Jeremy Weisz 5:46
What was most valuable for you, you were a member right with Silvertrac when you were in this is, I mean, most valuable for me is always relationships. You’ve met your co-authors of this, obviously, Software as a Service book. We’ll pull that up in a second, but you can check it out at softwarebook.com and you, your co-authors, all in the program, Marcel and Matt. You went through the program. What was most valuable for you when you think back to when you were in SaaS Academy?
Johnny Page 6:15
Yeah, it’s a combination of things. But the thing that got me in the door was the content. The frameworks really helped put a language and specificity to the challenges and the nuances I was feeling in the business. So one of our most popular frameworks is called the rocket demo builder, and it’s a very simple methodology for how to do a software demo. And I had, at the time when I joined SaaS Academy, I’d probably already done 500 some demos. And I could get off a call and tell you that one felt good or that one didn’t, but I couldn’t tell you specifically what it was that made the good ones good and the bad ones bad. Well, the rocket demo builder put some language in architecture to a demo that now allows this to be a much more repeatable process. So super high impact for me as the person wearing many hats. But it was even more impactful when I could turn around and give that to my sales team as I started to hire them and say, hey, this is a methodology that drives how we do demos here. So, and that’s the case.
I use demos as an example, but there’s, we’ve got over 400 playbooks all throughout our campus, from everything about how to hire and evaluate your team, how to build compensation plans, how to activate your customers and your product, whether you’re enterprise product or you have a product led motion. I mean, there are 400 playbooks for every nuance and dynamic in the business across every core function, and so that’s what got me in the door. What you don’t realize when you are searching is how impactful the community elements are going to be. And I remember like a very specific moment, I drove so I’m in San Luis, Obispo, California. I got invited to — there’s three events per year in SaaS Academy. We call them Intensives, and got invited to an intensive in San Francisco. And I remember it was the first time that I’d really driven and traveled for education or training, personal development. And I remember driving on the way up there, feeling so nervous about just walking into that room. I felt like I knew nothing about SaaS. Felt like an absolute imposter.
I remember walking into that room, it felt very similar to, like walking into a classroom the first time you changed to a new school. I was taken right back to, like, second grade. Of like, where am I going to sit? Am I going to get along with any of these people? And I remember walking in, and 45 seconds in, I was like, oh, I found my tribe. Like, and then for the rest of that day, where, outside of SaaS Academy, if I talked about the things that were truly exciting me about business, I had about two to five minutes until, like, my friends and family’s eyes glazed over, and it’s like, okay, I lost them. I went for like, eight hours on that first day, just in both through the conversation curated through the workshops, and then just all the in between, the lunches, the dinners, I just found the people who were aspiring to do the same things that I was and were also worried about the same things and frustrated about the same things. And so the community was not at all in on my calculus of things that were important and I was looking for. But, man, it being proved. I mean, I just knew from the moment that I walked in that I’d be a part of this community for a long time. I didn’t know what capacity, but yeah, I’ve changed the trajectory of my life, personally and professionally.
Jeremy Weisz 9:37
I’ve heard that over and over, where people go, they come for the content and stay for the community type of thing. And seems to be the case. I want to dig into what you said. And if you’re watching the video, you can go to SaaSacademy.com and you can go to the rocket demo builder, actually, and they have a download there. You could check it out. But what’s a big mistake you have found maybe you made them, or you found other founders make with demos.
Johnny Page 10:07
Yeah, there’s two main ones, and that is the first is that we give a tour of our product, not a demo. And so this can be really challenging for the founder who finds every part of their product really exciting, and you jump onto a call with a prospect, and you fire hose them for 45 minutes, touring every functionality and part of the product. And the reality is, there’s probably about 30% of your product. It is absolutely mission critical, super important for the client. And then everything else is additive, but unless we nail that 30% and communicate very clearly what their problem solved would look like, we don’t earn the business. And so this is a matter of shifting from a tour to a demo, and I say all the time, we want to show them their problem solved, so as quickly as we can get to showing exactly what that new workflow would look like. And this leads to point number two, going through the feature, ask flow. So we want to, like, demonstrate the feature, so we do a discovery on the front end. Hey, what is that 30% to you? What’s absolutely mission critical.
