Jeremy Weisz 18:39
I can see that, right? It’s discouraging to get 80 no’s and to keep up with the same enthusiasm.
Cory York 18:48
It’s very, very hard, but once you do it, everything is easy. Afterwards. There’s just nothing can be hard anymore, you know, because you’ve done the hardest. And I have three children now, I can’t believe it. I have three, three daughters, two months, three years and five years, and my requirements for them are not like go to university. It’s do door to door for a year. And I don’t care what you do. As long as you do that.
Jeremy Weisz 19:16
It builds thick skin, for sure. So I could see Cory, how in the beginning your idea was okay, I want to take this Shopify. Was it to small businesses?
Cory York 19:29
Yep, mom and pop, Indian companies in Mumbai, essentially.
Jeremy Weisz 19:34
And then how has Webware evolved from that initial idea and start?
Cory York 19:43
So Webware has evolved from that idea in a lot of ways. In the beginning, I was finishing my Shopify partnership because I wanted to do my own business. Being a reseller of someone is not owning your business.
Jeremy Weisz 20:02
You toyed with that. You’re like, well, I could just use Shopify as a back end and resell it, but then you don’t have control.
Cory York 20:09
I’ll tell you the story actually, I sold to this huge company in India called The Ditya Burla Group, and they’re just massive, and I got them at a good price, and we built the site on Shopify. And then it came day to, like, train them on how to use it. And I think it was like, $5,000 a month let’s call it. For me, at 21 it was massive, like, whoa. And then I went to train them and show them everything, and they saw the word Shopify in the back end. And the guy, like, went to the computer, and he looked up Shopify, and he spun the computer around, going, it’s $50 a month Cory like, well, but it’s me I got to do, you know, I she put me on my back foot right away. And I went back to that night, and I messaged Harley Finkelstein, and I said, can you remove the logo? Like, can I get rid of the logo? Because I’m going to lose $4,500 over this logo. Like, I would love it white labeled. And they’re like, No, that’s obviously not their game plan. Their game plan is that’s their customer actually, even though I’m signing Tata, or Ditya, like it’s actually their customer, right?
So one, they told me they can’t do it. And then actually they started shutting websites in India, down for maintenance over the Indian daytime to do maintenance on American night time. And when I pointed that out to them, and I said, Listen, Tata group doesn’t really appreciate their website being down. Can we do a different time? And it was, hey, and rightfully so. Marico is their market at the time. India is not their focus. I was a side thing, probably just trying to make me happy, because they were nice guys, but they couldn’t make a compromise on that. And I can’t tell Tata their websites not going to work at lunchtime. You know, it’s not good for them. It’s not acceptable, right? So at that time, I’d gone to a conference, and I tell you, conferences have been key. All my network was built at conferences. So I went to this conference for E-commerce in Mumbai, and it was just starting the bubble, and I met this guy named Ed in the hallway because I can’t listen to stuff. I wasn’t there to learn. I was there to network. It was like I was back in high school. I can’t sit still. It’s just me. So I wander the hallways waiting for the social stuff. And there was another guy doing the same thing. And we started talking to each other. Go, what do you do? He goes, essentially, I live in Goa, which is a beautiful part of India. Okay, everyone goes for vacation in Goa.
If you ever in India, go to Goa and go south. And he said, live in Goa. And for the last four years, I’ve cloned Shopify system, like, get out of town, like, you’re my dream. And then he goes, I’m looking for a business partner because I’m a tech guy and I need someone with the sales pizzazz. And I’m like, first of all, I had my Shopify India badge kind of tucked in my jacket, and I pulled it out, and I was like, you’re busted. And he’s like, oh, are you just kidding? I’m terribly upset with them. They’re shutting my sights down, and I need to do something about it. So if you have what you just said, I’ll partner with you. I’ll get rid of shopify, fire them tomorrow, and we’ll start this business together. And we went off to his hotel room, and he showed me the goods, he showed me the software. And I fell in love. And I actually me, and my girlfriend, had just moved to India to join me from Canada. I was like, pack it up, or move in the Goa.
