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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 3)

Joe Speiser: In 2005, we were a very profitable business and were scaling quickly. We had 50 to 60 employees at that time. This was my first large business, so I felt that we needed help. We needed some outside experience to guide us on how to scale this company. We brought on private equity. We sold half the company to TA Associates and Strikes Group. We started recruiting the grey-haired management team that you’re supposed to have in place. Things moved very quickly from there. We kept expanding. We went from $50 million to $200 million in revenue. It was on fire. That brings us up to 2010.

Sramana Mitra: The company was private equity owned from 2005 to 2010 and scaled to $200 million. You were still with the company at this point?

Joe Speiser: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to the company? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given that the market is $45 billion, there’s obviously a huge amount of head room to build a larger business here. Could you have grown a lot faster? Are there levers that you could push? I’m not saying that you should grow faster. I’m asking out of intellectual curiosity.

Tim Hentschel: There definitely is. If you gave me capital, I can spend it really quickly. You’re spending unlimited amounts of money when you’re trying to educate consumers especially on a worldwide basis. We’ve still got bootstrapping roots and are growing organically. It reflects in the growth that we continue to see.

We just surpassed two million registered group coordinators. That’s a good metric. We hit our first million in 2013. It only took us two years to hit our second million. We have a 70% net promoter score. As the number of people using us and liking us gets bigger, the word of mouth grows exponentially. We’re just hitting our stride. >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 2)

Andy Gotshalk: I also started taking some classes and thought about the idea of going to business school full-time. I never went back to business school so to this day, I still don’t have an MBA. I did take some key classes along the way, which provided a good foundation for me. The biggest thing that you’re going to get out of a business school is the network. The actual coursework is a critical piece of it, but you can pick that up from many different places. I took some classes to give me more of that foundation and continue to grow with the company.

An interesting side-story about me that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with business or entrepreneurship is in 2003, there was a restructuring going on in Haemonetics. They laid off a decent amount of the work force. But I didn’t get laid off. I had the opportunity to talk to the people there and coordinate getting laid off for a nice severance package that allowed me and my wife to travel the world. I decided to leave and travel for a year mostly to developing countries around the world. It also helped me think a little bit more about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. That was in 2003. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2000?

Joe Speiser: We started the deal sites in early 1999.

Sramana Mitra: This was bootstrapped at that point?

Joe Speiser: Yes, there were no VCs. These businesses were profitable in the first few months. If we weren’t able to make money in the first few months, we’d move on to the next set.

Sramana Mitra: On what kind of revenue level were you doing this in the 2000 to 2001 time frame before you partnered with your competitors?

Joe Speiser: I think it was around $300,000 to $500,000. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? Is this something that you are going to accelerate by taking outside capital or do you want to remain an employee-owned organization?

Tim Hentschel: Debt is so cheap. It’s 3% to 4%. People get excited about the private equity money out there. I agree that it has got some merit, but equity investment is expensive money. Whenever you go to pitch to an equity investor, you’re always going to tell them your strategy for using the money. If you really believe it and you know you can do it, then you’re better off getting debt because you can just pay that back with the kind of growth an equity investor would be interested in. You could easily pay back that loan two times faster than you’re supposed to.

Whereas when you got an equity investor, you get an equity investor for life. Finding agreeable terms for a buyout, especially if you’re a private company, can be difficult. You’re going to be constantly pressured to do a lot of things with that money and for those investors. It’s not something that you can take lightly. It’s one of the hardest things you can do. >>>

Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 1)

We have covered quite a few Utah companies already like Pluralsight, InsideSales, and Steals.com. Here is another interesting entrepreneurial story out of the mini tech startup hub in Utah.

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

Andy Gotshalk: I’m originally from Boston. I was born and raised there and also finished high school there. I went on to college at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. What I really wanted was Biomedical Engineering but at that time, there weren’t that many schools that offered a Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering. At Georgia Tech, I could pick either Mechanical or Electrical Engineering and then get a certificate in Bioengineering. I officially had a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Certificate in Bioengineering. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)

Joe bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital. His third business is a spin-off within the second business that takes him back to his digital media roots.

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

Joe Speiser: I’m from New York and I went to school in the city. I studied at the Columbia University. I’ve been doing all sorts of businesses from a very young age. I always had a passion for trying to start something from scratch and make a living. My dad is an entrepreneur. I used to work in his warehouse for most of my summers. It definitely taught me a lot watching my dad run a business. I don’t know if it’s something that’s taught or something that you’re just genetically predisposed to. I enjoy it so much. >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All the business model is entirely predicated upon the hotels paying your fees and not the consumers. What are the key segments where you do business? Are we talking weddings? What are the top segments in which your business flows?

Tim Hentschel: Sports teams is big for us. It’s great to have a relative that had a lot of connections in pro sports as an owner of an NFL team. We’ve been doing pro sports team travel for 10 years—Los Angeles Clippers, San Diego Chargers, Washington Red Skins, New York Jets, and Brooklyn State Warriors. Over here in the UK, we work with AFC Wimbledon.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the business is now sports team group travel? >>>