Rollercoaster on a Bike: Zagster CEO Tim Ericson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the team? Who was the coder? You are not a coder, right?

Tim Ericson: I’m not a coder. We have a couple of friends from college who were coders working in regular companies. They were moonlighting it and they were doing it for equity. 

Sramana Mitra: How much did the University of Chicago pay you for this project?

Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: VisiQuate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

Brian is a serial bootstrapper. In fact, he bootstraps using services. Terrific entrepreneur to learn from.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Rollercoaster on a Bike: Zagster CEO Tim Ericson (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Tim has navigated major ups and downs during his years with Zagster.

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

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The benefit you are offering is a flexible workforce of adjusters. They can pick people up as they need to as opposed to having everybody on the payroll. 

Matt Anderson: That’s a part of it. We can scale up and down. From a cost standpoint, it gives them flexibility. Here is an example that I use with my clients. When I was in Crawford & Company, at one point I was managing director for a service center in the state of Alabama.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many people are in Coimbatore right now? Is London still small?

Saravana Kumar: We have about 130. London is still small. We have about 10 people there. We only keep the top management here. One of the biggest things that we have done this year is invest in a 250-seat office that amounts to a $1.2 million office. 

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2020 when COVID hit? 

Matt Anderson: Up until 2020, I did a lot of sales. I had a part-time account manager that was doing some sales. We hired our first salesperson. I think it was 2019 when we hired a COO, which is a very big hire. He has been with us for a year.

I was able to offload the job to him because I was super involved with everything up until I hired a COO. That frees up my time to sell more. Our limitation became how quickly I can get onboard clients and how many people I can get to. I hired the first business development person in January of this year and we also hired a marketing leader.

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many people were in the company in 2018? How many full-timers and contractors did you have?

Matt Anderson: I’m an avid user of Upwork. 

Sramana Mitra: So are we. We are big users of Upwork. I am very familiar with this model and we run One Million by One Million in the same model, so we are very familiar with the virtual company model. 

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck and Scaling in Coimbatore: Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar (Part 4)

Saravana Kumar: That is the good part about running a business in Coimbatore – the attrition is low. People are loyal and if you look after them well, there is no reason for them to go anywhere. 

Sramana Mitra: Yes, and they are probably close to their families. That’s a huge advantage.