Andrew: Hey there, Freedom Fighters, my name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart, and imagine this: Imagine you buy a company, and you do it because you want to avoid some of the pitfalls of starting something new and figuring things out and having it fail, but imagine you buy that company, and the company fails anyway. What do you do? Today’s guest said he pivoted, and adjusted, and changed, and renamed, and rebranded and did it all as a way of pulling success out of the jaws of defeat, and it worked, so I invited him here to talk about how he did it. How do you like that Rob? Is that dramatic enough?
Rob: Yeah. Yeah that sounds great.
Andrew: The guy whose voice you’re hearing is today’s guest. His name is Robert Bellenfant. He is the founder of the company that I talked about today. Their company today is called TechnologyAdvice, but as you’ll see it had to go through a name change. TechnologyAdvice helps companies find the right software to use and to buy. So, for example, if a large company wants to buy new accounting software they can go to TechnologyAdvice.com, answer a few questions, like do they prefer to use cloud-based or non-cloud based software, etc., and then at the end of that process they will get a recommendation for the software they should use in their company.
We’ll find out how he built up this business and what their revenues are, but first I should say thank you to LeadPages. You guys know what LeadPages are, right? You got to LeadPages and you get a page that converts. A page that explains what you’re offering uses and asks them to enter an email address. Well those pages are so good, that for me, I get something like one out of five people who fill out my form. And if you know how to create a page like that, and you want to sell it . . . oh boy, this is a really complicated way of explaining it. Tell you what, Rob, why don’t I bring you into this because you’re a guy who knows how to communicate. Let me see if I can explain this and see if you can help me before we go into this interview. Here’s what they do . . .
Rob: We’re not live here, right?
Andrew: Sorry?
Rob: We’re not live here, right?
Andrew: We are live. The world is watching me make a big mistake here. I should have practiced this a little bit better.
Rob: Oh, boy. We’ve used LeadPages ourselves, actually. I don’t think we do currently, but early on we used the product and were very impressed with it as well.
Andrew: Right.
Rob: So . . .
Andrew: What did you use LeadPages for?
Rob: We used it for capturing. Basically as landing pages off paid media campaigns. And then also when we were scheduling folks for our podcasts and webinars, we would use them. You can take somebody who doesn’t have the technical talent and let them build. You don’t have to be as tech-savvy to use the product versus building out landing pages yourself, so it allows the organization that’s growing to move faster.
Andrew: And one of the cool things about them, Rob, is that if you not only don’t have the technical chops, but maybe you don’t even have the design chops to create a great looking landing page, you go to them and they have all these templates. So that actually brings me to the part I want to promote today. If there’s someone out there who knows how to create great landing pages that others can use as templates, I want to encourage you to go to mixergy.com/leadpages and create a landing page template one their site.
When you do, LeadPages will sell it for you and send you the money, because people like me, like Rob, like many other entrepreneurs out there, need good landing pages but we don’t want to create them ourselves. So you create the template, LeadPages will sell them, LeadPages will power them, LeadPages will make it all work. All you have to do is create them, and to do that you go to mixergy.com/leadpages. All right, Rob, thanks for helping me out there.
Rob: Absolutely. I’ll send you a bill.
Andrew: [laughs] You ever find yourself trying to promote something or explain what your business does and then go, wait, it’s a little bit convoluted, I need to simplify it.
Rob: Trust me, all the time.
Andrew: What’s an example of a time that you had a hard time explaining what you do or what your idea was?
Rob: You know, I think a lot of times . . . I come from a technical background. I’m a tech guy turned marketing guy . . .
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Rob: . . . and so a lot of times when communicating to non-technical people it’s a challenge. Take for instance my parents. They will say, so what do you do again, and I’ll explain. So what does that mean? I think I’ve gotten a lot better at that in the last couple of years, but earlier on in my career it was definitely a challenge for me.
Andrew: You know, I actually did do a little bit of practice on that commercial, and I did with what your company does. I wanted to make sure people understood TechnologyAdvice, so I came up with that example of a company that needs accounting software. And that kind of stuff helps, but it is difficult. Do you . . . the first business that you bought, you bought it on eBay? The one that you started this whole journey out with.
Rob: Yes, yes. Bought this business on eBay as a freshman in college at the University of Tennessee.
Andrew: Okay. What was the original idea, what was the original goal of the business?
Rob: Well so, I get asked what was the original goal or what was the original inspiration and at the time I was just 18 years old and so quite honestly the inspiration and goal is to make money. Now what the business did was again also completely different. So, it was buying ad space in bulk on the internet and then cutting it up and selling it to end businesses at a markup.
Andrew: So why did you need to buy that kind of a business off of eBay? Couldn’t you have you started off on your own?
Rob: You certainly could. Quite frankly, I didn’t have the experience and the digital ad space or you know…
Andrew: Oh I see, sorry the connection broke off for a moment. You were saying you didn’t have the experience and the digital ad space and something else and then that second part we missed.
Rob: Sorry about that. Yeah, I just didn’t have the experience and the space and so when I saw the opportunity you know it looked very appealing and I knew that there’s a lot of dollars going to this space and so it looked like a great opportunity.
Andrew: What did you pay for it?
Rob: Thirty-two thousand dollars.
Andrew: Thirty-two thousand dollars for this business and what did you get beyond the business model? What came along with it?
Rob: We got a customer list, vendor list, website with a back end that could serve the customers. But at the time I was 18 years old and I had very little experience with due diligence and I had a little bit of money from a previous business that I sold and I did not get exactly what I expected to get.
Andrew: What didn’t you get? Where did your expectations not live up to reality?
Rob: Well you know when your 18 years old and your looking to support yourself and put yourself through school and you don’t really know a lot about due diligence you kind of want to believe people and take their word at face value. Unfortunately for me I did not do the diligence that I needed to and so there were certain numbers that were being presented as far as what the revenues of the business were and the profitability of the margins and how many hours a day you needed to run and grow the business and at the end of the day they just weren’t true.
Andrew: I see. I wonder how you can even do due diligence on a company you buy on eBay? They’re not going to let you call up their clients are they?