I told my Gift Card India partner, you’re the CEO now, and I’m leaving, I’ll stay on the board, and I’m leaving, and I’m moving to Goa, and I’m starting another company with this guy, Ed. And I don’t know how my partner at that time supported me, but he did, and that’s what happened. I moved to Goa and we started this company together. It was called Power Stores, okay? And we tried to be exactly like Shopify, but in Asia, focusing on Asian market, right? And we did that for about five years, trying to become Shopify of India and then we failed. We really failed miserably actually. It was terrible. I picked up a really great investor out of Hong Kong, because he was a client that came through my network and was in so in factual the product. And he was such an aggressive guy. He flew into Goa from Hong Kong, and he wooed me and wowed me, and he invested in the company, and he was. Like, don’t sell. Don’t do sales. Build the product for like, four years, maybe three years, three to four years, he would just fund us to build the technology, no pressure to sell.
That’s actually never any entrepreneur hearing this can be like, I’ve never heard of anything so ludicrous. Okay, it was crazy. He was a crazy guy, and I probably wouldn’t be here without him. It’s sad story. Actually went bankrupt, probably because that’s the way he would fly. But anyway, that’s a different story. But we had done it for like three to four or five years in India, and failed and FACING ELIMINATION, really facing like two months of money left, 50 employees, families. We were looking at death’s door. We were literally looking at death’s door. I remember my founding partner, Ed, took me for a walk outside our houses in Goa, and it’s like, my wife’s gonna go back to America. His wife was American and he was Indian, but he also educated in the US, but he said, my wife’s gonna travel back to the US, and she’s gonna get a home, and I’m gonna go join her there, because this isn’t going anywhere.
And he’s basically like, I’m going. And they bought a house in America, and she moved over there. And he was like, packing up. And I went to Canada for Christmas time with my girlfriend and see my family, and I’m like, this isn’t over yet. This isn’t over yet. And here’s what’s really cool, is me and a friend, made brochures, and we went door to door in Toronto, right? Going back to day one, going back to like, what I learned, selling the books, right? Let’s make a brochure for web where it was called Power Stores. And let’s go down St Clair and Toronto, popular street, and let’s see what happens. And in one day, we made more money than in the four years selling in India, in the one day, going door to door, selling digital marketing platform and service delivery. And I called up my partner, who’s packing his home in India. Gonna move his wife just bought a home in the US. They’re like moving there. But I said, stop, stop packing. Not only did I find a market going door to door, after like two months of going door or called December, January, February, I got the business up to $30,000 in recurring revenue going door to door, me and two, three guys. It was up to three guys going door to door every day, and someone, I got lucky again.
My Network came through. Someone I had met called me up, and I was talking to him about my problems, and he goes, you know what, I just pitched this guy, and he rejected. He was another founder. He had a startup in car sharing, and he’s like, I just pitched this company, and they rejected me, but they would love you. They’re tech. I’m car they’re Tech. Go meet this guy, Ray Sharma. So I’m like, great, Sharma. I’m a expert with Sharma. I’ve sold more books to Sharma than anyone in the world. Okay, so I go in this room with Ray Sharma, and it’s him and four other Indian guys are the partners for this company called Extreme Venture Partners, and they’re called Extreme Ventures in Toronto, or EVP, they’re known as and for a while, they’re the number one game in Toronto for first check first check in. Like, I got an idea and a couple, maybe pre rev, mostly pre revenue, and they would make a blind bet on the founder. And God bless those guys, because I was on zero money. We had 50 employees, and they’re like, Cory, we like the business. In the first meeting, we like the business. You got to move back here, and you got to repatriate the company. We’ll let you bring couple of employees, and we’ll give you 400k for 10%. I’m like, I shook their hands right then and there, and I was so happy to be on my way back to Toronto.
Jeremy Weisz 29:06
So you got you built, the team spends a long time building the product at this point. Now, you just have to sell it. What was the offering when you were going door to door in Toronto?
Cory York 29:20
It was just a website. That’s it 50 bucks a month we build the website for 1000 bucks to build it and 50 bucks a month to keep it. It was no and then the products evolve. Now, sorry, I think that was the original question. The product now has gone from a website platform to a fully autonomous, well semi-autonomous, now with a goal of full autonomy sales and marketing platform. We’re actually well beyond like what a website agency would be, or an art a marketing agency. We’re now about 80% SaaS. We’ve converted from 20% SaaS to 80% SaaS in the last two years. And we’ve brought in from the website, we brought in the CRM, right? From the CRM, we brought in payments, right? So you can manage your lead correctly when it comes into your website, right? It makes a lot of sense. No CRM actually sees, hears and feels what your customer is doing like I have it all. We have rev ops team of 25 people, and we have HubSpot Salesforce. I got every tool you can imagine. No one can show me in one view the customer went here on my website.
They opened my newsletter, they liked my social post, they made this purchase, and then they spend 10 minutes on my pricing page yesterday, right? Like no one can tell me that, I got to ask, it take a month to generate that answer, right? While my rev ops team struggles, we’re building the product that does it out of the box, and I hope to push my whole organization onto it, although it’s not built for large organizations like mine, we’re 300 people. It’s built for those little guys. But I even have visions of us using it soon as well, because it’s all the problem. Like a CRM should tell you, as the owner, the salesperson, who to call that’s most likely to buy, right? Like, that’s why we have a CRM, most likely it’s to get to the person that needs you now that’s most likely to give you money. That’s why we have a CRM. Yet no CRM can do that. Webware CRM, because it’s built around the website, can tell you this person goes on the pricing page for five seconds. It lights it up on the dashboard of the CRM. It’s called the hottest customer list, and it lights up right there and goes, Jim opened your email and he spent five minutes on your pricing page. Now call him, book the deal and get paid and grow your business, right? So Webware is now covering all that like it’s bringing the lead in from a strong blog post that was built by the Webware AI and post it lead comes in from that great content.
Your CRM now tells you, here’s a lead right. From the CRM, you can email them now, so we have an email engine, whether it’s emailing in or out. You can now do that entirely in Webware, because your email gets attached to the CRM, right? So you know now what they’re saying as well. So you know what they’re doing, the CRM knows what they’re saying, right then we brought in payments. Now we know what they’re buying. Right now, we know what they’re buying, and the CRM can tell you who’s buying what. And that’s important, right? And I’m getting to why it’s important soon. When you know what someone bought, it’s the ultimate validation of success. There’s no better validation of success. Now, when one marketing platform like web where has the validation of success in it, now I can say that this blog post that we did actually succeeded. Okay, we just added the phone next month. Now we’re going to say this blog post, this ad, got this phone call, and this phone call was positive. Now we have the positivity, the negativity, the transcript and the voice of a call that originated from a piece of content.
Now we’re talking about how AI can leverage all of that, because we brought AI in the middle of our platform where it can access all those things, and it’s learning more every day, where now it can actually write better for you every time it writes. It can respond to emails. It can know who the customer is that’s hottest. It can customize, and it can actually be the best business assistant, like we have a business isn’t called Rivi, which isn’t on our website yet, but Rivi is Siri for Webware. And you know how Siri is about to get really smart with Apple intelligence, because it has context all your personal conversations. Rivi has the same context about all your business conversations, and Rivi is going to be the best business assistant you can get because it actually knows all the things about your business.
Jeremy Weisz 34:12
So Cory, I just want to point out, I want to talk about a specific example so people can get idea of how it works. But I know your ideal clients are local, small businesses. So in the portfolio there’s accountants, there’s lawyers, there’s doctors, there’s dentists, there’s printing shops, there’s salons, there’s, you name, a small business, local. And I want to talk about, maybe we’ll talk about, like a dentist. So just pretending a dentist is listening to this, I’m like, okay, where do I start? Like, like, this sounds interesting, yeah. How would a dentist, from the sign up, what happens next?
Cory York 34:57
That’s the best news. If you really are interested, you go to our website. Eight you get on the phone one of our sales people, they’ll make sure that you get a package that meets your needs. And we’re very affordable, by the way, our average monthly package is, you know, between 500 and 2,000 bucks. So it’s super affordable, where you get all these tools that probably replace thousands of dollars. If you’re downgrading from a HubSpot. You could save yourself thousands and thousands of dollars, but we’ll onboard you, and we set the tool up for you. Okay, we know that our types of owners, we don’t like startups, we don’t love start. We don’t like startups. You can still come over and try, but we prefer a business owner that knows they shouldn’t do it themselves. So we offer a full setup for you service in the beginning for a very cheap price. The whole thing, set up the website, set up the automation set up your drip marketing campaigns are created, written and set up the AI gets trained for you on all your information. It’s a very easy setup. It’s almost autonomous, but we do hand hold you through the whole thing, because we know that’s what our clients want.
