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10 Lessons From Building Two $10M Companies · GTM Made Simple

• Sangram here. All right. I'm going to share two ways to build a $10 million plus company because I've got the [music] experience now I should say for two companies that have gone from 0 to $10 million. The first one was Terminus that went from a million in the first year to five in the second to 15 in the third and then we had a private equity exit over $100 [music] million. And then the GTM Partners company that I've just launched over the last 5 years, it's roughly around 10 million. And so I'm going to share 10 lessons I've [music] learned from building two $10 million companies in a completely different market in different industry through different process and go to market motions. There are certain lessons that I've learned and I'm specifically 10 that I want to just share and help you think about it. How do you build a $10 business? So let's start with some of the basics. Number one, foundation. The first company was founded in 2014. At that time the market was up and therefore whatever was launched out there in SAS at that time is software as a service. I'm going to come back to that because I'm going to turn that around and talk about service as a software is is the new thing. But in 2014 is SAS is incredible. [music] You were able to build a new organization. You were able to drive business forward. You were able to talk about a new category at a much different pace. So a lot of people would say well I want to build a company today in AI world but at that time building a company required you to have a vision for a new category not just automating workflows you need a lot more of evangelism at that time. So all that to say is it was in 2014 whereas this the new company [music] GDM partners that is now roughly around 10 million started in 2021 and here is the number one lesson I learned from it. No matter what you do, business is hard. Building a business is hard. And if it was 2014 to now 2021, lesson number one, if you think that well, when I get to do it second time, it will be easier. Let me tell you, haven't done it twice at least now. It's not easy. What it becomes is the different levels of hard, right? Like, so you obviously have pattern recognition when [music] you do second company now, but it's not easy. My wife would tell you that I work as hard, if not more hard, than I did in 2014 [music] because I know what to expect. That's the big difference. What to expect in terms of results and outcomes and what a good looks like and I'm measuring up. In the first time, I didn't have to anything to measure up. I just built and every day was a new day. Today, I have something in the back of my mind that tells me, hey, remember this happened. So, lesson number one is that it is [music] hard no matter what. Number two, how do you build a company? Do you raise money or do you bootstrap it? So for the first company, Terminus, we raised over $100 million series A, series B, series C, and then private equity exit. So I got to raise a lot of money. And a lot of people would say that, well, raising money is the [music] best thing. I'll tell you that. But what I learned is that raising money is not necessarily the best way to build a business. But if you're trying to build a new category altogether, especially in a world where everybody's thinking about like, well, how do I build a new category? Well, then you need a lot of money. You need a lot of movement. and you need a lot of people believing in it and [music] that's very important. Whereas at GTM partners, it's a services business and it's bootstrap. I learned that just having money is not enough. You need a vision, you need a movement, you need an idea, you need passion, you need to [music] go all in on something that's way more important than having money or not. But lots of businesses that raise a lot of money and 97% I think the latest stat is they don't really make returns on [music] their investment. So if you talk to a private equity or VC or I'm an investor so I invest in a lot of companies I would say one in five one in four companies actually do anything that's significant it's a numbers game it's is betting on the the top horse over there so bootstrap although it's it's a cash flow business so I'm learning I' I've built these two business and I'm lesson number two is that it really doesn't matter if you raise money or not what matters is that you have a clear vision of what you want to do and there are times that raising money makes all the sense in the world uh because you're building a new category you need a lot more technology or implementation or people then it makes sense we were building an AVM new category and I'll get into that in a second and as a result of that we looked around and said man if we do not raise money we would be squashed and if we want to build something of magnitude over here we have to raise money so we knew so we were diluted much sooner even though we raised a lot of money it didn't mean we made all the money a lot of people think that well if you raised $100 million you must have made $50 million well that's not true you don't make any money in [music] your pocket. You have to invest that money and now you're accountable for all these other people that you have hired [music] and the investor that you have brought in to do all that. So, it's not as simple as, oh, I've just raised money and now I'm rich. No, no, not at all. On the flip side, [music] in a bootstrap business, it's cash flow. So, nobody knows how much money I've made. I've made more money in a bootstrap business year-over-year than [music] in a venturebacked. That's was a big aha moment for me. I thought venturebacked