Rob: I think they should if it’s a good opportunity whether it’s eBay or not as long as you have proper legal protections in place as far as a non-disclosure agreement and things of that nature. I think you should absolutely call up customers and ask all the important questions.
Andrew: I’m just feeling like if you talk to someone on eBay you don’t know them before and you say I need your customer list I’ll sign this NDA so I don’t steal them but I need to call them up. It would be a little suspicious that you might take their clients and go start your business on your own.
Rob: I think that’s a fair assessment so I think it’s getting the comfort level. Instead of just communicating through the eBay interface we’d had phone conversations, and email exchanges, and things of that nature.
Andrew: Okay, you said you’d had some money from previous businesses. What did you do before?
Rob: So my career in business started at the young age of 7 and between the ages of 7 and 12 I had about two dozen different businesses, if you could call them businesses but maybe projects is a better term. But anything from a lemonade stand to a business where I picked weeds and planted flowers for some of the neighbors in the neighborhood and all sorts of things like that.
Andrew: I heard you had an arts and crafts business?
Rob: Yeah arts and crafts that was the first one actually. So making arts and crafts and selling them door-to-door and I had a friend down the street who was my first employee and I was 8 when I hired her and she was 5 and she was my sales rep. and she helped me make the arts and crafts and helped me sell them. You know most folks, most parents tell their kids not to talk to strangers and my parents told me that as well, I just chose not to listen. At the age of 12 is when I started my first technology related business.
Andrew: What the one that got you 32 thousand dollars and allowed you to go buy this business off eBay the one that we’re going to talk about how it evolved?
Rob: That’s the one that I’ll talk about right now. Do you want the short story, or the long story, or somewhere in between?
Andrew: The interesting story…
Rob: The interesting story.
Andrew: …long or short doesn’t matter.
Rob: If I get boring just let me know. So at 12 I was introduced to a few friends at school that were interested in doing websites, and so mirrored my interest in technology. Their interest in websites and my interest in business, and making money, and start a business designing websites. So one summer between seventh and eighth grade the three of us locked ourselves in my parent basement and we cold called people out of the Yellow Pages and asked them if they wanted a website, and you know 15 years ago if you could design a website that was a pretty interesting skillset to have because there weren’t nearly as many people who could do it back then, and the second part of it that kind of made us special is that we were just 12.
So for the amount of effort that we put into it that summer we were pretty successful and doing about six websites, and we decided that, or we saw an opportunity in the marketplace after we designed the websites you have to host them somewhere. So we’re paying another company $13 or $14 a month for each site that we were hosting, and we thought, “Hey we should earn that reoccurring revenue and take the opportunity to grow the relationships with the customer, and have more long term relationships.”
And so one of our, one of my buddies kind of lost interest at this point and decided he wanted to go do the more typical things that most 12 year olds are doing as far as riding their bikes, or hanging out at the pool, or hanging out with their friends, and me and my then business partner each invested $200 and leased a web hosting server, and we started getting clients and after a month we had 31 clients paying us a dollar every month, and that’s when we knew that we were on to something, and from that point forward we decided to treat the business more of a business and less as a hobby, and over the next few years, between the ages of 12 and 18, we pivoted the business from just web hosting, well I guess just first web design to then web hosting to then server security and infrastructure security and management to outsourced IT staffing.
And then my partner and I entered college at the age of 18 at the University of Tennessee and we just kind of grew apart as far as our goals for the business, our long-term vision, the amount of energy that we had to dedicate towards the business, and so at that point we decided that one of us had to buy the other one out, and people ask me all the time, “Well why did he buy you out and why didn’t you buy him out if it was such a great business?” And ultimately he was just willing to pay me more for my half than I was willing to pay him for his half and so he raised some money from friends and family and bought my half of the business and he dropped out of it, out of school, to run the business full-time and has grown it pretty substantially ever since then and still runs it today. It’s very successful.
Andrew: What’s the business?
Rob: It’s Acunett, it’s A-C-U-N-E-T-T, and within that business he’s got a few other businesses as well that does outsource IT stuff, and he’s got one called Five Point Solutions and they’re based out of India.
Andrew: I see it, yeah they do server set-up, help desk support, server management, and kind of the stuff that you guys were doing before, impressive. How much did he buy you out for?
Rob: I’d rather not disclose that amount.
Andrew: Is it more than 50,000 or less?
Rob: It was more.
Andrew: Wow, so this business really did well for you guys. Can you say what it did in sales at the height before you left?
Rob: We were doing right around 400,000 annually.
Andrew: Wow, and I understand you did outsource IT developers, right?
Rob: We didn’t do developers at the time, although I think that is something he does now. We did outsource IT staffing for web hosting companies. So we’re hiring folks that had experience managing web servers and web hosting infrastructure.
Andrew: Wow, I think that’s a whole interview in itself. Let me just ask you this, I understand getting customers, I’m going to move on to technology advice, but I understand getting customers through cold calling that’s a pretty gutsy thing for a 12 year old to do but it makes sense. How do you get into security when you’re in your early teens and do it in a level that you can actually support real customers? Are we talking about basic type security or is it something more complicated?
Rob: Yeah it was pretty complex, now in the beginning it wasn’t that complex. So in the beginning we were just offering hosting space and we were using Manage Environments. So we started of paying another company to manage our stuff for us. Through mistakes that they made and experiences where we had a customer request something, for example a customer wanted a piece of software installed and we had never installed it before and maybe the company that we were leasing our server from had never installed it either so we just had to figure it out ourselves. So we learned by doing and by serving our customers. And so, you know in the beginning, we weren’t very sophisticated at all.
And just through time and through, you know, interests and just a desire to solve problems and deliver a great service for our clients, we learned a lot in that process.
And so, that’s when we, you know, part of the business, it was after two or three years, we pivoted from just being a hosting company to a server management, server security infrastructure management company.
So, we had gained skills in those two/three years in managing our own infrastructure that, you know, we thought we could help other hosting companies with as well.
Andrew: Wow, all right. So now, you’re a smart guy with a lot of experience. You buy a company that’s supposed to give you a leg up and you realize that it doesn’t work out. How long did it take you to realize this is a failure?
Rob: Six weeks.
Andrew: Six weeks! Wow!
[laughs]
Andrew: Did you try to get your money back?
Rob: Yes.
Andrew: And it didn’t work out. What happened to the guy that sold it to you?
Rob: Ultimately, it worked out. You know, without going into all the details, you know, the business was misrepresented when [I] bought it.
And, you know, there ultimately we came, me and the seller came to a settlement where we each kind of went our own ways. And I was smart enough to finance the majority of the purchase over the next 12 months and so we…
Andrew: Aha, so you were supposed to pay him over twelve months. He was financing it for you. Got it. So that gave you some leverage.
Rob: Right.
Andrew: So you could go back and say, “I’m not paying you the rest if this thing doesn’t work out.” And you come to some negotiated agreement and as a result, you end up with this company that’s a smaller version of what you imagined and now you have to pick up the pieces.
Did I get any of that wrong? I want to make sure I’m getting your story right.
Rob: No, I mean that sums it up pretty nicely.
Andrew: All right. Well, if you can’t do due diligence or haven’t done it for some reason, it’s good to be able to have owner financing, which lets you have some leverage and gives him some accountability. So…
Rob: [Totally], and you know, sometimes I’ve been asked, “Well, why did he finance it over 12 months if, you know, just six weeks after you take the reins the business fails?”
And I think ultimately anybody else that was looking at the business was probably doing more due diligence than I did and so, you know, maybe I was his only option. That’s just my best guess.
Andrew: I see. And then you start to pivot. The first pivot is towards what?
Rob: So, when after six weeks of running the business, our main supplier of this bulk ad space when out of business. So they didn’t return emails. Their Web site went offline. Didn’t answer the phone and so we didn’t really have much of a business after six weeks.
And so we started offering services, where we would just broker other types of marketing services. So radio ads and email marketing were the two that we did the most of.
And so, you know, went out and first started sourcing these services from other companies that had, you know, seemingly good reputations and things of that nature. And then start doing more and more in house.
So on the email marketing side, we started acquiring our own infrastructure to market to customers through email and acquiring lists and then renting lists from other companies as well.
And then slowly built the business, you know, just one customer and one employee at the time over the next couple years.
Andrew: What kind of lists can you buy when it comes to email?
Rob: You know, you can buy lists or just about anybody. And it’s a tricky thing, at least back then it was, because there’s all kind of varying qualities and you know, rules around email marketing.
Andrew: Yeah.
Rob: And around acquiring lists. You know, but over the years, we had marketed anything from private jets to homes for publicly traded homebuilders to, you know, “as seen on TV’ products like meat loaf pans, for example.
Andrew: So, someone comes to you with a meat loaf pan and then says, “I want you to help me sell this thing. I’ll give you a cut of sales.” That’s the way it usually works, right?
Rob: Yeah, if you’re doing affiliate marketing or performance marketing, yes sir.
Andrew: So then where would you go to get the list to sell this pans?
Rob: Well, you know, it turns out there are hundreds of companies out there that broker marketing data. So whether it’s an email list or a phone list or a direct mail list, there are companies, you know, you can find them on Google if you type in any relevant terms.
And we would reach out to these companies and talk to them and kind of, you know, weigh the pros and cons of all the different options. And then, source the list and put a marketing program around it and hopefully drive great results for clients.
Andrew: I’m imagining someone listening to us saying, “That’s spam. Rob used to spam”. Maybe at a point it was okay to do it but is that what it is?
Rob: No, it’s not. You know, the Canned Spam Act was passed in 2003 and then modified in 2004, I believe and there are strict requirements against that. I think you can send unsolicited e-mails but we were sending e-mails to targeted lists of people that were interested in what the clients were offering. Granted not everybody specifically said, “Hey I’d like to sign up for this list and I’m interested in meatloaf pants.” [laughter] But they signed up and said, “I’m interested in as seen on TV products.” Or, “I’m a physician I’m interested in receiving e-mails about products or services that physicians are interested in put me on your list.”
They’re all either single or double Upton email lists. They’re mostly generated through co-registration programs and online surveys. If you’re making a purchase on Amazon, for example, you make your purchase. I don’t think they do this anymore today but years ago they did. You would have the little box you could check that says sign me up for your email lists. Then your information gets sold to a list broker who then sells it to a company like us.
Andrew: Okay. How profitable was this business for you?
Rob: It was reasonable profitable. I was going through college and had from just me running the business to a group of about six of us by the time I graduated in 2009. It was providing a very comfortable lifestyle.
Andrew: Did you do more than 100,000 in profit while you were in college?
Rob: Yes.
Andrew: You were?
Rob: Annually yes.
Andrew: Annually yes, so what’s the greatest thing you got to buy yourself when you were in college? Don’t say education, or I got to buy the best books.
Rob: You’re really getting personal here with your questions. I love it. I was able to buy my own home. As a sophomore in college I was able to buy a first home.
Andrew: How about your fun nest date? Did you get to take someone out and say, “I’m buying you everything on the menu here tonight.”
Rob: I’ve never really been over the top about money or finances at least in my opinion. I did have a girlfriend who’s now my wife; we started dating freshmen year of high school. We had been together for a long time and I was able to put both of us through school and pay for our expenses.
Andrew: Wow, that’s pretty impressive.
Rob: Thank you.
Andrew: Did you get a prenup with your wife? Is that too personal?
Rob: That is personal, and I don’t know is it relevant to your audience to know that? [laughter]
Andrew: Sure I think getting personal, how do you feel about getting personal? You’re a pretty young guy but I feel like you’re an older experienced business man when I’m talking to you.
Rob: You know, you’re not the first person who’s told me that and I’ll take that as a compliment. But I think there’s been a lot of a mistake that I made in my career that I’ve chosen to learn from and look as instead of mistakes, look at them as opportunities for learning. Just try not to make the same mistake more than once.
Andrew: I wouldn’t say what kind of agreement I signed with my wife before we got married. I wouldn’t talk about prenup either. Some people open to it.
Rob: Let me reverse the question.
Andrew: I wouldn’t answer it. I’m going to back away from that too. [laughter]
Rob: Don’t ask me any question you wouldn’t answer Andrew.