Jeremy Weisz 36:06
Yeah, and talk about the, again, you experienced a white label experience. We’ll call it quote, unquote white label experience with Shopify. But you also have a white label option, if an agency’s listening is like, listen, this sounds great. Um, how can I use this with and just sell it and do the rest? How does the white label program work?
Cory York 36:31
Right? Like, the original idea was white label, and it’s in my heart, it’s been trying to get back to helping the 20 year old Cory that called up Shopify that couldn’t get the logo change, that probably still would have been building that business right now and probably stacking those monthly recurring revenue fees without having to build my own platform. And I look at that person, and I say, I really want to enable them. And I think right now, the world needs it a lot like there’s a lot of people that need a new career, they don’t want to go to the office, they don’t want to work nine to five, they want to be their own boss, but they don’t want the overhead, the board, the investment, the risk, the learning curve of becoming a digital marketing expert. But you know you can sell and build relationships. That’s who we love to help. And we white label everything for them, so you look, feel and act as if your own agency, but all you need is your time and network and in sales ability.
And you go out there and you put a customer in, and we’ll take care of everything while you just keep the relationship going. And you can build your own model, and you can charge your own prices, like I have white labels that charge $2,000 a month, $1,000 a month on average. And they’re paying us behind the scenes a couple 100 bucks, and every customer, they’re walking away with a nice big margin. And it’s recurring. And like, one of my white labels that I work very closely with, his name’s Mike Lendy, and he’s built, oh, man, I’m gonna say his numbers. He won’t mind. I make him talk about it all the time. So, like, he’s already doing about $25,000 in recurring revenue in our white label program with just about a year and a half of effort and, like, he’s about $5,000 away from basically saying, I’m done, like, I’m just gonna let my fees come in and I’m gonna golf, and he has that goal. Then there’s the other side, like you said, agencies. We do have agencies as well.
If you’re an agency that charges $30,000 for a website and you don’t want to pay the amount of money it costs to deliver sometimes, you can actually work with us and leverage our team and our technology. And again, like AI builds the site now, right? So an AI can build the site to about 90% of what those bigger clients want, and then with a light lift from there, you can deliver what you’re delivering for 30k with about this much effort, compared to like that much effort with WordPress and a non AI website builder, right? You’re starting like the car from scratch over and over again, right? Like we now have an AI builder that writes out of the gate eight pages of content without you doing anything, and our clients sign off on that about 90% of the time, with no changes. It’s really an amazing experience. I think we have the best AI Website Builder out there, and we’re really kind of unspoken about right now.
Jeremy Weisz 39:36
Cory, we were talking before we hit record, obviously a fit for this would be agencies who work with local businesses or who have a lot of local business relationships. But you said there’s another, what you have found, highly successful group, that uses the white label.
Cory York 39:58
Yeah, it’s that entrepreneur. Is the successful one. Is that what you’re referring to?
Jeremy Weisz 40:03
Yeah, you were saying like someone, it was almost like a consultant or someone with a lot of relationships, even like a VP of sales.
Cory York 40:13
Yeah, if you’re X VP of sales, or X VP of marketing, and you don’t want to go back to the corporate grind, but you have a network and you know, and you’re confident in your abilities to build relationships and sell, Webware is the perfect fit for that person, because then they can go out just like Mike Lendy was the VP of Zipcar. So Mike Lendy’s background is Vice President Zipcar Canada. He built out their Toronto market. He’s been the VP of Sales for a number of companies, but you know what? He just didn’t want to go back to it, right? He got used to working from home. He doesn’t want to travel anymore. He wants to be able to work from anywhere in the world and have clients anywhere in the world, and he’s also been a founder before. He’s like, I don’t want a board. I don’t want have capital requirements, like I want to live my life on my own terms, and I want to leverage what I have is my community and my personality.
And if you have those things, you can come up to Webware and will basically make you look like an incredible agency and will deliver on your promises fully white labeled, and you could essentially go to market and build yourself a recurring revenue stream that’s consistent, predictable. And essentially, I run open office hours for the agency owners every other week, where I just show up and I give them advice on how to grow, and I try and teach them to just follow in my footsteps. Like, hey, remember how I got started? I got my butt off the seat, and I went door to door. You know, all these entrepreneurs, they always try and start with, like, emails. It’s like guys, I didn’t email anybody. Like, I got up, I walked in, I said, hi, how are you go try it? And suddenly they get a deal. So I teach them what I do, what I did so that they can try and get to a million dollars in recurring revenue, like we are at.