businesses, the founders especially, make a lot of money. [music] As a matter of fact, I made zero, then like about 100K, then about 150k. And that's the most that I could take home because I was invested so much in the business. So, we're putting all that back. In a cash flow business with two people, then we do a million dollar plus a year. You can put a lot more into your bank or into your savings, into your retirements, and all those things or even investments. There's lots of ways to think about it. So I'm learning a lot more that man if you could do bootstrap you should do bootstrap [music] because that's the way to go. The third lesson I learned was the difference between [music] the timing of the market. Terminus was in 2014 and that was an up market. And what it means when you're building something in up market you just have to go with the flow. There are lots of events, lots of activities. You just need to be where everybody is. And when you do that in up market, you actually get noticed. People are more open to spending money or trying or testing new things. And that actually helps you drive business forward. when you're in a down market, which is what happened in 2021 [music] when we started GTM Partners, it was hard. It was hard for people to pull up their wallet and it was hard for people to say that, "Hey, I like what you guys are doing, but I'm not sure if I have the budget for [music] it." So, you have to create budget as a result of it. So, a big lesson I learned is that regardless of up market or down market, [music] you do have to have a very clear point of view and a solution. What helps in up market is you can go and say, "Hey, here's your budget and here's what I can solve for you." What happens in a down market is that you have [music] to create budget for them. So that's a big lesson we have to learn. We have to create budget and space in people's mind like hey this is a solution you need and you need it because if without this you can't grow. Whereas in up market you say hey you have the budget you want to grow here's what we have very different point of view. So that's the third thing that we learned. [music] Fourth is what type of business we want to be in. So for example terminus was a SAS business right software as a service. That's how you make a lot of money because when you build a software and multiple people use it, you get a return on investment meaning multiples on it. So the reason all these VCs and private equity bought us was because they were able to see we have recurring business of a software as a result of which they were able to give us a pretty good multiple. Typically six, seven times is pretty awesome. If you [music] can get seven times, eight times, 10 times that's what's happened in a market. we had pretty solid returns on our investment and you know obviously it was a life-changing money but now in the new world that we live in in 2021 and later now in 2026 as I'm doing this video I think the better SAS model is a service as a software look the software was built to solve problems that works in a growth business but when you actually do services which actually promises return on whatever the customer is asking for and you can have software in the back not in the front you actually can do a lot more so for example if I were to build another software company, I would never talk about the software. I will talk about the outcome and the service it provides and on the back end with AI, I will use the software to automate my workflows, do all the things I need to do. So that's the big difference as we learn in it. I think if you can build a software that people are using and [music] you have this massive uptake in people trying and buying it, great. Build a software as a service model. It will have great multiples. It's awesome. But if you want cash flow and if you want return on investment services as a business, a $10 million service business today with a incredible gross margins can do [music] tremendously well for you in terms of return then a $10 million or even a $100 million business that's exited as a software as a service and you are one of the founders, you might make a couple of million at that time because you will be so diluted when everything is said and done. So understand the difference between software as a service and what the outcome could look like for you and what does services offer outcome would look like. All right. So that's number four. Number five is building a category. I tell every CEO I talk to, do not build category out there because if you start building a category, what's going to happen to you is you're going to say, well, I want to do all these things. But there are only a handful of companies who have ever been able to build a category. Let's just use B2B as an example. All right. So in B2B, how many companies have built categories right now? Let's just go through this. Right? [music] Number one, let's talk about HubSpot. They built a category around inbound and now they call their conference inbound. Salesforce they build a category around CRM they call their event Dreamforce like Gainsite they build a category for customer success and they called their event as pulse. So these are all examples of building category around something that actually is going to change the way buyers think about business and therefore they're going to say hey that is a new way of doing it. So in 2014 [music] as we built Terminus we built a new category called ABM accountbased marketing and you can look it up online all about it. We wrote books on it. I'll go into thought leadership in a second, but it was our stake in the ground. Founders who want to build something great and change the world. They have to think about it from a category