Andrew: I won’t ask any questions that you can’t ask me back. I like that you’d turn around and ask me. I always watch interviewers on television ask these really gutsy questions and then they don’t reveal nothing about themselves. They don’t reveal any vulnerabilities they don’t reveal any humanness. I think it’s fair for you to turn the question back around and say well would you feel comfortable answering it? So yea, no I would not feel comfortable answering it.
Rob: I’m sure this is why people love watching the contail moxerges[sp], it’s a great question.
Andrew: Frankly, Rob, a lot of the thing I would really be too embarrassed to admit are nothing to people. They feel so comfortable. And some of the things I feel comfortable admitting are really shocking to others. You never know until you go to the line where that line is. You have to keep moving towards it. One thing you told our pre-interviewer was that you had issues with for example someone wanting to sell flowers. Do you remember that example? I think that capsules some of the challenges of the kind business you were running. What was going on there?
Rob: So this was the pivot we made before pivoting into the technology advice brand. We had, at the height of our business, bringing on as many as 100 to 150 new clients in a single month. We were what we consider pay per -service. You pay me a fee and I’m going to perform this service and I’m going to perform it to the best of my ability, but there’s guarantees other than I’m going to perform the service. So, if it’s an email campaign, you pay me for an email campaign, we’ll send out the emails and we’ll track them, and we’ll track engagement, and the ROI, but at the end of the day, if you don’t earn a return in that investment, that’s a risk that you’ve taken as the customer.
Andrew: And you still get paid? Your company, Rob, gets paid anyway, and so what would happen with the customer when they went through that.
Rob: This is how most digital agencies work, no matter what the marketing service is. We would do media buying companies, as well a similar sort, but with that, with our price points, we would work with people who have 100-200 dollars to spend. When you’re trying to be all-things, all-people, and trying to work across all industries, it really holds you back and prevents you from excelling in your business at the rate that you should. We were attracting, when we’re putting ads out there for our services, we were attracting a lot of start-ups, and we were also attracting a lot of folks that were running their business more as a hobby after-hours, and they had a day job that was supporting them.
The example that I give to a lot of folks is around Valentine’s Day 1 year. We had a flower shop, I think they were in Ohio, but they decided they want to start spending more dollars digitally. They had read a lot of the articles and the trends and got excited about it. They set aside a budget of 1000 dollars that year, or that Valentine’s Day season, I guess you could call it. They called us, and they called a handful of other companies, and ultimately they were dead-set on working with us. I think a lot of the other companies either didn’t’ return their call or maybe they didn’t’ meet the minimum requirement budget that they had. They had this 1-dozen roses that they sold for 99 dollars, and they’re dozen premium roses, I guess they were cut a special way off a specific type of…
I don’t know much about roses, but they were premium roses and we looked at the program and we said, look, this is probably not going to work because I can go buy a dozen premium roses from 1-800-FLOWERS for 30 or 40 dollars plus shipping, and that’s a brand that I recognize and trust.
Andrew: Yeah, and you guys are now coming, instead of 40 bucks, you’re going to charge me more than twice that, about 100 bucks? Forget that.
Rob: Right.
Andrew: Right. I can see a lot of people [??] that way.
Rob: I’m sure their roses were better, but in the eyes of the consumer…Try to put yourself in the consumers’ shoes. It’s just not going to work. After telling them, no this isn’t going to work and showing them why, they basically said, look, we’ve got 1000 dollars, and we want to spend it with you, we want to test this, even if it doesn’t work, we’re going to learn from it. Ultimately, we ended up running the program with them and I think we were sending out several 1000 emails to people that were in their immediate area, around their store, and it was a program…
Andrew: How did it do?
Rob: I’m sorry?
Andrew: How did it do? How did these special, super-duper flowers sell?
Rob: They didn’t. They didn’t sell at all. It was a program that was supposed to be sprinkled out over the course of a couple of days leading up until Valentine’s Day. After 2 or 3 hours of running program, they called us frantically, hey we don’t have any orders, where are the orders, we don’t have any phone calls, this just isn’t what we imagined. We talked about expectations and we told you what our expectations were and you asked us to do it anyways. We’d be happy to pause it where it is and refund you a portion of the money for what we haven’t done yet, but ultimately I know they didn’t make a lot of sales, I don’t know if they made any sales. We didn’t get the end results from them because…
Andrew: Did they end up being a long-term customer after that?
Rob: No.
Andrew: No. So that’s why you decided, you know what, it’s nice that we have this security in a short-term, but if we really want to have long-term relationships with customers we have to charge on a performance basis. We don’t charge them until we get them a customer. That gives us more control over the kinds of people we get and avoids these kinds of problems with people who spend money and fail, despite our warnings. Alright, so then you pivot towards that. It seems like you’re on the right track. Why take another big move? We still haven’t even gotten to technology advice. Why leave what seems to be working? What was the problem?
Rob: Well, again, the business was working. It was profitable and it was growing. And we had a much, much higher client retention rate and client success rate. Things are going great and about four years ago it just started working with the first technology company we worked with before. As a voice over IP phone company. We had delivered better results for lower costs than anybody else we had worked with. For us, we saw that as a huge opportunity to grow their relationship with the customer. But also to explore other opportunities and technology marketing space. We continue working with this customer for several years and started working with other customers in the space.
And ultimately other customers and other types of technology categories such as, software, and technology related services. Things of that nature. And it got to a point where, on any given month 80 to 90% of our revenue was in serving these technology vendors. And so, the vast majority of our business and we had a lot of ideas to services that we wanted to launch to better serve these vendors. But also to better serve the technology buyer.
Andrew: When you say technology vendor, who do you mean?
Rob: Yeah, any technology company we worked with. The big names of people recognize as IBM, Dell, HP or Goal. All the way down to a startup.
Andrew: And what are you helping IBM and get? What kind of customers? I’m sorry, what are you helping them sell? What kind of products?
Rob: Any technology based solution that they want to sell more of. So, today a lot of the trends lie around the clouds. So if anything lies around that cloud-based is really hot and trending right now. IBM might have a new cloud computing platform and they would come to us and say, hey technology advice please connect me with folks that are looking for the solution that we offer.