Jeremy Weisz 42:05
What’s been the evolution of the team? Because I know you started off as just you and Ed, and then obviously you got an investment. You grew the team to build the product. Talk about the evolution of the team.
Cory York 42:23
We were a sales led organization and I think that was important. I think if you’re a startup, you should be sales led. I’ll tell you why. The hardest thing to get is sales velocity, okay, and it’s the most important metric to selling the company. So if you don’t have it, you’re going to get a lot of money for it. So it’s the hardest thing to get. So what we would do, if you’re product led, first you pick the customer, and then you try and solve their problem. We were different. We went out there and we sold to everybody in the beginning, okay? Once we got out of door-to-door, we made a transition to inside sales. That was a really big moment for us, too. I did not grow this business going door to door. My first 200 customers were door to door, okay? But after that, and we probably wouldn’t be here if we didn’t do it, we switched to inside sales, and there’s a whole miraculous story around it, because when EVP brought me from Canada, they said, hey, we want you to meet this guy named Butch Langua.
And Butch Langua was the VP of a company inside Rogers Canada, which is the largest telco in Canada. One of them. It’s only three, and they’re all mass. And they’re like, You got to meet Butch. Butch talks about some inside sales velocity system he’s got, but he’s at Rogers, and they got this product from America, and the product sucks, but the sales is really rocking, but Rogers is shutting it down. Rogers is shutting it down. So I meet this guy, Butch, and Butch is like, he looks at my product, he goes, this is amazing. This is what I needed at Rogers. But Rogers has moved on. They’re firing everyone, or they’re taking the team into mobile, which basically means everyone’s gonna leave, because everyone’s there, not for mobile. This certain offshoot they had built, and we’re building away from the core corporate they had let this company called Outrank flourish. But Outranks product sucked. So Butch actually brought me into Outrank, and I probably can’t tell this story actually, and I walked around Outrank with a fake pass, because they were shutting down.
And Butch would walk me up to something. He toured me around, and he basically said everything here’s going. And he walked me in, and there’s all these young guys, like young guys and girls like, you know, and they all had music stands, and they’re all, some people were standing and they had the headset on, and they’re the and they were reading off a book on the music. In, and it was high energy. There was loud music, and it was the coolest thing you’d ever seen. It was like, boiler room meets Silicon Valley. Like, it was a nice place, was a shitty place, like, so I was like, this is cool. And he’s like, Roger’s getting rid of everything. So I said, okay, so he walked me up to this guy named Grant, this guy, Maurice, and before you know it, we chose five people. We took the director of sales, actually, who is the Employee of the Year at Rogers, and then he came on board, and then he brought his five best people. And one day we had heisted all these people from Rogers, and we had an inside sales team ready to go all in the same day, show up ready to work, and we created this script, and we hit the phones like two days later, and we haven’t looked back.
We made sales on the first day on the phones. And it blew my mind, because door to door is incredible, and it’s a game of numbers, right? How many doors can you do while keeping your attitude? And the biggest problem with attitude is you never know when your sales rep sitting in a donut shop anywhere, it’s like attract them with a chip. But if you’re on the phones in front of you a you can keep the environment super happy, so you can pump in happy gas and music and food and distraction and games and giveaways so that everyone’s thrilled every day, and they can even do more volume on the phone. So these guys would do 150 $200 a day and be happy. And that really worked. Okay, that worked. We never looked back. And we’ve built now from zero to about 14 million in revenues. And over time, if I look at my Stripe account, it would say probably 60 million, 70 million, all generated from cold calling. That’s wild. It’s wild. It is the coolest thing. And we have deals in one call. We have one call closes. And I would never believe it until I saw it in front of me over and over again. I would never believe it. Come on. How do you get a $6,000 contract signed in one call? But we do it, and it’s powerful.
Jeremy Weisz 47:11
What about from the backend team?