Why is this important now? Like, why are you on a software demo? Most people don’t love the demo software, just for fun. What’s the problem in the business? How’s it showing up? What does the ideal solution look like? Get really clear on the front end. Then we demonstrate the feature, and we pause to ask, does this solve the problem? See, a lot of times, if you make this conversion from giving a tour to a demo, we still miss the opportunity to ask for feedback and input from the client before I move on to that part. If we want to get to the end of the call and make it an easy close we need to pause for these like what some people call objections throughout the conversation, right? So don’t move on until we’ve shown hey, we can solve problem number one, and then we can move on and demo feature number two. But those are the two biggest mistakes. If you can just do that, if you don’t download the rocket demo builder or watch a training at all, if you just say, hey, am I giving a tour, or am I demonstrating their problem solved?
And then am I pausing throughout the conversation to ask for their input on, would this work for you? What do you like about it? What’s missing? We get to handle those with much more time on the call than what a lot of people do is they wait to the end. They’ve fire hosed them for the whole call. Then we show them the price, and then we ask if they want to move forward. And there’s about 13 minutes on the clock, and there’s about 45 minutes worth of questions. And so we just don’t get as far into it as we could, if we’re not front loading those mission critical parts of what they’re looking for.
Jeremy Weisz 12:50
Thanks for sharing that that’s highly valuable. And again, this obviously applies to any business. I mean, we’re talking about SaaS, but take any type of business and it applies. And I love how you kind of break it down in 80/20 right? Usually there’s 20% of stuff that’s going to make 80% of the impact and so focusing in on that. What are some of the big pain points that you have found Johnny of why people join or in the beginning, and maybe what were yours why you joined from Silvertrac?
Johnny Page 13:21
Yeah, yeah. You’re typically, most owners have hit some type of growth ceiling or plateau, and they’re not really sure which lever to pull to grow. And most of them think is, they just need more leads. I need more sales. So it’s typically, we boil the business down into three main parts. You can acquire more customers every month. You can keep your customers for longer, so improving your churn rate, or you can make the average customer worth more. Most people come in thinking that they need to improve their acquisition, whether it’s marketing or in sales, that hey, if we just had more revenue, we’d solve a lot of problems. We consider that, and most of the time, 30 to 50% of the time, that is true, revenue solves a lot of problems, but there’s the other 50% of the time where there’s just a really big leak in the bucket.
And no matter how much we sell, unless we reduce those churn rates, we’re just going to be on a treadmill of high acquisition costs and just you’re putting a lot of customers out into the market that didn’t have a great experience with our product, when the third one is just the pricing power and how powerful that lever is. If we have a customer that’s on average across our client base, they’re paying $250 a month. If we can get that to $300 or $400 even $500 a month, it dramatically changes the economics of the business. So most of the time, when a founder comes to us, they’re just not sure which lever to pull, if they do have a hunch or an assumption, it is that I need more customers. We sit down and remodel out the impact of if we were to focus on one of those levers for 90 days, what impact do we think we can have? And we make a more mathematical assessment around, what should we focus on? Because the reality is, if we’re putting in effort every day, and most founders are like, that is a given, I’m going to work hard for this.
The challenge is, if we don’t focus on the bottleneck of the business, it doesn’t grow. So we have this frustration around, hey, I keep on putting in the effort and just not seeing the results from it. We slow down a little bit on the front end to make sure that that’s pointed in the right direction. And that is oftentimes 90 days in with the founder focused on the most important issue in the business, we can start to push off that growth ceiling and start to see growth come back. And then we have another 270 days on their time in our program, if they’re in for a year to go, continue to push the ROI. So, yeah, most of the time we call it chocolate and broccoli. But people want chocolate is, hey, I want more customers. Sometimes we’re like, hey, I think what you need is to work on a pricing update or an improvement in your retention. But regardless, we sit down and model it out together and then get into execution mode.
Jeremy Weisz 15:59
The most for me, the most impact in my life and business is always mentorship. Being in a group and with people who have done it, have seen it and that’s kind of, I forgot there’s been founders on here have said you can run really fast, and people are working on in the wrong direction. So it’s helpful to get a group and people who have seen the trend. Can, you know, plot this stuff out. They’ve been there, done that. What’s interesting I want to talk about is, you know, we talked about sales, one of those things, right? I think a lot of founders or myself, sales can cure a lot of things, or at least we think it can. But you seem to be also a master salesperson.
And when you went from your family had a security company, and then eventually you were talking to the silver track people. You were basically, I’ll let you tell the story, but kind of the original arrangement there you had, probably, I don’t know, 80% of their customers. What were you doing that was so successful? Talk about the arrangement. We’ll talk about what were you doing so successful that you were able to really help them and get a large percentage of the customers.
Johnny Page 17:25
Yeah, yeah. So for background and for context, my family owned a security company, a physical security company. So they provided contract security services where we would train and certify security officers to then go out and work at hospitals, schools, homeowners associations, you name it. They ran that company for 40 years, so I started off with them. And the challenge in that industry is that it’s hard to prove if you do great work or not, right most of the time you’re on site when there’s no other you’re watching a property or assets where they’re unguarded. And so I found a tool called Silvertrac that allowed me to prove the work that we were doing, and became a massive competitive advantage. Turns out, it was better fit for me to be selling software and focus in that space than it was security services. So I made the transition over and I became a commission only sales rep for Silvertrac. I was essentially a reseller agreement. So I was allowed to take the software resell.
I got 30% of the monthly recurring revenue, but I had to be a market sell and support any customers on the product, so very quickly I realized how infrequent, because we had no marketing presence. I mean, like when I started working on the product, was just coming out of it was three, two brothers and a cousin that had built the product for their own security company, and they were just starting to spin it off into their own software company. So it was no website, very, very early. So I realized how infrequent it was going to be to have a demo opportunity to sell more customers. So I said, look, when I get someone, I have to make sure that I keep them around. So I’ve always had a more customer success focus approach to growth, and I think that really served me well in the sales conversations, because I could anticipate. I worked for so long. Let’s say that you’re in a sales only role, and we agree that the more time you spend with your customer, the better you’re going to get at sales. In a sales conversation, maybe I’m on a call with him for an hour, but when I’m deploying the software, I get to meet with his customer for months, and I get to understand the ins and outs of the business.
I actually get to see the problem solved. So then I come back to my new conversations, and I can see the sales are a transfer of enthusiasm. So the more clear I can picture their desired outcome, their problem solved, the more compelling I am in the sales conversation. So, and I started to, early on I’d be in slide decks, I would be worried about getting into the product, and what if it throws up an error page, and they’re just like, the more and more I got to know the products, and it said, by the time I’d onboarded 30 customers into the software, you couldn’t get me onto a demo if there was not a situation where close rates close to 70% when, if I got on with a founder of a security company, like they were going to launch some type of proof of concept to our product, because I could just speak with such a high conviction and clarity around what the problem solved looked like, and I knew I’d migrated customers over from every product in the space that customer success Foundation was incredibly influential, and it continues to be, if you think you follow the through light of my career,
I sold security services. I was a customer of Silvertrac, then I came on to run Silvertrac, then I consumed the services at SaaS Academy, and then I came on to run SaaS Academy. So this like Customer Success foundation, walking a mile in the shoes of your client. For me, I’ve never been someone like, you know, reading through a bunch of sales books and figuring out the Verbal Judo, or the right way to phrase a conversation like I just let the work speak for itself. In my customer success time focus on really understanding how to get them to their desired outcome as fast as possible, and then I extract value from those customers in the form of testimonials, case studies, referrals, references. So I let the body of work speak, you know, to then fuel my sales efforts and strategy, our marketing strategy, you can see that on our website.
I mean, at SaaS Academy, we don’t sit down. We don’t invite our customers to an event without sitting down and then getting them into a chair and handing them a microphone and say, hey, tell us about your time here, like there’s so many internet marketing companies out there that can claim to help founders. Like we just let the 1000s of founders that have worked come through our program speak for the results. And so I think that’s a cheat code. If you’re in sales, it’s harder. The later you join a company, it’s harder to get that like experience and customer success. But like I take hands down someone who’s been on the delivery side, and I’ll teach them the sales skills, then having someone with, like, great sales skills, and having to teach them the point of view and conviction that comes from having actually delivered on the product.
Jeremy Weisz 22:15
You can see here, if people are looking at the video, the SaaSacademy.com or at the our clients, the client stories page here, and there’s a bunch of Client Success there’s videos and everything like that. But there’s nothing that talks better to the product or service than a success story, especially if you have experienced that personally yourself. Just for people, Johnny, paint the picture a little bit. You join Silvertrac. You’re commission only. Where are you at in your life, as far as a wife, kids, significant other? Because it is a leap. You’re like, listen, I’m commission only. I mean, you’re betting on yourself here in a big way. And also you’re like, this isn’t an established product, so there aren’t people looking for it, so you literally have to go out and hustle and get customers, which is a big I mean, risk in some ways. What did life look like at that point?