Andrew: I’m looking at the first version of your site. The four big things you help people look find our voice over IP, CRM contact relation management software, cloud storage, and gamification software. So that was the first four categories of products you are helping people find. Am I right?
Speaker 1: Well, at a higher level we educate, advise, and connect buyers and sellers of business technology. And we do that through a variety of ways. I think what you’re looking at is the product selection tool on our website. If you are looking on the early versions you can see it’s come a long way from. I think since March of this year is when we officially launched it. So, just to being live for about-
Andrew: Looking at a cash version from October 2013. Over a year ago.
Rob: 2013.
Andrew: yeah. But it just has me a sense where you guys started. But if I think I’m understanding you right Rob, is what you were saying is. We had all these clients that were looking for more customers. And we would do our usual stuff for them but thought, what else can we do to get more customers, and what if we create this hub where customers were looking for technology solutions come? And if we get them to come to this hub then we can start sending them out to our clients. Am I right?
Rob: Yes.
Andrew: Okay. And the site that you bought. It looks like it used to be, was it a blog?
Rob: No. Well which side are you referring to?
Andrew: I’m talking about technologyadvice.com. You bought it from someone didn’t you? You made in 2013?
Rob: I just bought the domain name. And I can’t recall which month it was. But you are saying that you looked at something cash back and 2013. We didn’t officially rebrand our business until January of this year. I think it was more of a project and more of an experiment until January of this year. That’s when March of this year and we really start pushing a lot of resources behind the business.
Andrew: I see. So then when I look at Inc. magazine revenue for you guys for 2013 at $6.2 million in 2013. That doesn’t have anything to do with technologyadvice.com because that didn’t come on the scene yet.
Rob: Right.
Andrew: That’s what you made up by brokering ads.
Rob: No. So that’s when we were doing regeneration for technology companies. If you’re a member, I mentioned about four years ago we started doing marketing programs around technology companies. Or for technology companies and it got to where the vast majority of our revenue is in doing that. But we do outbound regeneration for technology companies. That’s what the bulk of that revenue in 2013 is what you mentioned was. If IBM comes to us and said hey do we have this cloud computing platform? We will design a piece of content and then we will send it out to technology decision-makers by email or we will pick up the phone and call them and start conversations, identifying people who have a need for whatever the technology company is offering.
Andrew: I see. What was the top customer that you had? It wasn’t IBM. Who was number one?
Rob: Honestly, I don’t know.
Andrew: Oh, really? Okay.
Rob: I can’t remember.
Andrew: You didn’t have one big one that you were spending a lot of time on?
Rob: Not one that was an overwhelmingly larger amount than others.
Andrew: I see. So then I guess I thought you bought technologyadvice.com from someone else and that they had a blog on it. Because if I look at an old version of the sight from June, oh, maybe you guys installed this, June, 2016.
Rob: Oh, yeah. You’re looking at the, I know what you’re looking at. So it started off as a project. It was an experiment, you know. We knew that we wanted to re-brand the company and that we had a lot of ideas. So it’s something that kind of makes us unique is we’ve got a very entrepreneurial mindset here, so we’re constantly throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, and I think what you’re looking at is one of the earlier versions of the site where it kind of looks more like an online newsletter/blog and that was just us experimenting in the early days. Even before TechnologyAdvice, we thought that we were going to re-brand this portion of our business into the ITbrink [SP], so we had registered ITbrink.com and we had all kinds of marketing materials designed around that and ultimately decided not to go with that brand.
Andrew: I see. So then, yeah, as a content company your or content product, you guys have got pretty far. I see content being written almost every day, some days multiple pieces. How then did you land on the formula that you have today, the one where it’s kind of like a search engine where people come in and say, ‘This is my company technology needs. Help me find the right software.’?
Rob: We borrowed ideas, quite honestly. We saw that there’s probably 50 companies in our space that do things in a very similar way that we do them and we borrowed ideas from a handful of those companies, some of their best ideas, and kind of just made improvements, small improvements here and there upon there existing ideas. And we spoke to a lot of existing customers about, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re thinking about offering you in addition to what we already offer you.’ After talking to, and having good, meaningful conversations with existing customers and just kind of looking at where we see the market going, we decided to build the product from there. And even today there’s huge improvements that we’re making to the product every month.
So some of the macro trends that we’re playing off of are, number one, that technology is getting more and more confusing. There’s more and more options for buyers and if you’re a buyer the number of options that you have is not getting, the list isn’t getting any shorter. So the amount of time that you can spend researching a technology solution for your business could take days and weeks, and months, depending on the complexity of your needs.
Another macro trend is that people are growing increasingly impatient in making decisions. So a lot of the younger generations, such as my generation, grew up in the information age with information readily available and just desiring to make decisions more quickly and getting the information they needed more quickly. So there’s several companies kind of in this space disrupting what you would traditionally look at as far as the Gartners and Foresters of the world, where they right very lengthy research reports. Most people that are in influential and decision making roles, in organizations buying technology, are not going to spend the time to read a 150 page report.
Andrew: I interviewed Don Fornes of Software Advice. Do you know that guy?
Rob: Yup. We sure do.
Andrew: Do you know his company?
Rob: Well, we know who he is. Yeah.
Andrew: You do? One of the questions that I asked him was one that I should bring to you. He gets paid, he has a similar model to you, and he gets paid by the companies that he gets new customers for. So when someone hits his site and does a search for CRM, for example . . .
Rob: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . when he finds them the right CRM, that CRM Company pays him. You guys do the same thing, right?
Rob: We do.
Andrew: So then doesn’t that keep you from being impartial because you have an incentive to promote the people who pay you, and an even greater incentive to promote the people who pay you more?
Rob: Well, I’ll give you, I’ll probably give you a similar answer to what he gave you, but then I’ll tell you what makes us different. So, number one, most companies that are of any significance in any one category are buying leads. So if you’ve got 200 CRM companies out there, I don’t know, there’s more than that probably, at least that serve the North American market. The majority of them have marketing budgets to grow their product, and the fact is that there are some that don’t. Maybe they’re in start-up mode or they’re boot strapped and they just don’t have the funding to buy leads, and what makes us different from software advice in this respect is that we give free leads away every single day, and so in any one of our categories the majority of the people in our categories, at least today, don’t pay us for leads.
