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From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is your customer acquisition strategy? Were you basically calling these people who have motivational speaking or other kinds of training programs and just direct-selling them into your technology?

Brad Lea: Yes, pretty much. We would find and select a target and camp outside their office. We would knock on doors and wait until we got in front of them.

Sramana Mitra: Getting to that $1 million milestone, what percentage of your revenue was in the revenue share mode and what percentage was in the per user pricing model?

Brad Lea: 100% was in the revenue share mode back then.

Sramana Mitra: So in the beginning, you basically had to give people the software and convince them to get on the fee model. >>>

From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were selling this particular training to car dealerships, and that became the core business for about a year.

Brad Lea: Yes, I had about 50 to 60 dealerships subscribing to use my system. I realized that that recurring revenue was definitely what I wanted to focus on. What happened was, as I continued to try and sell my training, the dealerships that I would approach had other trainers that they preferred or already used. I was having a hard time getting any scalability past 50. I kept hearing certain names as my competition, “We already use Greg Cardone.” I couldn’t convince them that I was better. I was finding a lot of no’s and was not able to grow my business. >>>

From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of where you started the business. I’d like to understand how you built the company step by step. You said you started the company by actually delivering your own course in the beginning. How, then, did you do that business of delivering your own course? Tell us a little bit of the nuances of building that business first. Then we’ll get to the SaaS business in a minute.

Brad Lea: I just kept going. I didn’t take no for an answer. It took about three to four years to figure out that I wanted to get into software. For three or four years, I was just out knocking on doors, getting behind on my bills, and sacrificing any kind of financial stability for entrepreneurship. Everyone said it wasn’t going to happen. Nobody believed that anyone was going to want to train online versus in person. It was just knocking on a lot of doors and trying to convince people. If I could help an entrepreneur, the help that I would give would be to not give up. More people will give up right before they hit a win. >>>

From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? How do people pay you? Is that a SaaS kind of a business model?

Brad Lea: Exactly, Software-as-a-Service. Usually, we will charge a little bit to get it set up and created. Then depending on the license type that you have, it will cost either X amount per user or some sort of a revenue share.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of denominations are we talking about?

Brad Lea: I would say, on average, $1.50 a user, or revenue share. We do a revenue share arrangement with some of our clients, where if they make $1,000, we take a small sliver of that. We have clients doing several millions a month to clients doing $10,000 a month. It’s a wide spectrum there.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of learning does your most successful client deliver on this platform? >>>

From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 1)

Brad knows how to sell. Read how he turned that skill in to a $20M revenue business with very little formal education.

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?

Brad Lea: I was born in Cottage Grove, Oregon in about 1969. My journey began right there.

Sramana Mitra: Did you grow up in that community?

Brad Lea: Yes, I grew up there until I was 14 years old.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that? Where did you move to and how did the journey evolve? >>>

Bootstrapping from New Zealand, Scaling in America: Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about the New Zealand team?

Jason Westland: I still have them. They’re our development team. If you can imagine going back to 2014, it was just me and the development team. Now, I have a team of customer support and marketing people here in Austin. The development team in New Zealand has scaled.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of metrics? How many customers? Where you run rate wise?

Jason Westland: I believe we have 16,052 paying customers.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to change the one questioning a little bit, and ask you what your feelings are about being a woman entrepreneur in the technology industry. What are you seeing? What has been your experience? Do you experience bias against you being a woman entrepreneur?

Janet Kosloff: I wouldn’t say I experienced any overt bias but it was very difficult, especially that very first bit of money.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s true of every entrepreneur man or woman.

Janet Kosloff: I would say that I was asked by more than one potential investor when I was raising the angel round if I was ever going to hire a man because the team slide on my deck had all women on it. I thought that was an odd question because I don’t think anyone would ask a man if they were ever going to hire a woman. >>>

Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: What is the minimum revenue threshold you think you need to get to achieve that?

Jon Ellis: My opinion is you need minimum revenues of about $50 million. However, plenty of companies especially in Australia, IPO at the level that we’re at now.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t think that’s a good idea necessarily.

Jon Ellis: It’s a disaster.

Sramana Mitra: Going public too soon is a bad idea. Based on the picture that you’re painting, $50 million run rate in the next three to four years is very doable. If you have a reasonably clean exit path into the public market in Australia, that sounds like a very interesting way to build a company.

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