Shawn Finder, CEO of Autoklose | Technology That 10x's Your Sales Team's Effectiveness

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network the HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the martyck podcast hosted by Benjamin Shapiro each week the martyck podcast tells stories of world class marketers who use technology to create lasting success with their business and their careers if you like any of these topics you're gonna like the martyck podcast is changing advertising how to set up a CRM so you actually use it private equities take on digital transformation by big social is focused on newsletters if these are topics that resonate with you go check out the martyck podcast wherever you get your podcasts or you can also go listen at HubSpot.com slash podcast network today my guest is Sean Finder founder and CEO of auto close Sean is a serial entrepreneur at the age of 24 he stepped into the entrepreneurial world never looked back he started out with importing packages from overseas and selling it to retailers in North America however as selling with his patch and he founded the list building company exchange leads in 2013 he turned that list building company in 2018 to his second startup called auto close which was a sales automation platform used by now thousands of sales professionals he sold auto close to vanilla soft in 2020 so serial entrepreneur he hasn't exit under his belt what we actually spoke about what we spoke about sales topics and entrepreneurship topics so we spoke about sales automation building rapport SDR versus AE splits win rates when mql should turn into SQL so marketing to sales handoff so very tactical sales things then how to optimize your entire sales process and when is automation appropriate when is building personal rapport appropriate what works better can you build a sales team just with automation can automation software displace or replace an SDR team and some of the results that Sean seen as he's used and eight is on dog food use his own software and then we also spoke about some entrepreneurial topics so we spoke about how Sean close the deal with vanilla soft how that how that deal even came to fruition and some of the items that he was thinking about and he had to navigate when he was trying to incorporate auto close into vanilla soft team into vanilla soft culture as well as some of the logistical and tactical things that he had to figure out in terms of closing the deal the legal the terms the valuation all of these different things that he's done throughout his acquisition process which is still very fresh because they just were sold off to vanilla soft in 2020 so we speak about sales speak about entrepreneurship so if you want to build out a sales force if you want to close more deals or if you want to figure out how to finally sell a company and then be acquired this is a great episode Sean just shares everything he's super transparent super candid so let's jump right into it this is Sean finder founder and CEO of auto close I didn't have to get acquired obviously like the cash was great to me so my name is Sean finder born and raised in Toronto Canada former professional tennis player gone entrepreneur so played competitive tennis and then did my MBA and finance once I realized I probably wasn't going to make enough money being a professional tennis player and from there it went to many different directions I went into finance and what happened was I went in for an interview for a finance job and the person goes you know I have a company that's looking for a director of business development and sales you don't have that experience in your resume but you're very outgoing and maybe you want to try it so I ended up interviewing for that role and I don't know if I was qualified enough but they were giving me $30,000 more than I was making and I was like I am I'll take this job and what happened was I took that job and that was when I came up with my first idea so your first idea so you were tennis player finance sales that you just pivoted pivoted pivoted so you took your first business director role or sales role but not many people are not everyone rather just pivots into entrepreneurship are you are you technical are you a developer or did you just want to build something definitely not a developer I am more sales marketing business development hustler grower yeah yeah so what I did was when I took that sales role the first week on the job I purchased a list and I gave it to the sales manager I gave him and they're like Sean these numbers are terrible Sean these emails are inaccurate and I was actually walking in a little pavilion for lunch with our CTO and I said to him at the time I go understand I just got this role we spent $10,000 on all this information that we need for our sales team it's all an accurate why don't we just build something that provides less volume but more accuracy he goes well we can I'm like okay I'm like like you can go the software I'm like okay he's like one of my best friends a coder out and in Eastern Europe Serbia let's reach out and see what he thinks and that was actually how I went for lunch with my CTO at the time and then we ended up starting the business and becoming co-founders and that's how that's how the and that was okay so this is not auto closed this is exchange leads that was exchange okay so how did how did that first the entrepreneurial venture go so you had a you had a technical developer your co-founders and it was an equity split did you quit your job and then jump into that or did you build this as a side hustle to start great question so the the year I was still working what I did was strategically I hired my lead developer in Serbia and at that time it was about $1300 a month so I would pay him full time he was the only one working full time I was working full time at the same time I was saving up about six months worth of runway so I said I'm going to save up a year of salary trying to save up six months worth of rent food entertainment etc and then when I make my first sale no matter if that's a thousand dollars fifty dollars fifty thousand dollars the first sale when the platform was ready I was going to quit and funny enough the first sale was $49.99 but I stuck on my word and I still quit on that day I quit a job that was paying me a hundred fifty thousand dollars for $49.99 dude the balls