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Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 7)

Joe LeCompte: We are starting to enter a new market in the business process automation where we’re actually going head to head against the BPM players. These are large-scale business management platforms that typically are in the order of seven figure license deals, five to ten person consultant deals for one to two years. What we’re seeing is that we can provide 95% of that functionality but without that same amount of labor. Frankly, that 5% of functionality might be a 5% that nobody uses or cares about. I liken that to Microsoft Word. You can do amazing things with Microsoft Word, but I typically limit my use to underline, bold, and italics. When I’m really feeling crazy, I’ll indent. That’s about it. That’s where we’re seeing our competitive landscape.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else you want to share in your company building process? >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Are you building the whole organization in Utah?

Dave Elkington: Yes. Here’s why. I’m maniacal about that. I drive everybody crazy. So much of a business, especially in hyper growth, happens ad hoc. It happens in the hallway. It happens in ad hoc meetings. If you distribute your leadership team, you impair them. That strategy is so fluid. It’s so quickly evolving that if you don’t cluster your key strategic leaders, you can’t be successful.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t want to get into this discussion but we have a completely global organization because of the nature of what we do. It works perfectly for us.

Dave Elkington: There are scenarios where it doesn’t work. There will be a day when I don’t need all of those key leaders here in Utah.

Sramana Mitra: I think the downside of building a startup at Silicon Valley these days is the talent war is crazy. That is not an easy game to play. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your own customer acquisition, is it all direct selling? Do you have a field sales force?

Bill Moschella: Yes, we have field sales and partner channel as well. We have an awesome partner channel team who are from Cloudera, Microsoft, and Oracle. They are now on-board and doing an amazing job.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your organization, are you still headquartered in Connecticut?

Bill Moschella: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company in terms of team?

Bill Moschella: At this point, we’re probably around 200 people all over the country. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 6)

Joe LeCompte: We have always been self-funded. It’s been a strategic decision because we feel that we didn’t need any funding. Also, we feel that if we did potentially accelerate growth, it would take our eye off the ball. It would take our focus from providing value to our customers to a different cycle.

We were now looking at our next financing move. Do we need to take on growth for growth’s sake so they can maximize their revenue? It has always been funded by customers and ensuring that is our focus. Robert can probably speak to you a little bit on how our customers drive our product roadmap.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re building the company organically.

Joe LeCompte: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: You would like to continue to build organically? >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 6)

Dave Elkington: Everybody who was willing to give us term sheets were great firms but what mattered to me was the cultural fit. Ultimately, we did $35 million from US Venture Partners. It was because I had Steve Krausz and Dafina, who were one of the newer partners. They were the right people. I loved their experience. I liked their engagement. They weren’t the highest valuation by a significant amount but they were the right people. They gave me the exact same terms that Mark Gorenberg gave me.

It allowed me to put much more fuel into the fire. By this point, I was surrounding myself with a lot of advisors that have done this before. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say you do that segmentation and figure out where the gap is. Do you also handle stuff like Google PPC campaigns for them?

Bill Moschella: Yes. They can either use their own agency, do it internally, or use our media-as-a-service where they pay a subscription cost to the media and then we give them the projected lead generation. If you put this money, the Evariant engine will give you more predictable results because we’re using analytics from past campaigns and current campaigns. By the way, we already have the templates ready in our engine, so just pick the campaign, select the target market you want to go after, and we’ll start pointing them towards call centre web forms, mobile, etc.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting, actually. What does a typical deal size look like for you when you’re working with a hospital? Is it a $100,000 recurring revenue in an annual account or is this a million dollar recurring account? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, you had this product out. Relatively soon, you have three paying customers. What happens next? What was the next major strategic move?

Joe LeCompte: The primary move was the IT focus. ITIL was really hot in 2008 to 2010. IT was looking for a way to better interact with their end customers. That was fuelling some of the growth. Now, I think people understand that you need to have a single pane of glass for anybody in the company to request something from anyone else in the company. What was once an IT service catalogue has now become an enterprise service platform that can easily serve the needs of the legal department as well as the HR department. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We’re talking 2010 now?

Dave Elkington: That experience was in 2011.

Sramana Mitra: Where were you revenue-wise at this point?

Dave Elkington: We were probably doing $6.5 million. A lot of companies in the SaaS space talk about bookings. When you’re bootstrapped, that gap is the only important thing that exists and most importantly, it is cash flow. It’s all about managing cash flow. Other companies would compare with us on, “What are you on revenue?” I’d be like, “We did $6 million in gaps.” They’d say, “What about bookings?” I’m like, “What’s a booking?” All that matters is the cash I’m going to bring in.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not very helpful.

Dave Elkington: I talked to a company and I really didn’t know what a booking was. He tried to explain it to me and it was such a foreign concept. At that time, I was like, “Who cares?” >>>