Johnny Page 23:15
Yeah, I was newly married, didn’t have any kids yet, although that would come like within the first year my wife and I were married, we had, or she got pregnant, and we had our first kid together. So, student loans had just kicked in. I’m paying about like $450 bucks a month in my student loans, we are barely making, like, $2,000 a month with my work at the security company, but the challenge was I had started using the software, and I was starting to sell a lot for the security company, to the point where I was changing my grandparents like business, they started to become, this is a lifestyle business they’ve been doing for 40 years. For the business to support my, you know, earning desire and potential. And we just realized there was real misalignment. And so that’s where it was like, hey, let me go start looking for something else.
Well, I called up the founder of Silvertrac, and I said, hey, man, I have this idea of a product that can help the security industry, just looking to get his point of view and perspective. And he was like, hey, like, let me show you what we’re building at Silvertrac. It turned out was really early on. So I remember sitting over the kitchen table and being like, look, I all I need to get to is about nine customers on a recurring revenue basis, and I’ll have, like, broken even on, it won’t be as much of a step backwards. So I worked out with my family’s company. Hey, let me have this like three month down ramp, where I’ll go from selling for you guys full time. I’ll just continue to nurture what’s in the pipeline. Let me ramp down over three months while I ramp up at Silvertrac. And it took me a lot longer to ramp up at Silvertrac. The challenge then was data. Our software ran on Android, and at the time, there weren’t even Apple phones.
So Android smartphone, but the data, the price of data was cost prohibitive to the security companies, like it actually cut into their margin, you know, pretty significantly. And so it was a matter of like, finding people willing, having contracts that were like, established enough that had high enough margins to support the product getting out. It took me a lot longer to ramp up to nine, but I just started doing, like, digital marketing services. Like I had a knack for helping grow security companies, so I was selling the software and waiting for that to come along. I also just, like, got scrappy and said, hey, let me help you, like, refresh your website, get into some local SEO work. And so I supported on the side there, just hustling again, serving the same target market, which I think really helped me. It wasn’t like I was helping gym owners at the same time that I was trying to sell those software, I found something, another problem that my target customer had, and continue to nurture and extract more revenue from the relationships I had while I let my network in and in the security industry continue to grow.
But that was around, put it at the time I became CEO of the company, I had been with him for about four years, and had built up a customer base of about 150 or so, 180 clients. And so, was really well established. He was essentially 85-90% of the total customer base of the company. And me becoming at the time I was still a contractor, so becoming an employee. At that point, it was well established. We had my wife, and I had two to three kids, and, yeah, the rest is history,
Jeremy Weisz 26:46
Johnny, talk about the evolution of your positions there really quickly. So you start off as a commission-only salesperson, right? You build up business. What were the next positions that you went through at Silvertrac?
Johnny Page 26:59
It’s funny, like the company when we sold it had at the most 30 people, including contractors. So there were never these, like, formal. It was like, hey, pick your title, whatever you think, whatever you want to call yourself, so that your customers are more likely to answer the phone like, you know, call yourself that. So I thought the easiest thing to call myself would be, hey, I’m a VP of Customer Success. That helps me in the support conversation, then also, you know, speaks. I think I can get by in the sales conversation as well. But there was never these, like, formal, hey, you’re this, or you’re that, like an essay all the time. Like, leadership comes without a title.
So I just had a, really, Chris Anderson and myself. Chris was one of the three founders, and he’s the one who brought me into the business and incredibly supportive mentor and just a lifelong friend throughout the process, but him and I just had this, like, really clear vision of what the business could grow up into being and work side by side. So there was never, like, a formal Hey, now you’re promoted from like salesperson to VP of Customer Success, or now you’re promoted from VP of Customer Success to CEO. But Chris and I work together, in the seven years that I was there, we go from the market being pretty challenging from a cost perspective to sell into there being five to six, like really establish competitors and a lot of investment into the industry as a whole, to the point where Chris and I are talking like we were misalignment between where Chris and I wanted to build what the other two founders wanted to the other two founders, this was more of a lifestyle business for them.