perspective [music] and have to focus on it for over a decade. So when you think about HubSpot or you think about Salesforce, their founders spent the entire decade like the same Mark Beni off at Salesforce, he's still talking about what it is and he's the only person out there. He's like the marketing CEO. You would never know the CMO of Salesforce. Why? Because the CEO is marketing the category. You think about HubSpot like Brian Termes, Yamini, you would never know the CMO. Even though Skip is a great CMO of HubSpot, I know him personally, but the CEOs, the founders are actually the evangelist. You think about Apple like Steve Jobs. You would never know the CMO of Apple. Nobody knows or have goes in because Steve is the CEO and the marketer of the category. So when you start building a category as a founder, you have to understand that you're signing up to be the evangelist of the business, not evangelist of the category at large. Not just your product, but the category. They talk about the category more [music] than they talk about their product. And that's a very hard thing to do. That's what we're doing with GTM Partners. Now, we're talking about GTM even though we're building a services business, not a software business, [music] as a category. We wrote a book on it and we'll get into authority leadership in a second. But you have to know when to focus on categories. So 99% of the company should never ever the founder should never ever try to build a new category. And here's why. You need 10 plus years of focused time [music] and effort to be known. It really is a big commitment. It's not a marketing campaign. It's not a sales strategy. It's not a quick thing or it's not a cute name or it's not a word on a website or slide or in your presentation to analyst. It's the way you think the world needs to work. That requires a fundamentally new way of thinking. Number [music] six is thought leadership. If you are going to build a category, if you want to build something that has an outsized impact [music] in the marketplace, then you have to think about what your thought leadership looks like. For us, we in the first year wrote the book an [music] accountbased marketing with WI at Terminus. Why did we do that? We looked around and said, well, how do people do marketing? They launch campaigns. They run ads. They run all of these things. Then we're like looked around and said we can do all that but then we'll be one of all these people. [music] what can we do that will be so different in the marketplace that people will look around and say hey that's interesting I want to part of that movement right so we ended up writing not just one but two books on ABM we had such an incredible [music] insight into what's happening what's not we even launched a podcast we did a thousand episodes on it can you imagine was called float my phone it was one of the top 50 business podcast in the world for a small tiny B2B company sitting here in Atlanta we were the top 50 business podcast in 2018 at that time Why? Because we just own the microphone around ABM. And we're doing the same thing with go to market now. We have put run on gtmos.com. If you go take a look at it, 175,000 people read our research. Now we're just launching this whole media engine to drive this conversation on how go to market works. We wrote a book called move which is a Wall Street Journal bestseller book out there in the marketplace and people like Jeffrey Moore and Christopher Lockett said this is a great book or at least in a way recommended this book which made it a Wall Street Journal bestseller. So thought leadership makes sense. If you're building a new category, if you are trying to build something of meaningful, you got to put your name on it and you got to be proud to put your name on it. But it cannot be about your product. It has to be about the category at large. Which brings me to point number six, community. I always said it for long. If people know me, if you have listened to any part of what I've ever done, you will hear me say over and over again that without a community, you're simply a commodity. And what I mean by that is if you are building something that requires lots of people to follow along, how are you going to ever be able to do that without having a whole bunch of people in the community? If you have to be the evangelist of the category, you have to talk about the category at large, not your product. And therefore, you want to bring lots of people in it. They want to be on the journey with you to this promised land, to this destination where you want to take them, right? So you have to build a community. So Flip My Funnel, we build a community of 100,000 people. free people can do events all day long. They were on the podcast even because we were daily podcast we'll interview tons of people all the time and as a result of that people wanted to be known for a job called ABM. So a job was created called accountbased director of marketing for accountbased marketing and therefore a whole category started to be around this community. People wanted to be part of something new not just a demand genen marketer but a community market like you know going back into the community giving it back. Same thing we're doing right now with go to market because go to market is more of an executive function. We think about companies running on GTMO as a CEO owns go to market. They need to know what that means. As a result of that, we are doing road shows all over the place and it's only [music] executive. About 50 to 75 people come in a room. They talk about go to market. We teach them the go to market OS. We help them figure out what are the top 15 go to market problems. We literally have them do this kind of process where 15 go to market