so you you stuck to your word man that's very impressive okay so you obviously grew some gray hairs at that point so after that first $49 sale $49.99 cents sale how did you grow the company what was the game plan was this self-surf sass did you go and you know you had six months runway so you didn't bootstrap and a lot probably a little bit did you go raise money so we bootstrap but we didn't raise it up but this is what I did as well we tried to I tried to grow the company right from the get going like this is going to be easy I sold my fair fifty the first week I sold zero after that $50 I was like I just put my job and I've only made fifty bucks I started to have them coming by realized it's not going to be like a rainstorm subscriptions so I said forget this I'm going to keep that going I'm using my connections and I'm going to go after the whales and what I did was my brother was working in the largest telecom company in Canada and he introduced me to somebody who then introduced me about ten different people and I ended up getting into a company called Rogers Rogers the biggest it's the AT&T of Canada I think it's number one or two largest company in Canada I got in there and within 90 days I had a appeal for $160,000 a purchase order for $160,000 and let's just say that let me hire people and gave me my runway for if I wanted to for years and years but that was the really start that I really needed to be successful in that first six months so you leverage so you leveraged your connection but obviously you had to offer some value as a as an entrepreneur who sold $160,000 a deal how did you man because I've sold to enterprise I actually used to work so you don't know I don't know if you know this about me but I'm actually Canadian I'm in Fort Lauderdale right now but I'm originally from Toronto I used to work for Bel Canada so I know the I know the nuances of my brothers in Fort Lauderdale right now he moved from Toronto Fort Lauderdale he lives on Los Olas I'm in Los Olas yeah are you serious so he's right behind the that's funny says right behind that you look at that I don't know what that but he's right behind the people exactly at New condo yeah so maybe in that after we can shoot the shit we go for drinks go for coffee whenever you're down here go for something better than coffee whenever you're down here man I'm always there that's so funny um anyway so yeah so I yeah I know Roger's well but I mean the so the point that I wanted to draw out of this there is a point not just not just drinking with you and your brother when you come down to Florida um is that uh it's not easy to sell to enterprise especially Rogers which even for 160,000 they may have to go to RFP sometimes for uh just because of the size of the company that they are and that means a lot of checks and balances so how did you sell that deal how did you get a hundred sixty thousand dollar PO from Rogers so great question basically they were using I think it was like info USA zooming for there was using a few of them and the data wasn't accurate and can at that point this is about five six years ago where um no one with can't can with castle nobody was really selling good Canadian data so we actually built a team and manually had it so I had about 26 people in Eastern Europe that were Rogers would give me a list of all their accounts that they were working on and we would find the first name last name valid email linkedin profile for those people and we manually did it one by one so I had hired 26 people we would deliver a certain amount per month and over the year worked out to you know over 160,000 and but we were charging say two dollars a lead so over the year we had to get them $70,000 content it's $70,000,000 contacts and it was two dollars a lead at that point 80,000 divided by 12 maybe we had to provide you know six per month we hired enough people um the labelled Eastern Europe was very cheap so our profit margins were very large and that's what we got into there was no RFP it was um I remember um going in there meeting with a few people um they needed it was perfect timing and then I just built that relation with them still to this day they're not a client anymore but I still uh still talked to each and every one of them all the time that helped me get to that that first thing so it was just it was just quality it was just and you know that's like so great it's like the well it's normally it's the do things that don't scale which is like you're not odd this is it's I didn't know that this was a first manual effort right that really just you ended up building it okay all right so you got that first PO you have some runway so when when does the story with exchange leads pivot into auto-close another great question um a good friend of mine from my MBA class um who was uh kind of we met every month for coffee and at one day I sat within the border and I said listen I'm like I got to think of what's next like we're doing well you know it's not scaling that quickly but we're selling data our clients are all going somewhere else to send emails so we got to think of what's next and he was like at that point he was like why don't you build the email tool so you now can offer not only the data but you can also email from yourself from like that's a good idea he's want to take a second and think the sponsor of today's episode like a now today compliance is mandatory for every single technology powered business from increasing regulatory requirements to customer uh security questions wondering how personal and private data is stored collected 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deal just for success story podcast listeners that's H-E-Y-L-A-I-K-A dot com slash success to request a demo and get 20% off when you sign up for like a two weeks later I flew to New York to meet my developers that were actually out of Eastern Europe they were in New York visiting I think it was Morgan Stanley their client and I met them in New York told them my idea and we started that and while we were growing auto clothes I funded my new idea with that Rogers purchase order so I used that money in the bank and built my second company by using my first company and using all our profits we as you know in Canada we don't want to pay the government so we had the choice to either pay a lot of taxes or build a new platform we decided to build a new platform