They didn’t really want to hire more employees, invest in the product. So we started to go through a process of a year or so, kind of thinking about, what are our options? Can we buy them out? Can we partner with another company? Should we acquire another company, or is it time for us to go look for an exit? So it ended up through many different iterations and attempts to keep the business under Chris and I ended up deciding that a sale was the best decision, and took them through what ended up being a 12-month process of finding a buyer working through due diligence, and taking the company through an exit,
Jeremy Weisz 29:15
With SaaS Academy, again, we’ll talk through some of the different positions you took on. But back to Silvertrac for a second. I know one thing that differs with SaaS Academy and Silvertrac that I think you learned from Silvertrac, and I’ll let you speak to it, is, as you grew up, you’re like, listen, I want stake in this thing. I’m helping build this thing, and I want steak. Going back to Silvertrac, what do you wish you would have done there in regards to that?
Johnny Page 29:48
Yeah, it’s funny. I remember when I was working through all those options of, can we get our, you know, some of the partners bought out. What are all the different avenues we have? Remember talking to Dan Bartel, and he said, Look, as you go through this process, I shared the concern like, Hey, man, I’ve built this to a point where it’s like, pretty well established. What I’d like to have happen as a part of this is that I become an owner in the company in some capacity. And he was like, well, you need to negotiate that first, because as soon as there’s a valuation assigned to the business, your opportunity to become a founder or to become a partner will be gone. They’ll know the value of whatever equity you they grant you, or you purchase. And so I was like, You know what, I didn’t take his advice. I said, you know, I trust the founders.
Regardless, I’m going to continue doing what’s best for the business. And it’s not like I don’t trust them now, but they did what we had agreed to, and that was that I was an employee, a well-paid one at times, and I did my job to do what’s best for the company, in hindsight, for the amounts that I contributed and really led the company to the outcomes that they achieved. I really wish I would have had that conversation earlier on and so, took that lesson learned and made sure that that was the first conversation that Dan and I had as I left. I was in about a year and a half worth of into my time with the company that had acquired us. And in conversations with Dan about coming over to SaaS Academy, it was the first one that I said, hey, like, the highs and lows of my journey into ownership in a company so far I get, the next thing I do, I will be an owner of, and at least a partner in.
And so you learned that lesson, but it was a costly one to have, and one I wish that I would have taken the advice from Dan at the time when I got it.
Jeremy Weisz 31:56
So just an overview of the trajectory at SaaS Academy. So you start off, obviously, as a client, customer. Then what happened next?
Johnny Page 32:08
Yeah, so post-exit, one of the ways that Dan, he’s super creative, and we’ve talked a lot about this on our podcast, is how he keeps his network close to him. He’s like, hey, I’ve got a group of people I know. Like, at some point I’m gonna look for an opportunity to work for them. So he’s like, starts with people first, and then looks for opportunities to work together. So one of the things that he did when founders in SaaS Academy were working through post exit is that’s a totally different challenge to be working through. So SaaS Academy exists to help founders find their perfect exit. So it’s very common. There’s over 50-some companies now that, through going through our programs, have gone on to sell their companies. And that post that earn out period, that post-acquisition period, is a time when there’s a lot of questions around, how does the founder continue to interface in the business? What are they going to do next?
So, Dan post-exit at Silvertrac said, hey, Johnny, why don’t you stay in the community and coach on a fractional basis, like, hey, let’s figure out what are the two to three areas where you really excelled in the business. And when I have a client that has a challenge in that area, we’ll just put them on to a 30 minute call. Just set aside two to three hours a week you might have, like, three or four phone calls, and just support founders based on your past experience. So that’s where it started was, we had probably about 10 to 12 founders. Matt, our co-author, was one of those that exited his company within about two months of when I went, took Silvertrac through the exit, and so both him and I were coaching on a fractional basis, and that was just a way for us to stay involved in the community, stay involved with Dan. And then that evolved into about six months into that, I just messaged Dan, and I’m like, hey, I’m an obsessive type of personality. I don’t do anything like halfway, and I can’t jump on another coaching call without having it be just my full-time focus. If I’m going to do this, I want to be incredibly good at it. I don’t want it just getting my leftover time.
And so that conversation then evolved into, hey, I need some help running our customer success team like we need to now start thinking about SaaS Academy with a formal product department and then a formal Customer Success department. And I love to have you come on and run customer success. And so I started there. That was my first way into the door. And then about four months after that, we had some challenges in our marketing department. And I said, hey, Dan, like, I feel like I’ve got a really good handle on what we could be doing better there. Let me take a crack at running a marketing team. So it took that over, and then about four to six months after that, had some challenges with our sales team scaling that, and just the sales leadership in place wasn’t aligned with where I wanted to go. So I took that over, became the CRO and then was in the CRO role for about I don’t know, 12 months before we started talking about what a transition into a CEO role would look like.
