Ich baue Vertriebsteams auf: Wie skaliere ich weiter?

0:00We build sales teams for companies, uh for online businesses, service businesses, coaching businesses. We build their sales teams, manage their sales process, and build their systems. Okay. We did just shy of 14 million this year. Mhm. Um we'd like to be at 100 million in the next 3 years. Mhm. Our technically year-over-year growth rate puts us on track for that. But our month-to-month growth rate, we haven't really grown for the whole year. We've just been consistently at a higher number.

0:30If that makes sense. So, we've done about $1.3 million a month this year. Um whereas last year we broke the million point later to the year. So, month-over-month we haven't really grown. >> Yeah. Okay. What's stopping us is like we've done the math to how many clients we would need you know, how many clients we need to bring on, how many we need to service to be at 100 million. And one, it doesn't seem like we could fulfill our service to the level that we'd want to fulfill it at Why? to do that.

0:58Um Well, yeah, so bringing on, I guess having the right people on the bus who are trained in the right way, who can fulfill on the product. >> So, you have people who do stuff. And why can't you get more people who also do stuff? What's also that at as we've grown, our profits have shrunk. So, then it's like to get the right people, we have to pay the money for them. And then we have to charge more to a point where >> we're charging so much that we're, you know, we'll churn too much or too churn too many of our clients.

1:27>> Pardon? >> Churn customers? Yeah. Okay. Um so, like the challenge is, yeah, let's say we're doing 100 million and we've got enough clients to make 100 million. Mhm. The amount of of leadership and fulfillment we would need for those clients wouldn't be profitable Okay. to pay at that, you know, to get that level of talent, basically. Okay. What's one of the cha- I mean, I don't really know the >> right now? You're good. What are the margins right now? Uh this year we profit-wise about 3 million.

1:52Okay. And is that compressing? Uh yeah, we we almost profited the same amount last year on half the revenue. Yeah. Um what is the added cost basis comprised of? We So, last year we profited a lot more because we did not we did everything ourselves, basically. So, we brought on a leadership team, we put on sales directors, account managers, built out a engineering team. Yeah, you had unpaid founders who were doing the work of multiple people and the profits look really fat because you guys didn't pay yourself except out of profits.

2:25Yeah. Well, we got paid, but yeah. Well, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. Um and now that you actually have to pay people to do the stuff that you want to do because you want to build an asset rather than just like doing all the work yourself, the margins are compressing. Right. So, question one is, do the margins compress and then stop or do they just continue to compress? Thing one. So, I guess you can answer that. Yeah, it feels as though they're continuing to compress. Okay. So, what is the what is the thing that continues to grow and eat up your margin?

2:53In order to provide a better service, our fulfillment team manages is managing less and less clients. Therefore, like our profit per pod Okay, why do they have to So, how do why do they have to manage fewer and fewer clients now than they did earlier? Uh cuz our churn was too high. Our success rate was too low. >> Yeah, got it. Um All right.

3:22So, are you working with us uh for Alto? Um no. Yeah. That's dumb. Um I own a sales company. Like, I wonder if we know anything about scaling sales teams. >> Alto is what's what's that? >> Yeah, what we're doing. Like, what they offer to us. Yeah, yeah. Um We have to like there is a version of the business that you have that is profitable. Uh for you to attract high-level talent in order to pay them. That's all service-based businesses. You likely do have a pricing issue uh because the eventuality of all service-based businesses, especially B2B, is that the price continues to go up, and that's the way it works cuz you chase bigger mirror customers, you charge bigger and bigger premiums, and that is the virtuous cycle of services.

4:09Um and you do that because you develop a good reputation, you have more demand than you have supply, you always have a supply constraint if you're in services if you're good. Right. That's how it works. And because of that, you increase your price, and then you're able to get more A players then because you can afford them, which increases your reputation, increases demand, which allows you to get more A players, and so you go from paying $100,000 people to $250,000 a year people to $1,000,000 a year people to multi-million dollar per year people. And so I'm saying that's where it goes. And so right now, we just have to figure out like where the issue is in the ac- actual model. And so right now, you had to compress your margins because you had each account rep doing something um you know, they had to they had to decrease the numbers.

4:45The question is like I would probably bet if we looked at all the thing all the activities that they do, there are some activities that correlate with retention, and there are other activities that don't at all, and probably some things they do that might actually decrease retention. Right. And so we just have to figure out what those things are, and then kind of prune them. This is a more op- like you're in a you're in an ops business, right? It's all it's people ops. Yeah. Um which I'm very familiar with. Uh but that's that's the core issue that you have.

5:11Fundamentally, if your unit economics work where what are you charging, 20% of top line? 25. 25, yeah. So you're charging 25% of top line, you probably have an issue from the bottom up rather than the top down. So you increasing your prices actually more looks like how do I get accounts that per rep I'm going to make more money Right. rather than actually going from 25 to 30 or whatever, right? >> I get more valuable clients? >> Exactly, yeah. Right, so how do I get bigger companies to do more volume of of more zeros on their price tag? Yep.

5:38Right. That was my other constraint that I was deciding between asking you. And so it sounds like I would ha- I would look at the characterization of the customers that came in, and then we have to do profitability per customer, which then creates the customer ICP, which we then change our messaging so that we can say, "Okay, we need to track this type of customer that sells this type of thing." And so, the model itself might not be at all wrong. This happens This is like not just a him problem. This is probably like 20% of you. Is that the business model itself you should be able to make plenty of money on 25% of somebody else's top line.

6:08Right? For sure. You won't do that if you're selling $100 gym memberships. If you were selling $100 million buildings, you would make a load. Right. Right. And so, we just have to unlock who the ideal ICP is. You said you named As soon as you got up, you're like, "We do coaches, we do consultants, we do blah blah." You do all this other right? And so, it's like there's probably a vein of that that's significantly more profitable, and it might be left of center. Um it'd be like, "Cool. This is actually where the business is. It's this avatar. Yeah. And this is how we can operationalize this, and because we're only serving a specific avatar, we can get more efficiencies, we can have more templatized levels of service, we can automate certain portions of the work, and then as a result, actually should be able to expand our margin in time, or at least keep it the same as we scale.

6:49Yeah. That's what we have to do. Yeah, that is >> [laughter] >> Does that help at least? Yeah, thank you. >> doomed. No, perfect. Thank you. >> Yeah. If you are a business owner, and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had, and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck, and how they got past it. And so, we broke it into these 10 stages, and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at, and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if If want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.