and that was the first iteration of auto clothes and this was so you're still using the same team at this point so you found developers you can trust which is actually a huge hurdle for many entrepreneurs it actually sent yeah yeah it sounded like you actually didn't have for developer and your equity and I was gonna say it sounded like you didn't even have a lot of trouble finding good developers like it sounded like you had good relationships day one which is very very valuable a lot tougher now than it was then I mean we we found such great talent in Eastern Europe because my co-founder is from there nowadays it's not easy because everyone's looking for good talent and even when you started auto clothes what year did you start auto clothes in because even now that market is saturated there's a lot of 2017 so we were a little bit late to the game the was already there already enough players in the game at that point they weren't as big as today but there was at least you know a handful of big guys are already playing in that space before we started okay okay so auto clothes you started building it at this point exchange leads you're still running that you got did you get big wins after the 160 KPO or did you just sort of ride that out till you launched auto clothes we had enough to pay our expenses to pay our salaries to break even we're bootstrap completely but that that big PO really helped us with our development of auto clothes which was we knew was going to be our big one because we had the what we had differently in the market was we had the database and the email platform where most people have either one we had it all inside okay so walk me through the launch of auto clothes because that's a self-serve SaaS product or software product yeah did you I guess use the use the services or I guess the resources you had for exchange leads you brought that into auto clothes you never exited exchange leads did you no so exchange leads it was always the parent company even we launched auto clothes but we kind of we moved the data from exchange into auto clothes and once we converted over we really only sold auto clothes we had a few subscriptions to the exchange leads but what we did was we just moved them into the auto clothes platform said hey you're still coming out with the data you had from exchange leads but now we're going to give you the email for free so when we launched auto clothes we did have a huge huge database of people that were either clients interested we're part of our newsletter so when we launched it we had I think it was the first two months there was two of us selling and I think we were doing 18 hour days of demos nonstop like we could not get off our computer because we couldn't hire quick enough I started calling friends in mind that were working full-time at the banks downtown investment banking I mean listen you got to help me I don't have enough people like just come after work to the board and we just start doing demos I'll teach you the product one night I'll pay you the commission if they sell we couldn't get enough we couldn't get people quick enough to fill first three months then slow down up so even walk me through so the first three months even just to put it in perspective how many customers did you did you capture in the first three months you can even talk you can talk money if you want but if you don't want to just customers yeah I thought I mean we broke we were broke break even so I spent about a hundred thousand dollars on development of auto clothes originally the first first kind of version of it we broke even within 90 days and what we did was we did app sumo which really gave us a boost so if anyone doesn't know app sumo was a is a company that lifetime offers lifetime deals so we ended up making I think off that sumo about 40 grand just in that week and those were tough customers but they do give you a lot of good feedback on your so we made feel 40k there 60k and then it just you know it just kept rolling our myself I was doing a lot of the sales myself I had a good friend of mine who left he left the i bank in world to join because he wanted to get out of that in Toronto joined me it was a great seller so he was selling for me till about till the acquisition actually so we had two of us that really driving all the sales actually two of us throughout most of the three years were bringing in 85% of the revenue okay amazing that's so that's that's how auto clothes got off the ground and and I would just like if you tell everybody what problem auto clothes is solving and then I also want to follow up with how did you you mentioned a few strategies to take it to market but how did you differentiate because you did mention you were late in the game so what's auto clothes for people that don't know or aren't in sales or whatever and what problem does this all so auto clothes is a sales engaging platform that has a built in B2B database therefore if you're looking for top of the funnel prospecting but you also need cold contacts we have both all in one under one umbrella we let you automate a while lose tedious task a salesperson hates doing so strategy wise for for growing so absume was one another one we did which was great um and placas weren't that big back then which I would have done if I was doing it but we did a few ebooks and what we did in those ebooks was we made sure that we had the top salespeople in the world in our ebooks so we built I think our first one was called 673 years of sales experience in 56 pages and what we did was we had the top 30 salespeople as Google said in the world ask some questions and put a profile them in the book so in the book launched we had now 30 people shipping to their network to their newsletter everything about auto clothes it got us a lot of traffic and it got us a lot of leads and demos because now we made the ebook but we've also got 30 different huge networks of tens of thousands of people emailing people about auto clothes and downloading the ebook and giving us those emails so that really helped move the needle and differentiating ourselves from our competitors in the space outreach and sales law were the enterprise we focused SMB so we went up against a lot of companies that were based out of Europe and I made it myself that I wanted to build on my personal brand in North America where I'm from so I was big on LinkedIn big on posting big on LinkedIn lives big on webinars would have been big on podcasts but didn't have one back then but did all those different things to continue working on my brand and to be honest it's my personal brand that year over year that continues to drive those leads it's just I can go and speak in an event speak at a conference and people have listened to me and as long as I'm continue to provide value they continue to come to us okay so let's talk about let's talk about sales engagement and sales automation so auto clothes yes it's a database everyone can wrap their mind around that but the really the the I guess the one thing that really can help leverage you know give leverage with sales rep is the fact that they can automate some of their sales process some of their sales engagement have we have we gone too far to maybe automate too much or or or what's the what's the like the happy medium like where does auto clothes fit in where can you overuse auto clothes or similar products like what what does the current sales environment look like when everybody's trying to do more with less well I think the biggest the biggest mistake people make with automation in general is they keep everything so long enough personalized you could write an automated email and make it feel like it's a one to one email and you can make it very short like for example I won my goal earlier this year in the first six months was I want to be on 30 podcasts as a guess why because it gives good SEO and back with the third team I actually wrote 30 the top sales podcasts and I wrote them all in email and it was very personalized with who I've been on etc and all 30 reply almost and said yeah I'd love to have you on the show and everyone thought it was a one on one email so it all depends on if you're being salesy or are you being genuine and actually being personable so I think that's the key now yes you do need to have not automate everything but you can do certain things like on LinkedIn for example I love to do email campaigns and multi touch campaigns but then go on LinkedIn and put a true comment on that person's post on how I feel about what they posted so then when you send them those emails they don't actually ever think it's an automated system even though I do use the email for the automation but I do use my social selling and I do all that myself so I do a kind of a mix and match but people that just just rely on you know the automation and write long emails selling your product my name is Sean I'm a company ABC I can help you with ABC it doesn't work do you think that with a tool like this the because in classic in classic sales organizations you have a good an SDR sales development rep and then like an account executive and SDR is doing you know appointment setting and whatnot and then account executive is jumping on the call maybe doing discovery maybe just maybe even just doing demo if the SDR is doing discovery do you think that with tools like auto-close you still need that setup or is there a new way to set up a sales organization so we still use that set SDRs are using more of the emails they're using late in they're using the tools they're using multi-channel the phone the SMS and all that stuff the AES are using less I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode feedback loop now if you're a product person entrepreneur startup guy like me you have at some point in your career try to take a product to market you've tried to come up with a new idea and it's fell flat it's ultimately failed 85 to 90% of all new products of all new startup ideas fail why is this basically it is really hard really expensive and really time consuming to validate product market fit with your potential consumers or customers old-style market research is way too slow to complicated to time consuming for dynamic fast moving teams and want to build great stuff but what if you could test out your idea your product with your target consumers whenever you want before you invest in the money time energy effort that it takes to actually develop a product well that's what startups all the way through to Fortune 500 are using feedback loop for you get quality feedback from your target customers early and often feedback loop is the test before you invest product research platform it has built-in expert templates for concept testing user discovery prioritizing features on your roadmap and much more you can create your own test in minutes and get quality insights from your target consumers and hours they set up a special link for everybody who's a success story podcast listener to test it out to try it go to go dot feedback loop dot com slash success you get three free tests that's go dot feedback loop dot com slash success you can try it out for free you get three free tests so if you want your next product idea or feature to be a hit test before you invest build based on data not opinion and launch with confidence with feedback loop check it out right now there's an update they want to give a certain client base on something that's going on or a feature release but the SDRs really need the automation tools just because then they can get more prospecting for that top of the funnel where I think the account executives need to be more personable they need to build those relationships that's you know finding out that Scott lives in Fort Lauderdale and after this podcast talked about oh do you know this restaurant you know this restaurant wherever you're in where do you live you have to still do that as an aid to build those relationships but I think at the SDR level you have to automate as much as possible because you need to be letting those touches it one thing I was I was I'm taking some notes I was listening to some other podcasts that you're on and you spoke about sales win rates and why are we accepting for example like a 20% win rate speak to me about targeting qualifying how how do we make sure that we still target and qualify properly when we're using an automated system I guess it's like good data in equals good stuff out and and and the opposite is true as well so walk me through that it's it's it's that and it's no making sure you have accurate information in general I mean you know for example if I want to reach out to sales engineers that's my target market or my buyer or so under my ICP you want to make sure that