challenges. They can go through all of these things. And I'm showing this because it's important for people to understand like here are the 15 go to market problems. Pick any one of these problems and let's do a workshop. The reason we did all this is because we wanted to create a clear idea around what go to market is, who owns it, what does it mean to run go to market on the operating system and we wanted executives. We wanted top down for ABM we had to do bottom up a marketing manager to become a director and how they can run a better marketing function as amer whereas in go to market we had to start with the CEO. So we have to know what your ICP looks like and therefore when you think about all of these things that I just talked about or like raising money or like you know building [music] an up market or down market or what type of business software as a service or services software or what kind of category you're creating ABM or GTM or thought leadership where we wrote books and that community which is number six we build that up here's what we also did number seven which is what is your go to market motion what drives the most business for you for us when we did we're building terminals we saw that man events was absolutely the killer solution As a matter of fact, every time we ran events, we would close about 10 to 20 deals, sometimes even 25 deals. So, we did four to six events a year. As a result of it, every single time we get lots of, and again, it was a movement building thing. So, we wanted thousands of people coming to our events. And so, we partnered up with even our competitors. Here's a tip for you. If you want to build a category, have a competitor speak at your event. It automatically makes you an industry conference as opposed to a company conference. Nobody was doing a demo. Nobody was showing it. Here's how my product works. It was all about trying to go to this promised land and showing people this is how you can go there. So that's what events were. Now when we think about GTM partners, we're doing this executive level work. And what happens is an executive thing trying to build this whole business around this. We're getting all these CEOs and CMOs and CRO all of them trying to focus on how to build an executive go to market function. How does that look like? What are the results look like? What does the roundts we talked about? What are the metrics that you should focus on? What are the go to market motions you should focus on? So for every business you have to think about go to market motion. In both $10 million businesses, events was absolutely the top driver for our go to market motion. I'm a huge huge fan of fan of it. Which brings me to number eight, tech stack. What is your go to market tech tag? I got that question all the time. Well, when we were building Terminus, obviously Terminus was part of the go to market tech stack. We had a CRM. We had a marketing automation platform. We had part as a marketing automation platform for bit. We have I think like 40 plus technology solutions connecting with each other to do this thing but it was never connected. It was always an issue right across the board. Today we literally have a few technology solutions. We do not have a CRM believe it or not almost getting to 10 million but no CRM and none of them have sponsored this by the way. So I'm just openly sharing it. So Thinkific where all of our courses and data that resides when people sign up. We have Swan which does helps us do outbound and then follow up helps me create content around it. We use obviously claude to connect all the dots across different systems. And then we have a super agent called GTME which looks at everything and makes certain decisions and helps us give recommendations that allows us to run this at scale. That's it. We do not have a 100 different things which brings me to point number nine which is team. What kind of team do you want to have? With terminus we had over 300 people in our business. So when you think about 300 plus people you think about different hierarchies, different leadership styles. you have to invest so much more in the community and the culture of your company and building all that stuff. Right now with GTM partners, we have left two, Brown and I. We have an executive assistance. We have some head of global sales who's following up with all the customer success part of it. And then we use some fractionals to help us write content, do some media fractional agencies that is working with right now. Shout out to Sherio Genius who's is helping us produce all this. So all of it is that we are building a team not of hundreds of people but very very targeted very very specific that didn't happen 10 years ago when you're building a company you would actually need a specialist in every single area and you need to hire let's say you hire an ABM marketer you would need to have them do ABM work but also 10 other things now [music] as we're building this business the lesson that I'm learning is that no no I need specialist I need someone who knows exactly what they're doing for that particular thing and I'll pay premium for it and that's good that's okay [music] I don't I have a problem paying more. I just want them to do exactly what they were hired to do. And it may be a fraction or a full-time doesn't matter. So a big lesson is no generalist. You really need more specialist coming into it. And the last is number 10. What kind of outcome do you want? With terminus it was very clear from day one. We are building a category. We are going to spend all the money we possibly can to make a lot of noise. Build a category, have an exit, have a story to tell. We knew that and thank God that it worked out and the private equity ended up, you know, exit