Cory York 47:19
The backend team, I kind of alluded this in the beginning. We started as a 20% SaaS company, and everything was back end. So, technology takes time to build, right? So, me being a sales guy, very aggressive ex hockey player. When I would look at Ed the CTO, I’d say to him, I want this feature, right? I go, I need this feature. He’d say six months, or, well, he’d say two months, and it would take six months. And I learned whatever you tell me, like, I would double it. I learned that very quickly, because that’s software, right? It’s hard. And you change the requirements when it comes out. It’s like, actually, I was supposed to do that, right? We weren’t good at documenting, and we wouldn’t even, we would barely do like, mock ups, we wouldn’t even do that. We had to say, this is what I want, and he run with it. That’s how startups are hard at the beginning, right?
So what I do in the meantime is I would use a person to execute what technology would do. So we would build a system where, now blogging is a button, okay, now blogging is a button, but before I had the blog for 4,000 clients every month. So every agency I meet out there goes a story. You blog for 4,000 clients a month, and we’ve been doing this 10 year, eight years before AI, maybe not 4,000 a month, but thousands a month before AI, how do you do that? We were doing it with people in India, right? We would have the blog written overnight. It’s funny enough, my wife built the original blog team, and the blog request would automatically. The client would get an email saying, what topic do you want? And they would choose the topic, and then a form link would show up saying, answer these six questions, and then those six questions would go to the writing team, and they would write the initial draft, and it would go over to my wife for review.
She would approve it, and then it would go back to the customer on the website, right? And that’s what we did with back end people for years, and we had built up a team of 400 people about a year and a half ago, we hit 400 and 80% of those were in India. Is 300 in India, 100 in Toronto. So we are hugely loaded in India because I was impatient to build technology, and I would just rush it through with people. And in India, I’d leverage, you know, could be $5 an hour, is your average hourly rate to run a team like that in India. So I could run those processes, and I leverage the back office to just get things done now, while engineering catches up on the software. And I would say, now we finally caught up. Now we’re 80% automation, and one by one, we’ve gone through all the people based processes and built in automation AI, and that’s that workflow.
Jeremy Weisz 50:14
So Cory from that standpoint, because you spent a lot of time and energy from the company early on with developers and software engineers, does it require less now, from like, a maintenance perspective?
Cory York 50:30
Well, elaborate a little on that. I didn’t get it.
Jeremy Weisz 50:32
Yeah, when, when you, you originally had that investment from the person, and you really built a team of 50 people, and you’re building out the product. Does it now require less kind of people power from like a software developer standpoint?
Cory York 50:52
Actually, now, the more people you add, the harder it gets to do things. So it’s actually become more painful verse, then to build stuff, because you need more input, there’s more variables, there’s more things being affected. So I’d say it’s become more challenging. And then the roadmap is something that always is fluctuating with digital marketing is a moving target. Like SEO algorithms were just updated. Okay, I got 4000 clients that are following a certain SEO strategy. Now, how do I get those 4000 clients back on the right SEO strategy, et cetera.
Jeremy Weisz 51:36
Cory, I have one last question before I ask it. I just wanna thank you for sharing your journey. It’s been a crazy road, and I want to encourage people to check out webware.ai to learn more. And I know that your journey has come with a lot of important people, colleagues and mentors. You mentioned Butch and several others who are some of your mentors in the business world that have given you good advice and helped you along the way.
Cory York 52:07
Great question. Before we tell you that I got a lot to say on this topic, I’ll make it short, because I work with 4000 business owners and I run the community, I hear their challenges, and I’ll tell you, I feel very deeply about this. I think there’s a wave of bad decisions being made over the last few years because of the lack of diligence in selecting their mentor and someone to listen to. I’ve seen people on Instagram go from comedy to finance advice and people listen. I’m not even joking, and then people jump into it, and they don’t ask the backstory, what’s the backstory? How did the person get there? And is this person in the place I want to go? And did they get there on the path I have to take? Right? We all listen to these, like, big celebrity, almost mentors.
Some of these kids always run off to go see them. So my sales agents, I’ll go off to see who’s the guy, whoever? I can’t remember his name, but if you look at his name and what he did, he’s handed millions of dollars by his dad. And I look at the sales rep, I’m like, hey, you guys. Love what he says and his advice. You guys eat it up. But like, you guys are climbing the same mountain. You want to be a real estate mogul, but to get up that mountain, you got snow shoes on, and that guy took a helicopter, right? Like, how do you take advice from the guy?
