Barry Clapp. He brings over 30 years of experience in sales and management to Centage. Beginning with IBM, he held successional positions with increasing responsibility on software and internet businesses. At DigitalGlobe, a satellite imagery company, he served as VP of international sales opening distribution in over 20 different countries.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Biography of Richard Branson
What CEO do you follow? – Marcus Lemonis
Favorite online tool? — Salesforce
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Be bolder, take more risks and get more equity from businesses with potential

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:43 – Nathan introduces Barry to the show
02:12 – Centage makes a budgeting and planning tool simple
- 02:20 – Every company budgets and most use Excel, which can be very difficult
- 02:49 – Centage automates budgeting to replace Excel
03:10 – Centage is a SaaS business
03:18 – Centage was launched in 2002
03:37 – Centage’s current business model is a changing from their previous licensing model
04:27 – Centage is in the SMB space and they have less competitors
04:55 – One of their competitors, Adaptive Insights, has just raised $175M
05:13 – Centage has raised a total of $13.5 M
05:50 – Barry shares what he did prior to Centage
06:24 – The top three PE firms for Barry, in Boston
07:16 – Centage’s customer pays an average of $35K to $40K a year
07:26 – Centage has also sold services in their first years
07:48 – Pricing is per seat
08:18 – Centage currently has a thousand customers or 10K users
- 08:46 – Most customers have 3 or more subsidiaries
09:06 – Barry is hoping to break the $30M ARR number
09:20 – Centage just launched their new product that is currently on beta
09:57 – 30% of Centage’s customers are on subscription and the 70% are installed on premises
11:07 – 2016 ARR was $12M
12:43 – Team size is around a hundred with some remote
13:13 – Average CAC
- 13:36 – Centage has an inside sales model
14:29 – Annual logo is quite higher than the previous model
14:41 – Centage has 80% retention rate
15:43 – Centage’s product has been continuously improving over the years
16:32 – Centage has always made 10-12% of their revenue from upselling
- 16:52 – Centage sells additional training
17:11 – Barry shares the weirdest thing they did to acquire new customers
18:50 – Gross margin
19:10 – Centage runs webinars, goes to tradeshows, spends at least $10K a month on Google AdWords and total marketing spend is around $100K a month
21:06 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Be BOLD and take risks now!
Shifting from a previous model does NOT mean that you should force your current customers to shift as well.
If people see value and how you can make life easier for them, they’ll stay loyal to your product.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

809: How This $12m Accounting Biz Moves from On-Prem to SaaS Model

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders