yes. This was a combination of employees as well as business partners that we had built up over the years. Ben, out of Australia, bought 10% of the company. We had another partner do the same thing. Then we had some external people >>>

Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you bring these inflection points together for us and help us understand how this impacted revenue?

Rob Purdy: When we signed the contract, the company business was, in aggregate, about $5 million. We doubled our business in the next couple of years. We grew the business to around $10 million. By 2010, we were about $10 million. We had a certain amount of profitability. Most of what we made went back to product development. At the end of any given year, we probably never made any money. >>>

Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2008?

Rob Purdy: There was a turning point in 2007. We went to our first ever trade show and unveiled the product in April. At that show, we had more international people asking about the product. There were a lot of companies that wanted to resell the product in their countries. We were pretty quick to realize that we had something in terms of a product and its appeal.

What was interesting is these companies wanted to take this into their country and resell it. We actually closed a contract at that show with an Australian whose family had started an employment law firm. They had over 18,000 companies in Australia that they provided employment legal services for. They were branching out into >>>

Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get a first version of this product out?

Rob Purdy: We started development for the Power2Motivate platform in late 2005. It took all of 2006 to complete the first phase. Phase one was the employee engagement component. That was enough to allow us to take that to market in April of 2007. By the end of 2007, we had probably 30 customers on the platform.

Sramana Mitra: What were you charging them? >>>

Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 1989, you launched this company. What happened between 1989 and 2006? Did the business succeed? Were you able to get clients? What scale were you operating at?

Rob Purdy: The business did okay. Unless marketing services companies have a very solid unique point of difference, it’s really challenging to continually grow the business. You are falling prey to the next big idea that the company falls in love with. If it’s not yours, you can lose those clients fairly quickly. The clients aren’t as sticky as they would be in a technology environment.

In those years, we had lots of successes. We landed a lot of different clients and we did a lot of interesting projects, but they >>>

Bootstrapping to $80 Million from Canada: Rob Purdy, CEO of Power2Motivate (Part 1)

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Adding to our incredible roster of stories of entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped decisively, Rob’s is an incredible journey of a precise execution.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and what kind of background?

Rob Purdy: I was born in Ontario, Canada. Our family is very blue collar. I grew up in an environment centered around a steady 7 in the morning and home at 3:30 kind of routine. We were in an area of the city where General Motors dominated the local >>>

Bootstrapping to $10M+ From Australia: Financial DNA CEO Hugh Massie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you stimulate that? Were these inbound leads or did you actually go after enterprise clients?

Hugh Massie: Both. There were inbound leads. People became aware that we existed. Because what we have done has been leading edge, it’s only now that these bigger firms are starting to having a goals-based financial planning model. What I’m finding more commonplace is request for proposals. That didn’t exist until the last year or so. It was all very organic. These firms >>>