And Dan and I went on a hike and talked about where we wanted our lives to be five years from now, what is great look like on that hike I shared with him. I just can’t imagine myself five years from now not being the CEO of a company. I’d love for it to be SaaS Academy, but I just can’t imagine not being in the driver’s seat. I feel like I spent enough time kind of being in a number two role. And by the time we got done with that hike, and we’re sitting over a cup of coffee in a coffee shop, Dan and I mapped out what it would look like 18 months transition into that CEO role, what would all the things have to be true? And you got to work on crossing those things off the list. And yeah, it takes us to our rat. That was about six months ago. We formally announced my transition into the CEO role.
Jeremy Weisz 35:55
Looking at that transition journey, what were some of those key points that helps with the transition. Because, if you’re looking at it, a founder bringing on, like a hardworking, capable CEO is, I don’t know if it’s a founder’s dream or but it’s definitely up there. What made that transition successful? What things that you both put in place?
Johnny Page 36:23
Yeah, Dan just does a really good job at beginning with the end in mind. And so we said, Okay, if, if Dan was emphatically, if he was enthusiastic and excited about the CEO that was running SaaS Academy, what would that person do? How would they show up in the business? How would they interact together? What would he go on to do? So, you know, he did that exercise. I did that exercise, and we created this Google Doc with all of the things that were there, almost like a gap analysis. It’s like, okay, if that’s what it looks like, where are we at today.
And just through a series of our one-on-ones. And several months, we would just kind of take one of those pieces at a time and start to close that gap. It’s interesting that I have always been in any role, and the part of the transitions that led even up to that point, like, I’m not someone that waits for Dan or for anyone else to say, hey, this is an area for development, like, I’m thinking like a founder and like a owner of the business from day one that I show up. So there was nothing on Dan’s list that I wasn’t like, yeah, I 100% agree that’s an area I’d love to get a lot closer to. Or are already doing and, or had a desire to do. And so, by the time we with the announcement into the CEO transition was probably about six to 12 months after it effectively took place inside the building. And so I just think that that’s a blueprint for a lot of people. Whether you are the founder, looking to hire CEO to get yourself out of the day-to-day, or you’re a number two in an organization you would love to be running it. The Blueprint is he got to be thinking and showing up like that person already, like it wasn’t a far stretch for Dan to imagine me running the company, and it wasn’t a far stretch for me to imagine closing the gap of what Dan expected out of someone in this role.
And so, I think that the beginning with the end in mind was a really important step of getting really clear expectations, and then just a meeting cadence throughout the process to measure progress along that. And you always like, there’s this difference between, hey, we set the goal, and then as you start to take steps down that you just try you almost like, try it on, and you say, hey, does this feel right? There’s a whole bunch that could have gone wrong, or where I could have said, hey, you know, I don’t think this is right for me. And there’s a whole lot that, like Dan could have been like, you know what, I’m not ready to step out of the business and have you take the reins, but you set a direction, and then, you know, set a meeting cadence, allow us to routinely come back and say, how’s it going? That I think, set us both up to be successful.
Jeremy Weisz 39:00
No thanks for sharing. That’s really helpful to hear. I do want to talk about books, right? Some of your favorite books, if you’re looking at the video, we have Software As of Science. We’ll definitely talk about Software As a Science. Also talk about Buy Back Your Time. I remember I was chatting with Jason Swank, and he’s like, he was recommending it to everyone he knew, and I think even bought it for a bunch of people too. So what are some of your favorite books, business-wise? And then I want to talk about Software as a Science.
Johnny Page 39:38
Yeah. I mean, I think that some of my favorite books, gosh, I think one of the most impactful first ones that I read was Adopting the Rockefeller Habits by Vern Harnish, which then led me to Scaling Up. I love Jim Conn’s books like you know, those are incredible in the SaaS space. I think Extreme Revenue Growth and The Great CEOWithin are two of the ones that I find myself recurring all the time. To founders we work with Extreme Revenue Growth is by Victor Chang and then The Great CEO Within, by Matt Mashari. Those are our foundational almost like required reading at least once the founder is starting to shift past that $3 million mark and into your scaling and CEO in the company. Those are really helpful books.