We give them to them for free and the hope is that eventually the vast majority of them are buying leads from us because we’re not just selling those leads but we’re connecting them with buyers, and some of the highest quality opportunities that their sales team has seen before. So it’s interesting that you bring up Don, he and his business, the ones that we will credit in giving us the idea for having the word advice in our name, I think if you look at what Don’s done we’ve definitely borrowed some very great ideas that they’ve had in their business.
Andrew: Like what?
Rob: Well advice in the name of the business is probably the simplest thing that we’ve borrowed, but even the idea of giving, building the tools, the web based tools, for the technology buyer to leverage to make decisions more quickly. We saw that they’ve been very successful with their model but at the same time there’s a lot of things that you can do to better serve that vendor, and better serve the buyer, and…
Andrew: What’s the most, what’s one example of something that you do to better serve the vendor and the customer?
Rob: A lot of it deals with the user’s experience. So we have a much more, we focus a lot more on the buyers experience with our brand, and I don’t know what software advice does today but I know what they did maybe a couple of years ago when we first started talking to those guys, but there are…I guess to speak on a high level there are opportunities to serve that user and that technology buyer better, and one example of that is giving them a truly unbiased, truly unbiased help, and also focusing on the long-term relationship value between you and that buyer. So if you have a buyer first mentality you’re doing things to position the buyer ultimately for success first and the vendor and yourself success second, and as you know those things don’t always align but if you take the buyers side first then the ideas that that buyer’s going to come back and work with you on all of their technology projects down the road, not just the one that your helping them out with currently.
Andrew: Okay, you mentioned the name. You used to have trouble with your previous company name, what was that? What’s the previous name and what was the trouble you had?
Rob: We didn’t have any trouble I guess you could say but the…before we branded the business Technology Advice we were Thrive Marketing Group, and the Thrive Marketing Group brand still exists. We have a couple dozen clients that aren’t technology companies that we still serve under that brand, but you know Technology Advice, or a brand like IT Brink those are a lot more conducive to not only what we were doing at that time but with what we want to be doing long-term as well.
Andrew: So what I was referring to was somebody hears the name Thrive and their not clear about what the company does, but when they hear Technology Advice it makes sense instantly. You don’t even have to have a tagline to tell them what it does.
Rob: Absolutely.
Andrew: Rebranding is a challenge. One of the issues you had was you didn’t even change the voicemail, the name on the voice mail messages.
Rob: That was one of the last things that we thought to change. I don’t think rebranding for us was any more challenging than any other company, but there are a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot, a lot of details.
Andrew: Another challenge you had was outgrowing thinking small, what do you mean by that?
Rob: Yeah, so I’m a young guy and a lot of, while this business is growing I’ve also been growing, and I’ve grown up with the business and so I think a lot of the things that we did in the business earlier on we were thinking very small. So I’ll give you an example, I never thought this business was going to be as big as it is today so after we moved into our first office in April 2011 after a couple of months we started designing our next office and knowing that we were eventually going to want to build and design our own space, and we did that.
We designed and built it over the course of the next two years and, a little less than wo years, I guess, a year and eight months, and we moved into this current space in January of 2013 and we only have 21 parking spots, but we have about 50 people in the building, and so that tells you, kind of, where we saw, you know, the long-term potential, the long-term opportunity for the business as a whole, back when we were designing this in 2011-2012 and, really just have learned a lot about thinking bigger and looking at the bigger more long-term vision and opportunity for the company, and I’ve had a lot of really great mentors and leaders within our business that have helped me get a lot better at that.
Andrew: By the way, if you see my eyes move around a lot, it’s because I keep researching and looking up what you’re talking about so that I could have even more depth and can ask a proper follow up question. In this case, what I did was you’re talking about your office. I went and found photos of it on GlassDoor.com. The thing looks gorgeous, dude. How much did it cost you to create an office that looks like this?
Rob: I’m sorry I think I lost you for just a second there.
Andrew: There, do you have now?
Rob: Yes I do.
Andrew: I’m just complementing you on how beautiful the office looks and that I’m saying that I’m glad I saw it on GlassDoor.com,
Rob: Okay.
Andrew: to get a sense of what your, this looks like an expensive office.
Rob: It’s all relative, right? Expensive. Cheap.
Andrew: You know, and I also wonder if maybe in Tennessee it’s a little bit less expensive, but boy this looks gorgeous.
Rob: Yeah, it’s, you know, that’s one of the benefits to Nashville, Tennessee. A lot of real-estate is lower cost and cost of living in general is lower and so we’re very thankful for that.
Andrew: I like the area here that looks kind of like a living room, with the dining room table-like area.
Rob: Yeah, that’s probably our break-room. Yeah, that’s kind of a multi-purpose room. It’s a break room. It’s a conference room. It’s a lunch room. We do cater lunches 4 days a week. Most importantly though, it’s the ping pong room.
Andrew: I don’t see that here on Glass Door, the ping pong table.
Rob: Okay.
Andrew: But I do see how the office looks. It does look like a really nice environment. So when you’re saying you didn’t realize how bit this opportunity was, you’re a guy who thinks big anyway, so when you push yourself to think even bigger, what happens? How does it change the way you act?
Rob: You know, I don’t know that I do… I don’t think that I always have thought very big.
Andrew: Really?
Rob: Maybe I’ve thought big relative to other people my age, but in general, I’ve learned a tremendous amount around thinking small versus thinking big from others and business, but your question is what happens what when you start thinking big, and there’s a lot good things and a lot of challenges that come with that, and 1 of the challenges… Let me handle the good things first. One of the good things is that you get really excited, right? You see all this opportunity to serve people better, and it’s very exciting. 1 of the challenges with that is that you can get what I called business-ADD or idea-ADD and lose focus, and we’ve definitely struggled with that in the past.
You see all these opportunities and all these ideas on how to connect that buyer and seller business technology in a more efficient way and sometimes you can spend days and weeks just figuring out which of those opportunities to take next and to put resources towards. One thing that we use in our business that kind of sums up our approach to that is, you first get out a pistol and you shoot a bullet at an idea. You shoot bullets a lot of different ideas, and if you hit your target, then you get our cannon and you start shooting much larger cannonballs. You put more resources, energy, and time behind that idea.
Andrew: I see. So you take a bunch of small tests and then when 1 makes sense and does well, then you start to really fire the heavy guns at it. We saw how you evolved. This new business, technology advice that connects software with, excuse me, software vendors with software customers. How does its revenue compare to what you did before? Actually, why don’t I ask it much clearer. What kind of revenues are you doing today, 2014, now that you’ve changed your direction?
Rob: We’ll do a little north of eight million this year.
Andrew: Get out. Really? You’ve completely turned your business around. How much of your business is what it used to be where you were creating landing pages for people, and sales pages for them?
Rob: Yeah, less than 2%.
Andrew: Less than 2%?
Rob: Yeah.
Andrew: So in one year, do I have this right? In one year you completely turned…
Rob: Well about two years, over the course of about two years.
Andrew: Two years, so two years you turned your whole business around and you’re making more than you were before?
Rob: Let me back that up, or let me…Actually it was probably over the course of three years. It was a slow process over the first couple of years and the last year has been more accelerated.
Andrew: So what happened before that set you up for this? It seems like 2014 is when you really launched technology advice as this almost search engine, or matchmaking site, what happened 2013 and 2012 that allowed you to get to this?
Rob: Well I think it was just a lot of learning, and planning, and getting feedback from customers. Also seeing, again, seeing that the Don Fornes of the world and a handful of other companies that we’ve seen what they’ve done in the marketplace, and the value that they’re adding, and at the same time see opportunity for doing a lot more and doing a better job. I think 2013 was our year of planning so we took a step back and we kind of reevaluated what we needed to do, and 2014 has been our year of building infrastructure, and technology, and processes behind the planning that we did in 2013, and so I’m really excited about 2015. That’s when we get to…We’ve been shooting bullets I guess you could say through 2014 and 2015 we get the cannons out.
Andrew: Is your whole site built on WordPress still?
Rob: We have a good portion of the site built on WordPress, and I don’t know all of the ins-and-outs of the different technologies, but I do know a lot of it sits outside of WordPress as well.
Andrew: I see.
Rob: I think the front end is all WordPress based though.
Andrew: Yeah I can see that actually here if I look at the source code. That is impressive too, that you’ve built this on such simple technology.
Rob: There are a lot larger sites built on the same technology. We did a lot of research behind that and it’s great technology. We’re an open source company so we use open source technologies for everything that we do, when we can.
Andrew: I look at where your traffic comes from, are you doing a lot of ad buys?
Rob: We do.
Andrew: You do. What portion of your traffic would you say is bought versus organic?
Rob: It changes quite a bit from month-to-month. So again, we really just started pushing the marketing for the different categories that you see on the site in March and so there’s still a lot of testing and experimenting that we’re doing, and I couldn’t comment on what we’re doing right now, but it could be anywhere from 10 to 80% is purchased on any month. I know that’s a really large range I wish I had more specifics to share.
Andrew: Wow, because I don’t see a lot of content marketing. Do you guys do any of that?
Rob: We do a lot.
Andrew: You do?
Rob: Yeah.
Andrew: Maybe I’m just not noticing it.
Rob: If you’re interested in that I’d check out our blog, and social media, social media channels as well.
Andrew: TechnologyAdvice.com/blog right? I see it. So your last, that’s from today I see. What portion of your traffic comes from content marketing?
Rob: Content or organic marketing versus paid again I don’t know the specific break up today, and I can probably tell you some of the previous months, but it varies so much month-to-month at this point.
Andrew: What do you spend your time on that allows you to know that the company will still get new customers, that the ad buys will be done right, that the content will be written right so that you end up growing your sales without having to do any of this yourself and be so deeply involved that you could even give us the numbers today, how do you do that?
Rob: Well that’s goes back to outgrowing thinking small. If you’re trying to have your hand in everything that’s going to ultimately hold you and the company back and that’s probably been one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur the last 12 to 18 months, and again I’ve been very lucky to surround myself with mentors and leaders in our business that have helped coach me get out of that day-to-day working the weeds and allowed me to go and do things that are going to ultimately add more value for us.
Andrew: What’s one piece of advice that they gave you that allowed you to do that to separate yourself from the day-to-day and still know that it’s going to get taken care of properly?
Rob: Probably the silliest thing is up until about six mo-…it was probably eight months ago I was doing payroll, I was still doing payroll for the business. So they’d just see me working on things that I shouldn’t be working on and they’d, “Hey Rob you’ve got to stop doing that. We’ve got to hire a controller, we need to hire a CFO, we need to hire…somebody to lead that portion of the business and so we do have a few processes kind of built around that, but they’re not really that elaborate. It’s more of you just see a problem, you bring it up. I think part of what’s enabled us to that is just having this culture where we’re very transparent with each other and you know, anybody can come into my office at any time and tell me what they think; good, bad, or ugly. I’ll tell them if I agree with them or not, buy I’ll thank them for their feedback and I will take their feedback the right way.
Andrew: How formal is your mentor group?
Rob: It’s not very formal. I mean, I have a handful of mentors that I look to and then we also have a leadership team within the business. And the leadership is more formal, so we meet regularly and talk about challenges that we’re facing and opportunities that we see and things of that nature.
Andrew: The mentors; do you give them shares in the business or how do you get them invested enough in your success that they’re going to give you help?
Rob: Well, a few of the mentors are paid. I don’t have any mentors that have equity or a piece of the business, but some of them are just kind of long-term mentors in business in general and they really enjoy helping other business owners and entrepreneurs be successful.
Andrew: And you pay them for that.
Rob: Some of them are paid. So like I have a business coach that I meet with every two weeks and he’s paid. The majority… so I have three other mentors that aren’t paid but they’re just, generally…they get enjoyment out of helping people succeed and I’m one of the people. I always give them ideas too. They might be mentoring me on how to grow and scale a business and at the same time I might be mentoring them on how to attract IT talent or how to motivate younger folks on their team or things that I’m a little more familiar with.
