Workshop: Beratungsfirma von 15 auf 100 Mio. bis 2029

0:00Unternehmer/Gast Managing partner at Eclipse Consulting, we're a boutique services firm based out of New York City and we provide data management, risk, and regulatory change advisory services to highly regulated and data intensive businesses. And uh historically most of our clients are financial services, uh particularly banking. >> Okay. >> Um we were heavily concentrated in banking, Credit Suisse, Silicon Valley Bank were some of our biggest clients. So uh when that sector went down, we had to kind of reinvent ourselves a little bit and focus more on asset management, insurance,

0:30>> Just now? >> private equity. Relatively easy. >> change. And that's a big change. >> Well, the cool thing is data management, risk, and regulatory stuff, it's the practice is kind of industry agnostic. You need some of the specialty in the industry. >> Okay. >> But uh it was a pretty seamless pivot for us to be honest. >> That's amazing. >> We were just so uh at one point supply constrained on the banking side and then demand disappeared. And so we chased we went to where supply was. So anyway, um Um so we'll we'll do uh we we were well over 30 million after 3 years.

1:02>> Awesome. >> Um with the banking crisis, we fell back down. We'll do around 15 million this year. Uh want to get to 100 by 2029. Um pre- uh we've kind of I've almost invested too much time into working on the business. >> Sure. >> Uh and I I found I had a lot of fun doing it. So historically a lot of our sales were founder led. And so we've really pivoted a I I've been working aggressively. I know I can swoop in. I know I can use my network relationships to drive leads and referrals.

1:32>> Uh-huh. >> I don't consider myself a specially good sales uh guy, but uh I'm not bad. >> 15 to 30 in business, you're not that bad. >> Yeah, I've done multiple nine figures of professional services sales, but it comes from the passion, the consultative nature. So I think of sales as our last frontier. Uh the the operations, the the the people, the uh the finance side, pristine like in your in your nine stages where they're solid eight eight-ish in all of those areas, but sales and marketing we're lagging. out in the sales if you look at our growth engine from lead onward team's exceptional. There's some levers we can continue to tweak and enhance on close rates and on commercial acumen to just enhance profitability. But we need more leads coming into the funnel. So So that's our biggest constraint. We've We've been experimenting with a lot of different things. Um the pandemic definitely kind of changed up the game a little bit. So it's hard to rely on

2:28Alex >> you source leads right now? >> So most of it's founder led. Most of it's just me texting someone on a whim. >> Founder led meaning you? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> It sounded so fancy. Um you're like I text people. >> Yeah. >> Got it. >> [laughter] >> Yeah. >> Um okay. So So you texting people that you know just because you've been doing this for a while is how you more or less source business. So it's warm out bound. >> Exactly. >> All right. So um it's probably in in your industry going to be a combination of three things. So one is So you need to dominate trade shows and conferences because you're going to automatically be able to you're going to be elevated. That's where all the fish are in one barrel.

3:06Um this is especially true for kind of enterprise level sales like yours. And so enterprise is typically a combination of um affiliate partners in some way. So kind of like the centers of influence who uh you can kind of do joint venture type deals with where it's like hey you do this element that we don't do. We do this element that you don't do. Like how can we share in deal flow? And then basically co- co-participate in a lot of deal work which I'm sure will happen. Um the conference stuff is like we have a great conference playbook that we run for all enterprise sales stuff. Happy to walk you through it. Um and then uh I mean you're doing warm out bound which is always the first thing that you do and you just happen to be able to do it to 30 people

3:43>> [laughter] >> which is great. When you do that for gym memberships you get to about $5 a year. And so um it to show if you add more zeros to the thing you sell, you can go a lot further sometimes. Um, but with uh with the cold outbound basically becomes a uh a back to those two as the front end. So, it's basically you use cold outbound to get your conferences and your affiliates. That's the outbound method that you're going to use as the primary action. The secondary action is securing the deals for both of those so that you can have your playbook that you run on a regular basis that you're doing to get those people in the funnel. And then to the same degree on the affiliate side, um doing the deals that you need so that you can share in in in lead flow. And so, Sharon here?

4:28Is he here? No. Well, he was in here earlier. So, Sharon uh uh CEO or president, excuse me, of Real Brokerage, a publicly traded uh real estate brokerage. And so, um Sharon came in and 6x the company from 200 million to 1.2 billion. And he did one thing. He did 220 speaking events a year. And then he just went from stage and then stayed for 2 days and would just sell every person who'd come up to him. And that's how they took it from 200 million to 1.2 billion.

4:57And so, sometimes it's like we had dinner and I I think I've told this story before, but like people are like, "So, what's the really scalable?" It's like, "That's what he did. He did 220 [ __ ] events in a year." And that's how he added a billion to the business. >> Oh, wow. Yeah, we're doing, you know, 10 or 20, so we could probably do a lot more. >> Yeah, so there's probably uh you probably do more volume on this. There's probably way more you can squeeze per cuz there's a bunch of different conversion points you can do if you set up the event properly.

5:22Um and then on the affiliate side, I see these as really good long-term things that you'll also still be able to source from the from the events that you attend. So, it's kind of a really nice cycle in terms of acquisition. So, it's like we do the outbound so that we can get the events. The events then feed us in these multiple ways. One of the things that we triaged at the event is potential partners so that we can actually between events have this as our ongoing kind of lead gen uh component. And then obviously we do direct deals from the event itself.

5:48>> Yeah, that's interesting. So, we have a robust alliance partner framework and so we have a lot of alliance partners. Um our challenge has been >> activation, getting them to continue to refer business? >> Exactly, cuz part of it is we almost have too many alliance partners. >> Yeah, but they're not activated, that's the problem. Right. So, we we think about affiliates as a second customer base. So, basically with every every So, Alan had three levels as the software company that we had. Um we had SMBs and then above SMBs we had agencies and then above agencies we had agency influencers. So, people who like helped agencies do stuff. And so, we actually had to have three tiers of service uh and when I started I thought I was going to be serving SMBs and then I realized agencies were really the people that needed to use our software to service SMBs. And so, that became a huge level of leverage for us to scale the business really quickly. But then we're like, "Oh, wait. We also have these super affiliates that have 500, 1,000 agencies that are in their network that could basically push us 100, 200, 500 agencies with one email." And so, we had to basically create the how do we make these guys feel amazing all the time that they're the best and then these people who are coming in we only made money when they activated and actually used the platform. And so, it's basically customer success has to get put in as a function on top of the affiliate base.

7:03And so, then that becomes a regular cadence of communication with them and then the same thing that we're talking about earlier with the sales uh sales coaching thing, which is like what are the quantifiables, what are the what are their demographics and what are the behaviors that they did, the ones that are the robust partners that do send you leads, what differentiates them from the ones that didn't and then we just reverse engineer that into the actions that we put into activation on that regular cadence for the affiliates. I know that was a lot of information, but >> Yeah, that's right. I just got to go flip the switch, I guess. >> [laughter]

7:30>> But that Does that make sense? Um but that that check out? >> Yeah, that's great. The the playbook sounds really interesting. So. >> Rock and roll. Now, I appreciate you. If If a business owner and you're 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 scaling roadmap, 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 you 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 just 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.