But man, there’s dozens and dozens of books that have helped, Dan uses this term all the time, like built by books. I mean, that is SaaS Academy. Are both our curriculum, our program. The partners in it all built by books and those that have gone before us and shared the knowledge, which is part of why we put the time and effort into go do the same and to give back and to get all that we’ve learned over the last seven years in running SaaS Academy into a book that we could share with the world.
Jeremy Weisz 40:59
So Software as a Science: Unlock Limitless Recurring Revenue Without Losing Control. What’s one of your favorite stories from the book?
Johnny Page 41:10
Oh, man, I think one of my favorites is, and it was, it’s fun because I joined the program at the same time. I remember Chris and his brother started a company called Trainual, and Chris and I were in SaaS Academy at the same time. In fact, we did this fun thing where, at our intensives, existing clients in the program would go up on stage and teach a 10-minute tactic. And I remember Chris and I both taught at the same intensive back-to-back. And he taught how he was using zero-interest credit cards to fund their customer acquisition, because they could get their cash back in less than 60 days so he didn’t have to eat. It was essentially 0% financing their growth. And we actually ended up he used that single methodology at the time he was at about he had gone from 20 to about 55k it taught the tactic in SaaS Academy, who would go on to use that single channel to drive their growth north of 2 million and now extremely successful, well-established company and a fund.
Fund will commonly go back through SaaS Academy’s campus and see like, Chris or myself, or Marcel or Matt as students in that room. So fun to have that footage and story. But I think that’s one of my favorites in there. It shows the concept of a lot of times it is easy, especially with digital marketing today, to feel like you’ve got to be doing everything, you got to have a podcast, you got to be running paid ads, you got to have SEO, and what we illustrate with Chris’s story, is the need to be super disciplined and focused on one channel and one funnel, and how far it can get you into the business before you start to diversify markets or marketing channels. So, yeah, I think that’s one of my favorites.
Jeremy Weisz 43:05
You have another one you look back on 10-minute talk, what was another fan favorite, 10-minute talk?
Johnny Page 43:11
It’s funny. Like that same intensive, we had Matt Prado’s from a company called review way, which is now, you know, they’re doing north of 30 million. They made multiple acquisitions. The three of us went back to back to back. And there are certainly, you can kind of think we do three intensives a year. So that’s three batches of four founders that teach. I think that one’s probably got the most, like exits and revenue under our belt, more than any other. But that was another one. He taught a really interesting methodology, of them using trade shows to be their primary acquisition, which is uncommon in SaaS. I mean, there’s well-established SaaS companies will use it as a channel. It’s typically not the first, and Matt had a really awesome strategy for growth, all fueled on almost like a guerrilla marketing approach to going to trade shows.
Jeremy Weisz 44:04
It’s funny, Johnny, you mentioned Matt because I’m a recovering chiropractor, and I remember Matt, he served the chiropractic niche. And I’m like, who’s this guy? And he was obviously early on into the internet scene, just doing more innovative things. So I heard of Matt made decades ago when he was serving the chiropractic market. I don’t know if he still is. Maybe that’s part of review waves, client base. But I know you have co-authors here with Marcel, yourself, Dan Martell and Matt, maybe talk about their contribution. What’s another part of the book maybe that wasn’t your piece, but neither Matt Marcel or Dan’s piece that sticks out.
Johnny Page 44:52
Yeah. So the cool thing is, this book is a distillation of our best trainings in SaaS Academy, the top playbook. So what we introduced in the book is this concept of what we use to figure out what’s the bottleneck in the business. We call it the Grow ceiling, and it allows us to take those four metrics, how many customers do you have today? How many new customers are getting on a monthly basis? What’s your monthly churn? And what’s the average customer worth you? And show on a graph at the point when your business will hit their the grow ceiling. And so the first two chapters of the book, there’s three sections so that to the remaining part of the book that focus on each one of those, you know, levers. So how do we acquire more customers? What are the core the best playbooks and trainings that we’ve had from putting over 3000 founders to our programs. You know what is the most effective when it comes to getting new customers?