He’s like, yeah, you just do it. Guys, you got to work and you got and you’ll get here, like, come on, did your dad hand you 2 million a small amount of money, $2 million you know? So I find a lot of people taking the wrong advice from the wrong person. So I chose my mentors very carefully, and I’ve had several along the way, and what I find is important is you got to pick the mentor that’s sitting in the spot you want to be in next. And they got there with the same equipment that you’re available, right? They did it in snowshoes. If you have snow shoes, you got to find the guy that in snowshoes. And if you find that guy, he actually will tell you exactly how to get up the map. He’ll be so excited to tell you because you came searching for him. You just got to find them. They’re not all famous, and they’re mostly unbothered by people. And if you call them up, they’ll probably be loved to give you time and time and advice. And if you find the right person that actually took that route, you can cheat code your way up that mountain really fast. They’re gonna be like, here’s a shortcut, and there’s another shortcut when you get there, and if you keep a good relationship with them and you use them as a mentor along that way, they can help you save years of pain, years of pain. But what’s also important is to recognize when you’ve run out of room with their experience.
That’s happened to me, because you’re moving up, right? So you got to pick someone also, that’s at that next stage. You can’t pick the billionaire. You got to pick, if you’re a student or a director of marketing, or a director of sales, or someone like director or lower, but your goals are to become a VP, you got to pick the VP and then mimic him and learn from him, but once you become a VP, you got to go find that guy who’s the CRO, right? If you want to become a CRO, you got to now shift your mentor to CRO, because what does the VP know about becoming a CRO? He didn’t do it. So, a lot of people will keep the same mentor, where I have adjusted my mentors along the way. So in the beginning, my mentor was a second cousin of mine, because he was just his dad liked him. And then I achieved that. And then I met this guy, Michael, and he had become a VP of sales, and he owned his own business, and I mimicked him. And then I met Coleman in India, and I was like, wow, how did this guy get to that level? Okay, he had this attitude and effort, and attitude and effort thing, so I copied him. But then when I hit his level, I had to pick the next person. So it’s important you change.
Like, my latest mentor was a guy named Dan Martell. Okay, Dan Martell is amazing. I don’t know if you know him, or you’ve ever come across his content. If you’re a SaaS CEO, below 10 million, your startup, SaaS CEO, this guy’s got gold, Okay, got to be careful of a few things. Like, he teaches buy your time back. You don’t want to buy your time back to where you’re not involved in your company. I think that’s a little dangerous. But his tutorials on how to run a meeting, how to bust churn, how to think, you’re really good at teaching how to think really, it’s really strong. That stuff. I think that was really helpful to me. But again, and I signed up for Dan’s like, serious tier, like I was paying him a ton of money to get into his one-on-one coaching program, which you don’t get in the SaaS. Like he’s got like, 800 900 customers, SaaS CEOs, and they’re at this one level. But you never really meet Dan one on one. If you want to pay a certain amount, I won’t disclose, but you can get him as a one on one. I went for that, and he coached me for like, two years, one on one, and it was great, absolutely great. And I would say, I probably wouldn’t, also be here without Dan’s help, getting from that four to $7 million revenue mark. So when I joined Dan, I was at four, and I got to seven, right when I hit seven, has Dan’s program? Has Dan built a company past seven? I don’t think so, right?
Dan hasn’t built a company to seven to 10, 20 he’s not done that. So the advice runs out, and I have to make a break, and I have to find the next guy, and it’s hard now, right? Like, how do I find someone that took a company from 14 million to 50 million? Is probably the next mentor I need. So now I’m working with a coach named Mark McCloud. Mark McCloud was the, he wasn’t necessarily a founder, which is a little dangerous, but he was the CFO Shopify when they were at that 20 to $50 million mark. So he was in a company. He heard it. He knows the challenges, and he’s been part of the success of a company, getting over that hump of 15 to 20 million and getting to that 50 to 100. That’s the next mentor I’m looking for and seeking and trying to find. And right now, Mark is my best guy, because it’s slim pick games.
Jeremy Weisz 58:15
Cory. I love it. Yeah, I remember, actually, when Dan Martell started Clarity and then ended up selling it, that was a really cool product, and it’s really interesting with Mark. Obviously he’s been there, done that, in a company that they kind of full circle back to Shopify for you from the very beginning. So I love it. Cory, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone check out webware.ai to learn more and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Cory, thanks so much.
Cory York 59:25
Loved it. Thanks so much for having me and have a good day.
