George Revutsky, CMO for Soothe – the world’s largest on-demand massage service. He’s also the CEO of ROIworks – a growth agency that runs growth and build growth agency teams for funded startup and Fortune 1000 companies like Headspace, TriNet and Original Stitch just to name a few. Listen as George talks about how he generated double digit revenue for Soothe in straight 11 months.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Don’t Make Me Think
What CEO do you follow? – Aaron Levie

Favorite online tool? — Optimizely and Hotjar
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Knew the value of moderated user testing and customer development when founding companies or evaluating product”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:10 – Nathan introduces George to the show
01:48 – ROIworks started as an agency 10 years ago
- 02:12 – Used digital tools such as aid acquisition, A/B testing etc. for a series of experiment
02:40 – Typically, they would make some kind of retainer
03:15 – They used to have 3-6 months contract
- 03:40 – Shifted to monthly
03:51 – Average pay per customer
- 04:00 - $ 240,000 per customer
04:05 – Number of total unique customers
- 04:25 – Worked for hundreds for the last 15 years
04:45 – First year revenue
05:05 – ROIworks is making roughly around $ 2 million a year
05:15 – 12 people in the team
05:30 – ROIworks changed their model
- 05:43 – Used to have smaller retainers
- 06:16 – Now they’re getting larger retainers and less clients
- - 06:25 – They’re getting deeper with these Series A and B clients
06:30 – Monthly head count expenses
06:50 – Agencies should retain a 25% percent after all the expenses
07:20 – What George does with the cash flow as the CEO
- 07:40 – “We like to be conservative and be safe for our team members”
- 07:50 – Keeping some cash in the bank
- 08:04 – Give bonuses to team that is coming from the cash flow
08:54 – How Soothe works with ROIworks
- 09:00 – The founder of Soothe invested in one of George’s startup
- 09:15 – George takes a leave from 6-12 months
- - 09:27 – George co-founded SplendidLabs during his leave
  - 09:50 – It is a machine-learning based personal shopping assistance
  - 10:08 – Sold it because they can’t find a particular market fit
- 11:13 – Became friends with the owner of Merlin of Soothe
- - 11:40 – George started providing ROIworks’ discounted marketing services to Soothe to help the beta testing
  - 12:21 – Soothe grew steadily and Merlin got Angel funding
  - 12:33 – Soothe got Series A for $ 10.6 million
  - 13:00 – Merlin asked Gerry if he can worked with Soothe in Hollywood
  - 13:35 – They got 3 months of dramatic revenue bills
  - 13:51 – Merlin hired George directly as the contract CMO
  - 14:30 – Able to put together 11 straight months of double digit growth
  - 14:45 – The growth led to their Series B which is for $ 35 million
  - 14:55 – ZEO is their biggest competitor
15:10 – Created a playbook to acquire customer
- 15:30 – Doing Facebook advertising, AdWords, re-marketing and a lot of paid ads
- 16:00 – Paid acquisition is foolproof
- 16:17 – Soothe was in the Ellen show for Mother’s Day
- 16:59 – Who to approach with the Ellen team
17:45 – Connect with George through george@roiworks.com and ROIworks.com
19:00 - The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Make your team members happy – it will boost their confidence and will reflect to their work.
Be happy on being a part of one’s success.
There are tons of ways to acquire customer – you just have to find what works best.

Resources Mentioned:

Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal developers.
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
ROIworks.com – George’s business website
george@roiworks.com – George’s email address
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

EP 453: $2M Agency Helps Brands Raise Capital, IPO, Sell, with ROIworks CEO George Revutsky

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders