Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the timeline? You started this in 1999 and grew this to 40 people in three to four years?

Peter Coppinger: Yes. We got the idea for Teamwork in 2009. We launched around then, but we kept it as a side project. We really found it difficult to find time to work on our product. After a couple of months after the passing of the idea, we said that the only way we were going to get this product off the ground was if we treat ourselves like one of our own customers. We dedicated Fridays.

Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did just the two of your run the agency?

Peter Coppinger: We grew the agency to about 40 people over the next few years. We had never ran a proper business and we had no idea what we were doing. How do you do pitches? How do you do pricing? How do you manage the margins on different projects you’re doing. How do you stop being the busy fool? When should you hire people?

Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 1)

Peter has led a terrific vertical cloud business from Ireland and now runs a global SaaS company that is kicking ass.

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

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now?

Todd Schwartz: This year, we’re in the over $400 million range.

Sramana Mitra: When did you go public?

Todd Schwartz: In 2021 on the NYSE. When I walked up to the stock exchange, it was never about financial gain. It’s so funny to me to see OppFi on the banner. This was literally about helping people. I want to make that clear. If financial gain is the reason you’re doing it, your heart and soul won’t be in the business.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about going beyond Illinois? How long did you do just Illinois?

Todd Schwartz: We scale nationally now. What was interesting to me was there were 17 other states that had small-dollar lending laws that we could use. What’s difficult is that each state has its own rules. We started to scale that way. There are 35 states that have payday lending laws, but only 17 have small-dollar lending laws.

Our goal was to provide credit access in a better way and, essentially, eradicate the payday loan. That was our original mission. That’s when I stepped down as CEO. I became Executive Chairman and hired a CEO.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the technology? Did you build all that?

Todd Schwartz: I do not believe in going out and blowing a bunch of equity to build this beautiful shiny technology system. In four years, it’s probably not going to be the best system with the rate of change. I used off-the-shelf solutions and did API integrations into them. I spent little on technology. I didn’t have a CTO for the first five years. They were all variable costs. I didn’t have to outlay a lot of equity. I was able to grow with a variable cost model.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 3)

Todd Schwartz: The technology wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about lending. I didn’t know any other way to do it except take $100,000 of my own savings and open a one-room office in the north side of Chicago, get a printer, and use Excel to originate loans. I applied for the CILO license. Six months later, I was granted the license. I was getting referrals from the pawnshop.

I made the first 3,000 loans in person by myself. I handed the check to every borrower. I got to know every borrower. I understood why we were better. There were no prepayment penalties. I had to hire people. We were getting so much referral volume. We have such high customer satisfaction. We weren’t really measuring it, but I could just tell by the way people were overjoyed and the referrals we were getting. Our interest rates were much lower. Our payment terms were much more beneficial.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you steer your career from that point on?

Todd Schwartz: I went through the crisis of 2008. That’s when I learned a lion’s share of what I know today. I learned about investing. I learned about allocating capital. I learned what not to do. I learned it not from having success. We got ourselves in a little bit of a pickle. It was a very tough situation. Unwinding a lot of that was painful.