Ben Newcomb: The Hidden Formula Behind a 9-Figure Exit

In this episode of the Passion Millionaire Podcast, Robert Roth speaks with growth strategist, executive advisor, and business transformation expert Ben Newcomb about what it takes to build a company that is valuable, scalable, and attractive to buyers.

Drawing from his experience helping companies grow from startup stages to nine-figure organizations, Ben shares practical lessons on scaling revenue, improving retention, launching new products, and creating predictable growth. He explains why many business owners become the bottleneck in their own companies and how building strong systems, developing high-performing teams, and maintaining focus can dramatically increase a company's value.

The conversation also explores how businesses can create recurring revenue, improve customer retention, strengthen forecasting, and prepare for successful acquisitions. Ben shares real-world examples of helping companies recover from major setbacks, increase long-term contract value, and achieve exits significantly above their original targets.

If you're a founder, entrepreneur, or business owner looking to scale beyond the next growth plateau and build a company that can thrive without depending on you every day, this episode is packed with valuable insights and actionable strategies.

Connect with Ben Newcomb:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/bnewcomb/

https://www.newcombadvisors.com/

Podcast Website:
 https://rockandrollyourdreams.com/podcast/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Create a life of entrepreneurial freedom with insights from successful creatives, entrepreneurs, and investors. Discover how they overcame challenges and turned their biggest dreams into reality. They share their personal success playbook so you can build the business and life you truly want. Welcome to Passion Millionaire, the podcast by Robert Roth. Rock and roll your dreams.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Welcome to today's Passion Millionaire podcast episode. And for him, it's normal to work with companies in the size of 10 million, 15 million, 20 million, and helping them actually become as valuable as possible for a future acquisition. That's usually the goal of the owners of the companies in their future. And he is helping with the experience that he brings from having done those transformations many times. Having increased revenue, having brought back companies that are in trouble, actually from almost near death, or dealt with dips and help turning around everything that is necessary in order to actually make growth happen, sustainable growth, and make a real valuable company happen. That is, let me also add this one point, running as much as possible without the owner. And therefore, I'm excited to welcome Ben Newcomp and learn from you how that works. Please reintroduce yourself, go a little bit more into depth. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Robert, thank you for having me. Absolute pleasure. Uh, it's been fun meeting you, listening to your podcast as well. So very honored to be be on the podcast. Thank you so much for the introduction. That's that was truly, truly, truly great. As you mentioned, um, I've taken I've worked at a company starting as a third employee, growing into to nine figures. Um, that is not easy to do. It is a lot of missteps and a lot of corrections. And you learn really quickly on how to recover. Uh, if anyone's done that without a misstep, you know, kudos to them. But the fun and the excitement level is when you can, when you can make adjustments. How do you correct those and how do you excel to just complete high growth status year over year? I've worked in other companies to where um, so acquisition, taking them to private equity, exit, second rounds, et cetera, from there. I've worked in companies where where COVID hit, revenue went to went from eight figures to zero figures. And how do you recover from that part? And so the conversely, I work right now with many companies that 2021 was a beautiful year for them, but they're still trying to get back to those numbers. So what I like is challenges. What I like is not status quo. What I like to do is is really help people grow and how do they recover? That is that is the place I live in. It's not maintaining mode, it is it is actionable, it's executionable, it is literally results driven.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Yeah, absolutely. Love that. I'd be super curious to learn more about the story of that $100 million company. So maybe let us know a little bit. Like, how did that all start? How did you uh get into that? What size was the company back then? What were the challenges along the way and um your experiences that you collected?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Yeah, that's uh that was in uh the the mid-2000s. I was speaking with someone about a potential company that was coming to be. A potential. I had a DVD. That's how far back we go on this. On a conceptual what is to come. And what I saw was it's a very good product. There's market demand for it. And how do we start? So I moved from from uh the East Coast, I moved from Miami, Florida all the way to the to the desert of Arizona to do the startup of a company. Um, I was the third employee there. We were pretty nimble. You know, there's some corporate values out there of people wearing all the hats. Well, that's just true. Before corporate values start, employee three, you just get things done. And when you get traction, then it starts to grow and it starts to grow and you start building off a buzz. So I was doing sales at that point in time, eventually grew into sales management, director, just all the way up. And I frequently got put on products that were either launching or were floundering. And so uh maybe I should say fledgling or floundering products. So either they were going well or they needed a complete recovery. So I'll start with a fun one. We had a launch of brand new software that we're launching out. Target $2 million first year. Well, I coached this, I coached my team up. We did six million dollars on launch weekend. So imagine that. Like you got the target year one revenue off of this. And instead, the first weekend, you you blow that out of the water. Two things to do. One, celebrate, but two is oh my God, how do we deliver this? So that's challenges I deal with right now with clients is they're having success. Well, when you land that big deal there, how are we going to make sure that all the clients you have right now are very excited for your growth? And how do you deliver this one without messing up delivery cycles? Another one was we had about 42% of annual contracts churning out. So almost every person annually, every other was quitting. So I was given that gift. And then within the first two quarters, we shrunk that down to just shy of 70 or 25%. So we're keeping 75% of people on annual contracts. How do you do that? It's just effort. You don't need MA, you don't need to spend money on it. It's just coaching teams and how do you engage with your client base is the first start. Once you start getting up a little bit higher there and you're starting to shrink those down into single digits, you need some good technology. You need more than that because now you're keeping a lot of people, and I'm sure you're acquiring them as well. So I've dealt with good and I've dealt with tough situations. And how do you work through those with the existing team? Here's what we have. The product's not changing instantly. So how do we how do we get better results from this?

SPEAKER_02 6:43

So and uh that company back then, that hundred million dollar company, that's what it grew to. So that was in the software space. Did I get that right? And what it what software was it about, or were the different products? So we understand, like, what was this company about, actually, as well?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah, that was a healthcare company. It was healthcare, it was training, it was educational content, software uh that they could use within the office as well. And so it was multidisciplinary, but what was beautiful with it is um there were competitors in the market. There were a lot of it, but it's fragmented. So we built off the base. It's not always easy to just cross-sell your current customers and I've learned that quite a bit over the course of time. And it's really great when your board understands that too, is a cross-sell is not that easy. It is very doable, though. So, how do you take people from this product line and put them into the new launch? How do you transition that over? Or if you're gonna add something in, a lot of that's vetting. You gotta vet this out before you just launch. Can we talk to existing customers? Can we talk to prospects? Can we talk to people that that are not even on the radar yet? Is this something they're even willing and able to pay for? And if that's the case, and the answer is yes to that, now we can move forward to it without making changes to that part. So as a healthcare company, healthcare, healthcare tech education, and it was built off of a very strong brand. And from there, we created more products to do it. A lot of it didn't need to be tested extremely. It didn't have to be perfect to go to market. We can make adjustments to it. And I think that being nimble, I don't always mean to use the phrase of build the airplane in the in the air. No, but you because you got to do some market research ahead of time. Let's be honest with you and have a viable product. But perfection can stall. And so, how do you get version 1.0 out there and get to 1.1 quite quickly? Well, that's from getting it in people's hands and see are they willing to pay for it? Well, that helps. And then my job was to scale it. Let's scale, let's get, let's push it to the sales team. Our comp plans a lot. How is this? Are we training up the team? Do we have sales collateral? Are we just telling them? Can we show them what this is and what it's gonna do for it? How do we go about that? And um, we operate at a very high rate.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Quite interesting. And when you say healthcare company, and you have mentioned the products now or product lines that you had, who was your customer then?

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Our customers at that time were dentists. So they were solo dentists. And what's very uh fun about that sector of healthcare is one, um, as at that period of time as well, the majority of them were small business owners. They have they were doctors that didn't take a lot of business school in college, uh, or in university or in their doctoral. If they became doctors that happened to run an office, a small business with staff and salaries and um water leaks and all sorts of things that happen when you run a business. As anyone that's listening to this, um, you know, you get surprised by something on the daily and you have some FARS out. So there were dentists and uh a very fun part of healthcare. It's different than managed care, it's different than hospitals. You go see them. Typically, a lot of people go see them every six months, but some people are a little bit longer. So, how do they fill their schedule? How do they work through that? And how they get better at diagnosing what's happening. So we did quite a bit on that part too, is you know, some people when they go to the dentist, it's one of those places that you hope they don't find something wrong.

SPEAKER_05 10:28

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 10:29

Well, yeah, dentist. Quite interesting. So basically, also the owners, you were always talking to the owner when you were selling whatever product you were selling. That's how it sounds like to me.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

That's absolutely correct. Yes, it was it was always dealing with the owner of a company, which conversely we can we'll probably talk later on when you're selling to not owner. But yeah, because there's some buying committees, there's procurement, there's a lot in there when everyone is doing their job. But this one was owner direct. So you're dealing with the decision maker, or you get to the decision maker. So what value are you providing to them? What problem are you trying to solve? How do you hit this? Are they your ideal customer profile? If they're not, let's let's treat them that way too.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

Yeah, awesome. So and what was the first product? Was that the software that we were talking about?

SPEAKER_01 11:19

No, the first product was uh was on the educational sector. So it was additional training. So we're selling training to people that are already doctors. They've gone through the process. What did you train them on with that product? Uh procedural techniques. Techniques, procedurals. How do you see something? So in this sector, yep, um, let's let's use a small example. If a tooth breaks, a tooth is not supposed to break unless two things happen. One, there's a trauma, something hits it pretty hard. Um, okay, that's a fracture. Uh but then number two is how's your butt? How's your bite? Are you grinding? Are you clenching? There's too much pressure happening there. Well, if the if something didn't hit it, it broke for a reason. And so something's malaligned. How do we then find out what that issue is? That's a small sector of of what that could be. But the thing is, is we were selling our product line for easily three to four X what a typical dentist would spend in an annual year on this type of service. So it's not we weren't selling bottom pricing here. We were a premium product that they had to shut their office down to come see us. So they lost production for that day as well. So there was um additional fees on top of that. But we were selling a premium product well above industry standard.

SPEAKER_02 12:38

So how you did that, uh, I'm hearing, is because it didn't take them a year, but you kind of compressed the time, which made it more valuable for them, or or how were you able to sell it like that?

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is yeah, that's a good clarifier. One is is tangible and actionable. What are you doing right now, and what can you do tomorrow? Like how can you put this into play? It's not conceptual, it's not strategy, it's not uh, well, you could do this. It's literally you will see this day one, and what can you do about it? And so it's it's very actionable. And when you can have that, people are very intrigued because it can it can create change versus a distraction. A distraction as a small business owner, because that's who we're selling into that happen to be a healthcare doctor. But if you're selling distractions, then then it's not exciting. And the office staff isn't going to be someone that wants to implement what you're doing. But if you can create value for them, and if you can create create value for their base, uh either patient-based, customer-based, depending on your product line, well, then people get excited about it and they want to implement what you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yep. Makes sense. So was that the product that you made this weekend launch of was it six million that you mentioned before?

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Eventually it was a software for them. So we were still running the training sector. So we were divisioned out and we had um a very healthy, uh, a very healthy division for that part and product line. This was a launch that was going to be a software for their offices. There were other softwares out there. This wasn't the first of its kind. This wasn't launching a product where they said there is no competition and no one can compete with us, and this is the best that there ever is. You hear that sometimes with products, and you say, okay, sure. No, there are already products out there, so this was an adaption to those. What do we see that's really great? Where can we find a place for us in the market? And what was really great is we had a great base of clients to work with this on. We get feedback and we had a really good launch possibility at the same time versus going in directly against all of those. So that's where cross-sell comes in, which can be some difficulties, but it was a practice management software. Guess what? Most people already had one, so we were doing conversions as well. Yep. We were doing net new, they didn't really have something, but a lot of it was conversions. And so, how do you coach up, how do you coach up a sales team to be able to have this conversation to where on a launch weekend people are like, sign me up, wait list me if I have to. Here's a deposit, I'll pay in full. How do you create that much excitement of a vibe to make sure it's done? Not collect forms like, hey, I'm interested in, no, literally, contractually, I'm on, I'm in on this thing. Sign me up, one, two, three years, let's go.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Yeah, love that. So, to understand also the situation of the company, because a six million dollar launch, that's that's quite exciting, I would say. And then like what how how much revenue roughly did the company make at that point? And um, how many products did exist at that point when it made this this launch?

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Yeah, that's that's good context too. So, you know, six million off of a hundred million. Well, we're all pretty good at math on that one, right? That single digit percentage is the exact number.

SPEAKER_04 16:04

No, so the company was already being at that point.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

No, we weren't even halfway to it. We weren't even halfway to uh to to to uh seven or pardon me to eight nine figures. We weren't even halfway there yet. So this was a substantial launch, a substantial launch for percentage-wise. This was this was complete revenue stream. This was build-out whole division, this was hire people, this was expand off of it, this was attract people that were not in other product lines to pull in. This was um this was uh double digit growth for the company.

SPEAKER_04 16:38

Wow. Yeah, so big deal.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Absolutely. You know, we we would all like to plan on uh significant increase, but when you get it, again, there's excitement there and there's a wow factor of we really did this. Now we gotta deliver it. And how do we also sell more? But the delivery aspect, there's other people sweating. There's people excited about it, and there's other that are saying, hey, now it's my job to make sure our delivery and capacity can handle this, which creates beautiful problems to solve.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

That's a nice way to say that. I'd be curious, like what would you say was the secret sauce for this launch to make that work that way?

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Yeah, uh, for one, we really built off some good momentum. We had an on-site event, brought quite a few people there, but we also learned who wasn't coming and their interest level for it. So we had contracts signed from people that were not even there yet. How do you build off of this? And, you know, there's scarcity. Not everyone's starting at the same time. Again, you have to deliver this. So even if you're you're dealing with some type of manufacturing, this wasn't, but if you're in manufacturing, you still have quantity. And there's a there's a set amount for that part. And so how do you start delivering it on schedules? Well, we'll get you in, but you you're in the delivery timeline of six months out here. So, you know, some weightless scarcity. How do you work on that? They're ready to go. And you've been pre-selling this too. You've been trickling this out. You've shown them what's a little bit behind the curtain that you're working on with some of the existing base. They get excited. And if they're not, then you learn from that, which will evolve your pitch too. Because you don't want to be selling them something that they're not interested. You don't want to tell them that it's something that it's actually not. Well, that will derail that. You're you're not yeah. Now all of a sudden it's smoke mirrors, and people are thinking you're selling them something that it's really not. And instead, that starts trickling out to your industry. And now you're having to combat that versus when you've built up a reputation that this is what it is and this is what you're gonna get on the rest of your products, and you stand with that, your reputation will go on further with that next one, too.

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Yes, that makes total sense. And uh, how were you able? You already mentioned, okay, there are those practices, they already have a software. So how were you able to position your software in a way so that there was this hype? Like I gotta have it, and I want it ideally now to be on the front of the wait list rather than six months down the waiting list. How were you able to make that happen?

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Well a good way to do that is to realize that um where loyalty stands. Oftentimes we think that some existing people in our bases are very loyal. But sometimes that's uh a stretch and that's not exactly how they feel about it. To where if there is something going wrong, does the uh the company that's delivering that product, do you really know that there's an issue? Are you reaching out to them or do you hope they don't call? So you're a little nervous to make some calls to see what's going on. Or when you do hear of an issue, how do you address that? Well, for our standpoint, is there not everything was perfect with the other product lines either that they were dealing with? The compet the competition, it's not like something was absolutely perfect. We all would like to say, oh, it's sticky, or there's multiple hooks that they have to stay with us, or contractually the here or there. But in all reality, are they? What's their usage for a software? What is their usage? What's their team's usage? And that could go from anything, it could be or CRM, that could be anything under there. What really is it? When I'm talking with vendors and we're spending six figures on contracts for whatever software that might be, and we get a new client success rep that rotates every three, six months on us, and they say, Hey, I would like to talk to you, Mr. Newcomb, about what's your usage. You know, we're in a two, three-year contract, et cetera. I said, I don't want to talk to you right now. I don't want to fill you in on what's happening with us. Look at your systems and tell me what we are not using? What makes us look like even an ounce of possible non-renewal? I want you to tell us what if you did this, we would be there. Hey, you guys are great on this, but you could even be better on this part. That's what I want you to show. When you can pull that value in, let's get on the phone, let's talk through it. But oftentimes we're kind of scared to have that conversation. I don't have a problem challenging that. You'd like to talk? Please don't have me tell you what I think about your product. Tell me, bring insights in here into my already busy enough day leading sales teams or full revenue for a company. Like pull value. Unless you're brand new here, you know your product, you should know it better than I. So, what are we not doing? What usage do we not have to where you said, if you would do this, we've got you in a green zone here. We've got you rated a 9.2 out of 10. Wonderful. If I was a 9.4 for however you scale me, this would lead to this for my team, which would lead to that, which would create this much more revenue or efficiency or whatever. Whatever, oh, you've got my attention. Thursday at one o'clock, I'll be there for that call. The other one, now you can schedule it. You can send me calendar invites. What purpose is it for me to join? For me to explain out how I'm using your product. You can talk to my sales operations manager, you can talk to a few other people, but they're gonna be the same way as I am, because that's how we're gonna run an org is be challenging. What is this? Because the the conversion, the change rate, the the switch to another product line. Realize their sales reps are calling and emailing. Are they doing that more, the competitor, than than what your client success team's doing, or your account manager, or call whatever title you are? Realize there's companies that are trying to convert at a high level and they might be in touch with your people more. And so we think we we have this sometimes, I don't want to say all the time, but there are times where we have a we think that someone's more loyal than where they sit. And that doesn't mean they don't like us. They might love us. But we're talking from a product level. I'm not talking about someone coming out with a lower price either. But are we making sure their usage is really good? Are we making sure that we're delivering on what we told them it would be at the same time? Very important. So to get back to that launch, we weren't dealing with a perfect industry. We weren't dealing with things white as snow. We were dealing with some problems out there, and it was quite easy to address those. Now that it was on us to make sure that we delivered that that we didn't turn into the same thing that we said we were not. But to convert off of that, we had very good momentum.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Very interesting, yeah. So how far or how much of a difference did that make? When you said beforehand you were a size of maybe around $50 million company, then you launched this. Like how far did that product get the company in terms of revenue?

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Yeah, ultimately it it really pushed pretty close to um it pushed pretty close to about 40 to 50% of total composite or total revenue for the whole company over a few years period. That's the growth trajectory on there. It was software. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't inventory, it wasn't tangible, it wasn't something you can necessarily hold and have to produce, or there's limited supply of it. So the expansion rate on that was quite high. And that took us to a whole nother level and honestly made us very uh appealing for a potential acquisition as well. So uh there's beautiful parts in that part, you know, from EBA and margins on those two. I mean, it's uh it's a great place to sit.

SPEAKER_05 24:47

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

And like in terms of in terms of size of the company, revenue-wise, from it grew from 50 million to roughly where because of the software when you're saying okay, it's took about 40% of the whole company, but revenue-wise.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yeah, that's the one that pushed us into over $100 million, that product right there, um, which then fueled growth for other areas too. Plus, we had other ones that were still expanding, uh, which was which is a beautiful situation, but it it just it turned us into uh a complete uh machine at that point. There wasn't something that was missing. We had multiple divisions, we had multiple product lines, and it um it was a separator in the market.

SPEAKER_02 25:33

Yeah, very interesting. And I'm trying to understand also how the company was able to grow to halfway there to like this before you launched the software, because um you were the third employee. Roughly what size of company was it then? And then how did you get to doubling that and doubling that until you were at 50? Roughly that that would be the idea. I'd like to to understand how that grew.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Yeah, I mean, from from day one growth, um, you know, I'd I'd love to tell you that it took off immediately. You know, things take a little bit of time, but once you start working on that, the growth patterns just started to hit, and then you start seeing like what are people wanting from us? And so you start giving more of that, you create more demand for it, you create more capacity for it. That was a big surge for it. And then so that was again the training sector. Well, we spun off of that and um made it.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

Well, what was the size of company when you joined, roughly? How what was the revenue?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

I was a third employee, like we were we were a complete startup.

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Yep, so it was making barely seven figures or below that, or or a little more, or I mean you could count it on your fingers and toes probably.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Okay, like literally completely stage, um, very early stage, you know, petty cats. I don't know. There's something fun.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

And so, you know, we grew in the product line was was training at this point. That's correct. Yeah, that's that's training.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

That's the only thing we had. That's the only thing we had.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

How far did that grow the company? How far could you grow with just the training product then?

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Oh, you know, I would say complete maximization into the the 20, 30 million dollar range, um, just capacities, bandwidth, okay, et cetera. Um, and that would be running at a very high functioning, too. So to be able to max that out, and I'm not saying it couldn't, I mean, you have a few levers. One, you can create more capacity, two, you could increase your fees. Um, three, you could change comp plans, you can, you know, that we're talking top line, bottom line on this, but you have levers to do that, and it's not always just raising costs. Um, sometimes it's creating more of a capacity perspective. And so, you know, there were multiple levers on that part.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

But yeah, how did that look like? Growing from three employees to that size of 20, 30 million, roughly, right? Like, what was the roadmap that you followed or figured out along the way that made that work, actually?

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Yeah, that stage is really fun, actually. Um, and I would tell you that one of the most important things you do is you get people that are like high performers, but ultimately good people. And there's still there's still plenty of those people that I see and we spend time with. And when if I bump into them at the gym, we talk, we don't even work out. See, we're talking for an hour. And I talked to someone this morning, same thing. Like it was a phone call, shot a text, and it's like, no, this is a conversation. We talked on it on something further. So when you when you can build an organization to to grow at those types of levels, it's a lot of people. I mean, you you do need a product, and you it'd be nice if it was a good one to say the least, but it's a lot of dependency on the people. Can they get along? Egos are not a bad thing. We all have an ego. I'm not I'm not here to be philosophical on what that looks like and who does and who doesn't. But can we all work towards something? Can we all get out of our own way? That doesn't mean we do not have hard conversations. And I think that's one of the biggest things in life is it's if something's not working, do you have the voice as uh the newest employee to say something? Or do you do are you hushed because you're not the highest paid person in the room? So therefore, like, well, I don't feel the no. When you're in a growth mode like that, you need to value the employees because um someone actually asked me in a very similar industry to this one, they said, you know, they were much smaller, they're 20, 30 people, um roughly, and not doing um, they were probably in the uh seven figures, you know, probably definitely have gotten into seven figures, and they said, What's the biggest challenge? And I said, Well, one of the biggest challenges at that stage is is not keeping people, it's turnover. Like you don't have time to keep reteaching people, especially when you have one person doing the role, then who's there to teach them? It's gonna fall back on somebody who doesn't have a lot of that time, i.e., the founder of the company or someone else. And if you're constantly doing that, it's exhausting. So, how can you teach people up? How can you enable their product knowledge, sales knowledge, and dealing with customers or prospects or anyone on that part? So if you retain your people, that's one of the biggest things. And you retain the people you want there. Like that's pretty vital. How do you treat them? How do you take care of them? How do you let them grow? It's not always by title, it's not always about money, but how do you take care of them? And so, because they're the ones that are really going to push you through part of that part. Um, and I'll be honest with you, there's plenty of products where whoever is dealing with you from an employee standpoint, there are products out there where that person's not essential to the relationship. But there's other ones to where if they're getting somebody new every time they talk on the phone. Eh, yeah, now that's not maybe the best thing for some industries. Yeah, maybe not the best things. I'll tell you what, when I was uh when I was just a little pup, I was probably 23, 24 years old. I'm out at the Miami Herald and I'm selling advertising and I'm driving out in my in my suit and tie in Miami at 94 degrees and sort of sweating and walking in my ad agencies and saying, Hey, I'm Ben Newcombe here and I'd like to talk to you about your advertising plan and blah, blah, blah. I would hope I'd have a better pitch for it than that, but let's just say that was my pitch. And they would say, Come back if you're still here in six months, because that's what they had been used to over the last few years. And so then I would show up, but I wouldn't wait six months. I'd come back again and again and again. And eventually they didn't even want to talk about work. They'd want to talk about anything else under the sun. And we chatted up, and then they'd say, Hey, we were only supposed to have 30. We're on 55 minutes now. Oh, I do need to do this, this, and this with our ad campaigns. All right, cool, let's go. But so it is kind of a now, that's a thousands of persons, people in that company at that time. Things have changed. But people are very important. People are very important. How do you take care of them? How do you scale if if you're just churning through people? I don't know. Good luck. Now there's AI, there's software out there, et cetera. But at the end of the day, like, how do you not have to retrain the same things over and over? It's hard to scale growth when you are just churning through employees or not taking care of them. I've worked for some people that have said some wild things out there. So people are, where they're like, I just burn people out and I get another one. I'm like, okay. Or let's say, I don't think anyone can do this as good as me. Okay, well, good good luck getting this thing to get bigger. Like, how can you push that onto someone else? Because there are things you need to be doing to scale your company, and you need people to be doers. So that's one of the biggest things. How do we get there? People. Good product, but people. Was there equal good products out there? Absolutely. But how did you create it to be an environment to where the people that were using your product said, I want more or I want a higher frequency of this, or sign me up, like more, more, more. And it was you can create a perfect storm that is very good for revenue, but it's but it wasn't fake. It was how do you meet market demand?

SPEAKER_02 33:30

Love it. Wow, thank you. There's so much insight in that. And I, yeah, you you you you're talking about a point that is very close to my heart as well. Like um, yeah, people as the heart of a company, and then culture that you're developing. And um, I can totally see for companies that are growing to this size and then further, like 20, 30 million and then all the way up to 40, 50 million, like that's a typical case that you are seeing, right? When you're helping somebody from 10, 20 million to multiply and become a very valuable company for a potential exit if that's the goal. I can totally see that because if I would be a buyer, I would definitely look to buy something that uh once I bought it is not falling apart.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

Yeah. I don't I don't like it when I buy something that breaks right away either. Like that's my first impression, right? Like, do I enjoy this? And to go back to that loyalty thing, there are products out there that people will stay loyal to even if there's problems. There will. But there's conversely, there's products that are near perfect, but the smallest little thing that goes wrong and people will change off of it instantly. It's a transactional at that point to them. You haven't built that up, or maybe the industry is not even for that part, but you're you're spot on right. Like if you're building a company up and you can rely, you can lean on some of these areas, it is a big lever that will show up in very tangible numbers on spreadsheets. It'll show up in bottom lines, it'll show up in top line, it will have an impact, and you can predict that. I kind of like to forecast accurately if I can do so. That's quite enjoyable as opposed to not being able to do so. Well, retention of key employees is pretty important for you know, for you to be forecasting the current month, let alone three months out, or you're making plans, you know. The month of October is in September are some of the most fun times of the year because you're closing the year out. It should be a good buyer pattern, budgets, whatever that looks like. You're closing it out and you're planning for next year. Well, if you've got just atrocious turnover or the products having some struggles, what's your accuracy? Because you don't want to reforecast your numbers nonstop. Like that's kind of hard to I I'm addicted to knowing numbers, but I think it's kind of hard to remember your own numbers if you keep re-forecasting nonstop. Let alone for anyone else that you've told this to, and they thought, oh well, I thought that we were supposed to do 2.4 million this month. Oh no, 1.8. No, is it 3.2? Like, come on, let's get this straight. Yeah, let's get it straight because that's a big difference in here.

SPEAKER_02 36:16

Yeah, interesting. And maybe the last um point I'd like to touch on for this episode at least, um, would be maybe you have an example that it could present to us of a company that you've helped actually potentially maybe even have helped exit. And um what was the transformation from before they worked with you in terms of value of the company? And then after you've worked with them, what was the value of the company then? And um if they did actually decide to exit, like did they feel the difference? And did they send you a thank you letter maybe an idea of how that would look like?

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Yeah, that's fun. Uh I I like that. Did you get a letter in the mail? Um a handwritten letter would sure would be nice. No. Oh, that's good. Uh, I'll give you some I'll give you some examples on this exact topic because it is fun. And sometimes I will be talking with people that are saying, hey, you know, we're interested in bringing you in because you have fixed scenarios like this where our revenue was going well and then it either stalled, it paused. I say when revenue looks like an EKG monitor, that's typically talking with people. Um, and I don't mean flat line, but there was a big and you want to get back to that number. Or you're people are adding sales team and the revenue's not going up, or things are going really well, like I talked earlier, but they've got to deliver all of that demand too. How do we do this and still stay at the same level of of um expectations from the clients? So um I'll give you I'll give you one specific example, but I'm more than happy to give you more. Um, there's a client that um was uh a certain level. They were they were a certain level, they weren't quite eight figure. Uh they were they're above eight figures pre-COVID. So call it 2018, 2019. They were on a ramp up of doing, you know, 600,000 bucks more per year. So they were on growth trajectory. You know, it wasn't it wasn't um extreme growth by stretch, but they were growing. Well, COVID hit uh them like a truck. Um some companies went to zero. We all learned some, we all learned and became teachers of foreign language when we learned the word force major. Like when you look at we all we all became bilingual pretty quickly and said, hey, this contract just got canceled.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

That's what it means. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

Yeah, that's what it's not force major. It is literally, uh, there's a little more swing to it. So um that specific company, uh, here's where they were. They were doing about 50% of it, um, year over year over year, with a lot of excuses, changes in leadership, changes in management. And they said, we want to start doing multi-year. I said, cool. So they brought me in. They said, we're doing less than a percent multi-year.

SPEAKER_04 39:12

All right, great.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Well, within three months, we had contracts on almost a third of every dollar coming in was on two, three, four-year contracts. It's positioning, it's moving things. So now you start going into the year. As I said, October, September, uh, fun month. But but now you can go in and say, hey, look, whatever year it is, it's 2026, we're playing for 27. Hey, we already know that we got this many million already booked. And look, in 2027, 2028, we got this many million already booked. Takes the pressure off a little bit. You have a new floor, you build it up. I've got another client that uh that I came into that we did exit with. And so, how do you build that up? I'm very used to showing how to build up models without having to do MA, which we can do, which we can implement, without doing expensive uh acquisitions of new clients. But how do you grow your current client base? That's one of my, that's one of the things I love to do most. And we grew this up. They were on a bell curve revenue, a three-year bell curve. It would ramp up, year two would be great. Year three would come back down as fast as it grew. And then said, we want stabilization. I said, Oh, cool. Here we go. Here we go. Here's how we're gonna handle it. And let's say there was a client doing 600,000 bucks a year on the peaks. Well, that was our new floor. And if I were to show you a chart from that part, it wasn't bell curve. It flattened out at the top, if not kept fluttering upwards. And so if that's one client of yours and you can repeat that at a half million dollars or more annually, now that you're that that's a beautiful place to be because you're gonna have other ones on the uptake and you're gonna have other ones that are moonshots and they just jump on.

SPEAKER_02 40:49

So when you're so what did that do to their evaluation of the company? That's huge, it sounds huge, but maybe you have some numbers.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Yeah, it is because evaluations, when you're in due diligence for this, like one of the things is like if your data's not good, first of all, have a data room if you don't have one. Let's start there. Number two is start putting data in your data room. And number three, because it's gonna get asked for. But the job of that of due diligence is to see like, is this true? Is it true? And so I'll promise you like what I work with people on is literally building up these models and the scale to where when someone asks a question, everyone in the company is gonna know the answer and be like, oh, it's this and this. Here it is. There's no story to it. Here's the data, here's what we did. There's no cover-up. The only story is like, we've done this good so far, but you know, I'm sure that you all could do even better than we did. Like, that's the only story that happens. It's like we did this well so far over here. And I'm sure if we were to scale that out even further, there's a lot left. There's a lot more meat on the bone. That's the only type of story that when I'm working with people, that's the only type of story we're gonna tell during due diligence. Is like, here's what we're starting to show. For these ones, as we're adding in this product line or this cross-sell, we're we're seeing these big successes to start with. And we're looking to go wider with that with these organizations. So, who do I work with? Are people that want to change, people that want to grow. And we all say that, but it's like, no, it they really do. They're invested in it, they want to see the change, they're frustrated, and they want to bring someone in to specifically solve this problem. Not a big old stack of papers tomorrow for a W-2 employee, like none of that. It's literally like, I need this done and I need someone to execute on it. Not tell me what I think that we're already doing, but literally say, you don't have 10 choices, you have these two, and we're gonna do one of these two, which will lead to this, this, and this. And the team is gonna be doing that. And we will see a spike. And so I like to work quick. I like to show very immediate results because that takes the pressure off both sides.

SPEAKER_02 42:58

Makes total sense, yeah. And for this company you've just talked about that actually did exit. Like, what was the rap exit amount and before you worked with them? Like, where would that maybe have been sitting? So we see that you know, that gap that you've helped them close.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

Well, I'll tell you what. So um to I'll I'll tell you some numbers on that. It was a nine-figure exit and it exit for 50% higher than what the target was.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:28

So you got that thank you letter. That's what that meant. Yeah, I got that thank you letter.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

I still get those thank you letters. Um, and and I get introductions because of that. It is a tangible number. It is it is very specific on where things are. And there are points in my life where there's things that I can't talk about specifically that I've actually done, but I would like to tell someone else's story. This is a story that I've done it. I've lived through it, I've lived through the stress of it, I've lived through the excitement of it, I've lived through the all the sorts of it to where. Um, it's one of those things where it it's an Everest. It's an Everest that I've climbed, um, which is quite fun. So I like helping people get there because I've gone through it, I know what to expect, and that's pretty helpful to them and their growth pattern.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

100%. Wow, really appreciate you sharing all of this. One last question. So all the projects, companies that you have worked with, and owners that you have worked with, if there was for that size of 10, 15, 20 million dollar company range, the number one mistake that is happening, what is that and how could you actually know that you are currently making this mistake?

SPEAKER_04 44:51

That's a great save question.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

That's a really good one to wrap with. What's the number one thing? I would say it's it's turning yourself into Swiss cheese. You're stretched too thin. At that size, it's you're getting pulled in every direction, you're starting to show holes. That's the number one mistake right now. It is all of that. It's being distracted by things of maybe we should be adding this in and this in. How do you really know it's gonna work if you can if you're not giving full effort on it? Because there you can't give full effort to 15 different things. There's no way you can do this. You're stretching your team. Something's stretched too far to where it's not giving the optimal results. So, how can you actually put metrics on? Did we give our top effort on this and are we showing that results? So that's one of the things is like it's focus. It's absolute focus. It's shrink things down to fundamentals. So that's what it is. It's fundamentals. Are we doing the most basic of things? Because I will tell you what, when I come in, there's stuff that's getting skipped where you know I don't have to necessarily say, I'll tell them, but they're like, oops, you're totally right. Cool. Let's work off that. It's you know, it's just like it's acknowledgement of it. It's absolute acknowledgement of it. And they want me to tell them what is happening. They want me to be very upfront and clear with that. That's why I get paid to do it. It's not uh not to tell everything's fine because they're like, it's not fine. That's why we're talking. But it's when you're stretching it out too thin. How can you execute to the level that you need to when you have too many things going on? Let's focus, let's pause something or slow it down, let people come if they want to. But how can we really push this, which which just sets you up for better success to pick that project up later? Gotta say no somewhere.

SPEAKER_02 46:28

Wow. So if you are a company owner, you're running a 10, 20 million dollar company, and you know your stretch to thing, then you also know now who to talk to. So therefore, Ben, how could somebody reach out to you best? Just uh give us the links. We're gonna also put them into the show notes.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

Uh, thanks for show notes. Yeah, my name again, Ben Newcomb. I run Newcomb Advisors Consultancy. We'll come in all the way up to fractional if needed, but we'll do project-based and we will hit your numbers on that. Easy to find on LinkedIn, Newcombadvisors.com. It's N E W C O M B.

SPEAKER_02 47:05

Thanks for that. Again, Ben, really appreciate you taking the time and sharing all of your expertise with us. See you soon. Bye bye. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

Go to rock and rollyourdreams.com forward slash podcast.