Andrew: You know I want to finish off by advise that you give people who you mentor, but one of the cool things that I notice as we’re having this conversation and I’m following up on different parts of what we’re talking about, is your Wikipedia strategy is pretty fricking cool. Wikipedia sends you a good amount of traffic. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Rob: I think I know, don’t tell Don Fornes.
Andrew: Do you feel uncomfortable with me saying it publicly?
Rob: No, I don’t think so.
Andrew: Okay.
Rob: I don’t know all of the specifics of it again. I think I know the basics though.
Andrew: Are you okay with me saying it? You seem okay with it. You tell me.
Rob: I’m sure if somebody’s smart enough, they’re going to figure it out after too long anyway, so go ahead.
Andrew: It seems like just about every app that you guys have has a Wikipedia page and links to the app go to your…links within Wikipedia go back to your site. And so Wikipedia is sending you considerable amount of traffic from people who are looking up things. Like, what do I happen to be on…all scripts. And if I go to all scripts and I do technologyadvice.com. Yeah. There’s a link in there to technologyadvice.com/products/allscriptreviews. And the link is for all scripts. And so if I go…
Rob: You know what, I don’t know that we actually played a part in that specifically.
Andrew: And see it may not be.
Rob: We have done some work with Wikipedia and like the citations.
Andrew: Yeah. So there is a citation for technology advice in there. It’s reference number four and that’s the part that says care management. That would…
Rob: Shhh.
Andrew: Right…Anyway. It makes sense because you guys have so much content on your site. And if people want reviews on some of the software that’s on Wikipedia they might as well get it from your site. Where now if I click over to all scripts reviews, I get a really in-depth article and can read the review.
Rob: I think it sounds similar to what I’ve talked to our Director of Marketing about a few months ago, but maybe they’ve pivoted that strategy a little bit. But none the less, I think we definitely have some really unique marketing angles that nobody else has around whether it’s something with Wikipedia or Social Media and something that we are really proud of.
Andrew: The only part I can’t figure out is why norefer.com is sending you guys traffic. Why are people trying to cloak URLs when they are sending traffic to you. Do you guys have and affiliate program?
Rob: We have a partnership program. It’s like an affiliate program, but we haven’t done much with it to date.
Andrew: Okay. Obviously you can see I’m trying to study everything you do because I think you guys have built something incredible. I didn’t realize the revenue had gotten this big in such a short period of time. I’m on the page right now and I can’t help but just scroll it because I think it’s just so pretty. If I scroll up this [??] page, this top part…
Rob: I appreciate that.
Andrew: …comes down in such a cool way that gives me the price. It says click for pricing, free demo, and a phone number. You guys are really big on putting your phone everywhere. Anyways…
Rob: [??]
Andrew: …uh-huh?
Rob: I was just gone say thank you for the feedback. I appreciate that and chances are if you refresh that page in a day or two you’ll see a few things that moved around so that’s something that we take pride in too, is constantly experimenting and doing split testing and so at any given point we have, you know, several experiments that we’re running on the website and just to see where we can deliver the best results.
Andrew: It’s just really clean and pretty, as I said, without looking overly designed to look pretty. It just is a really efficient site. It just looks great.
Rob: Thanks.
Andrew: When you talk to your mentors, people like me, who are trying to figure out what you’ve done and learn from it, one of the big pieces of advice that you give them is to just launch, just get going. In fact, you had someone who solved the great problem about 15 years ago and what happened…to this mentee who solved the problem? Do you know the one I’m talking about? Here’s what I’m seeing here. I know, this is from April. She must have picked this up, picked up on this in her conversation with you in preparation for this interview. She said, there’s this guy 15 years ago, saw a great problem, wanted to solve it, had an idea, and just now over a decade and a half later is finally starting to move and one of your pet peeves is people who just don’t take action. They spend too much time thinking about it. Or am I misreading her notes from your conversation?
Rob: Yeah, can you hold on one second, Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah, you bet.
Rob: Okay.
Andrew: For what it’s worth, we’re almost done with the interview anyway so if you need to run go for it. And while he’s doing that, one…
Rob: Okay, alright. I had to get some notes from one of my team members here.
Andrew: Okay.
Rob: So, yeah, we’re talking about someone that I’ve been mentoring…
Andrew: Yeah, right.
Rob: …and his own software. Okay, I’m sorry. That relationship’s only been recent but, so remind me again what was the question?
Andrew: Ah I see. So it was…well, I guess the bigger issue is you like to take action not over-think things, right? And you push people to do that as much as possible.
Rob: Yeah, just do it. Just take action. You just got to do it and do it fast and you got to learn from the mistakes that you make while moving. There is a gentleman that I have been mentoring here in Nashville and he’s been wanting to start a software company for 15 years that he’s been working at a large accounting company.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s the guy.
Rob: He’s designed this software while working for his current employer which is one of the top accounting firms in the country and he has been asking me questions like, well when do I know the time’s right and what do I need to do next and things of that…and my advice to him is the same that I give a lot of people. It’s just take the first step right now. Whatever you have to do to get to your goal, take that first step right now, like today, and tomorrow take the next step and the next day take the next step and every single day ask yourself am I taking steps towards my goal because what a lot of people do is they let all of the planning and all of the concerns with all of the different situations they might find themselves in get in the way.
So you can build a business plan, that’s a very smart thing to do, but after you build the business plan you just got to just start acting on it. I have people that have come to me and said well here’s why I can’t do it, or here’s what I’m worried about, or I think there might not be demand. And I said, Well, don’t think. Don’t think there might not be demand. Just pick up the phone and call people and ask them if they have demand for what you want to offer. And, so ultimately, it’s action over planning and it’s production over perfection. Those are kind of the phrases I like to use there.
Andrew: Well, congratulations on taking so much action and getting so much accomplished in such a short period of time here. The site is technologyadvice.com for anyone who wants to look at it and see what we’ve been talking about and I recommend checking out one of the product pages. I think those are really well designed. Rob, thanks for doing this interview.
Rob: Thank you. I really appreciate your time and had a lot of fun. I wish you best of luck with everything down the road.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye everyone.