because we really put all of our eggs in that basket. The current company that I'm running, which is obviously bootstrapped, it's a services business. We haven't raised any money. We're still running all these road shows which are all now sponsored by lots of different folks. We're two people company and as we grew from zero to a million to five and now almost 10. It's a lifestyle business. It is a franchise model. We literally certify hundreds of certified partners, go to market leaders all over the world to be certified in our GTM operating system and give them this information, give them how to run that and they're running it for their three four clients. So over 3 to 5,000 companies could be running on GTMos right now as we speak. So it's a franchise model. So it doesn't require us to hire hundreds of people. It requires us to be good teachers and stewards of what information needs to be out there, helping them, giving them all the tools and infrastructure to run it. helping CEOs what it means to own go to market and how to run it. So we are continuing to still being who we are at the core of it which is we love to teach, we love to help CEOs, we love to build, we love to scale, we love to operate. So we're doing all those things without trying to build a product like a full-on product where it's a SAS product, right? So those are the 10 lessons is you can have a great business 5 10 $20 million today but the most important thing is as you build business there are multiple ways to do it from raising money to bootstrapping to services to SAS to lot of tech stack to a few tech stack and with AI obviously that makes easy with lots of employees to a few employees and rather high in fractionals to an exit to a private equity to a lifestyle business that we are trying to build now having done two here's what's really important this is something that I don't share very often But here it is with terminus. Um I almost got divorced. We almost didn't make it. Why? Because business is hard. Lesson number one, business is very, very hard. And if you haven't ever done it, you don't know how to set expectations at home. You don't know. Your brain is always working thinking about all the things you want to build and it gets hard. As I'm building my second business right now, we have a very clear conversation of why we're trying to do what season in the business is going to be really hard and what season in the business is going to be okay. I'm very intentional about the work I do and the days I do and the times I do. My work ethic is crazy. My wife will tell you that. But now I know where to put boundaries around it and I'm I'm getting better at it. At that time we just have two kids very early on like less than a year daughter and 5-year-old son. And now they are 16 and 12, right? So so lots of things are happening and activities. So I'm able to go to my son's tournaments on Friday through Monday whenever he's playing tennis. I'm able to go to my daughter's recital and all those things that I would have missed it if I would not have understood the discipline around building something great with and for the people who you want to spend the rest of your life. Faith is a big part of it. I didn't have any faith roots. I didn't know why outside of making lots of money. I really didn't know what am I representing. My identity was so wrapped up in my company that anything that would happen it would be personal to me. So now it's much different. If tomorrow if GDM partners just you know doesn't work and I have to start another company I'll feel bad. I'll be honest. It will feel like it sucks and you know we worked and built all these things and it didn't work and we believed in it but I'll be okay. I'll be okay because my faith is no longer in just myself. It is much in God and how God is driving this thing and all glory to him is what I think about. And the last thing is the co-founder relationship. This is what nobody says and the big lesson is that man I was a bad co-founder. I was really bad. I wasn't really the most helpful co-founder in every way. I did what I did and I'm not proud of some of the things that I did. And now that I'm building this thing, I feel like in the process that terminus, I lost a friend. Whereas in the process of building GTM Partners, I've gained a friend and that's Brian Brian Brown who's who has been a brother to me and a a great friend and who you're building this business together. So as you think about all the 10 lessons I shared this why you're doing having family orientation if you have a family and kids and and wife um if you don't have faith you will have to have some sort of faith to go through it because it's hard and then don't do it alone growth does not happen alone growth does not happen by yourself growth happens when you are actually on a walk with somebody and I learned that the hard way and it's one of the most beautiful things when you actually do it at spouse's growth as co-founder if you can do this together where you complement all of these hard things and again business is hard if I've said it enough number of times it actually becomes easier when you start thinking about it that way where your identity is no longer in your business but what you're trying to do and who you're trying to do it for so with that if this makes any sense at all let's keep moving and you can go to runon gtmmo.com and we literally teach thousands of companies how they should run GTM and build a great business runon gtmmo.com/move move and that's an assessment. Thousands of companies have done it and it will help your business grow better through figuring out what stage of the business you're in and what should your next step be. So, if you're interested, check it out. Let's get moving.