The second section of the book goes through what are our most effective strategies for reducing your churn, and the last one is the strategies for increasing the average revenue per account, or what a customer’s worth to you. So it was a challenging but also very rewarding process to have four authors as a part of the book. You can imagine, all of us have worked hand in hand with customers and seen these methodologies. We agreed on the macro right, but the micro of what stories get highlighted, and as you start to put it into a book that feels very final, everything we’ve done up until this point, has been a series of like, YouTube videos and training in our campus, which is easy to go in and update and change if we have a change in our point of view. The book is going to live forever, whether we have multiple versions of it or not. When we publish to the world, it is going to have an evergreen element to it. And so I’ll tell you, Matt was the quarterback of this process, the person that kind of took all four of our points of views and boiled down to kind of get like, what is version one on the board that we can then go through an editing process. And he was just incredibly influential.
Dan created the version one of many of these methodologies. Marcel and I both built on them in our time working with clients. But it’s a fun process. I’m glad now I can call it fun, because we are done with two years of writing the book. It was very challenging to have four authors, but I’m glad we decided to do it the way we did, because you got the best of all of our point of views having, we’ve got a 360 view of this challenge, and between us 1000s of repetitions of seeing these playbooks implemented in SaaS companies.
Jeremy Weisz 47:25
I’m not surprised when you say that, because when I was looking at Matt’s bio as COO of SaaS Academy, so I visualize him making sure all the visionaries, kind of wrangling them all, and making sure everything happens. So, the last question I have, first of all, Johnny, thank you. People can check out softwarebook.com to learn more. You can get the book. I’m sure it’s going to be wherever if you want to go get an Audible, or any of the on Amazon, or anywhere else you can get up. You can check out softwarebook.com they’re going to have some bonuses I believe in, like the audio version. Also, you can check out saasacademy.com, if you know of a B2B SaaS founder, send this interview to them and tell them to check out SaaS Academy. The last question is about, I love. I don’t know which story would be better. I know Mark Abbott or Kyle from Proposify. And just tell their story a little bit so that the audience can get some lessons from what they went through.
Johnny Page 48:28
Yeah, I think that, we’ve had the pleasure of, we’ve had some of the most successful and well known founders come through our programs. And there are people, I say all the time, the winners are going to win. So, Mark and Kyle and Chris and many of the founders that have come to our programs are going to win regardless, like, whether they are in our program or not. We help accelerate it. But the thing that’s most meaningful is when they say, look, I’ve stuck around because of the community that I get from us, like there’s nowhere else on the planet that I can go three times per year get together in person, and then when I have questions, drop it into our Slack community, or connect with other founders and have that shared experience and support.
So to be at a place where guys like Kyle and like Mark and like Chris, continue to be a part of the SaaS Academy community and use it as a sounding board, no matter what level of success reaching their business, to me, says a lot. We are very much results-focused, but there’s a relationship foundation to a lot of what we do, and guys like that continue to be a part of our community. It makes me super proud, and it’s something we continue to double down on as we pursue this mission of creating more value for SaaS founders than anyone else in the world.
Jeremy Weisz 49:55
Is there a takeaway from, I don’t know, maybe from the community that mark. Abbott got, or Kyle from proposa fire, or anyone else that would be instructive, like, what was one of the takeaways that they got that helped improve their business?
Johnny Page 50:10
So those are both guys that spends the majority of their time in our programs, in our high-end mastermind, and at that point there have been through multiple rounds of fundraising. They’ve considered acquisitions or exits, and those are not conversations like you don’t get redos on those. They’re extremely high-leverage and high-consequence conversations. So when you are considering fundraising, or you are in the process of pursuing an exit to be around a community of people that have done it before, those are commonly like, hey, that paid for all of my time in SaaS Academy and then some because of the conversations like I mentioned that I had with you. I got the advice, hey, if you want to get equity in the company, you better have that conversation before this valuation. Unfortunately, in my case, it didn’t end up creating the ROI. I got the advice. I didn’t apply it, but…
Jeremy Weisz 51:05
Use Dan’s advice with Dan, so.
Johnny Page 51:08
It paid off in the long run. But I think those are the conversations that when we sit down and ask about hey, or when they share, we use them commonly as references, is to say, why join SaaS Academy. Those are the conversations that you really want to have a strong network around. And unfortunately, by the time you need it, if you haven’t built that network, it’s hard to have it like you really want to be investing in that early on, and just say, like for me to become the founder and build a business that I want, I know that I’m gonna need to be plugged into a community of people that have been where I wanna go.
Jeremy Weisz 51:47
Johnny, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone check out softwarebook.com, saasacademy.com and we’ll see everyone next time. Johnny, thanks so much.
Johnny Page 51:55
Yeah, thank you.