you're not setting that you're putting that in the message but you also know for sure that that's a sales engineer because you don't want to be sending a message to a sales engineer that might be a director of sales or a national sales manager so having the right information is very important and you I mean there's different strategies you can do to keep it very personal one of the ones I love and it worked really well was I used video but I had a webinar where we had 540 people but we had 26 people that were named Michael and I just did a video saying hey Michael I just want to thank you for coming to the webinar yesterday your input and etc and Michael received it thinking it was one to one but it was an automated video that was sent to 27 Michael so you can be a little strategic with the automation um but the key is personalization you need to make that prospect feel like it's a one to one even if it's not and with win rates you're going to get a higher win rate a if you get the emails first delivered then you have to get them opened and then you have to have them click to reply so I know there's a lot of people that say oh I this is a funny story actually I had a client call me and said Sean I hate your tool I have a 0% click rate and I'm like well let me see what you wrote I go to his content he's wrote to email but there's actually zero things you can play like there was nothing to correct there wasn't a calendar there wasn't a website there was nothing and he was so mad at it so you have to also know your audience and we work with small companies so we find that sometimes happens but your content is most important obviously accurate data is up there as well and what I'm trying to what I'm trying to bring out is for for a larger sales team these are these are tools that you can use to scale your SDR for us but also one point that I thought was really interesting was that even for an SMB that's looking to scale a sales organization the CEO can use tools like this in place of hiring a $56,000 SDR 100% and that's what we've done we we've tried to do the AE's where we'd compare them a very very good salary with our price point now we're moving up maybe it's more likely now but when we first started we couldn't so you need to what I like to say is you need auto clothes or any sales again to platform to be a five-person team feel like a 50-person army so we did was each person has multiple accounts I was be sending a e-mail everybody in the company sending out emails people are sending them on my behalf you can create different emails you can have you know Sean at autoclose.com Sean.findroid autoclose.com and S find your autoclose.com all sending emails and they're having them forwarded to one so there's a lot of different things you can do but as a small company everyone's got to be wearing different hats and everyone's got to be involved in that prospecting and and also in that engage. So you've basically like you've democratized building out like a sales team with just a piece of tech and and you know just knowing best practices like now you have the data you find you now you target your ICP nearby a persona you set up some email sequences you know the subject lines that open you know the copy that converts and then you just democratized everything so now anybody can just launch like a huge campaign even if you're just a founder plus one salesperson or you know any iteration of a very small startup that's very that's a great that's great okay so and we've seen so many emails we know how many words should be in a subject line how many words should be in your body paragraph how many follow up emails you have for a cold email sequence versus a warming most sequence we've seen millions of emails we know what works what doesn't we know what the biggest mistakes are all by just analyzing the data can you can you for listeners can you walk through some best practices some of the data points that you just touched on like can you walk through like the best subject line how many emails in an email sequence what points the personalized so that they can take that back and just try and and and sell better via email because I think I think even you know they use a tool or not a lot of people miss the mark on this yeah no so subject line most important is three four five words max we actually had somebody on our we were analyzing that had 14 words on the subject line and the reason why you want to three to five words is simple 67% of people are reading their emails on their mobile device they're only seeing three of your words on their mobile screen so if you don't have those three words in in the subject line that are the most important they're not going to read it so having something a long sentence or you know can we have a call not worth it though number one subject line that actually works would be high Scott just high first name is actually the number one another one that works might be Sean plus Scott but very personalized you know you know uh following up two words you know um quick call very shorting some of the whole point of the subject line is get them to open them now the biggest mistake people making their body paragraph is a they make it too long your first email should be about 75 words and your follow up email should be 50 words if you're sending an email that's over 75 words it's way too long the other biggest mistake people make on body paragraphs is as I mentioned earlier it's called the three second rule the first three seconds of what you write if you write hi Sean I'm the founder of all of our clothes and I can help you with sales engagement boring not gonna work hey they already know my name is Sean because my email is Sean rather close dot com they already know my company's name because Sean are like those auto close dot com is my email if you said something yes Scott if I was able to double your open rates and also add 10 meetings to your calendar would you give me 15 minutes question mark and then go into someone you've helped before how you can show the value etc but you try and hit them with I call it with a pain point in that first line and don't talk about yourself it's like I'm stuck if you're going on a date with a girl whoever and you're gonna talk the entire time you're probably not getting the second date it's the same with the emailing keep it short and sweet let them do the talking you give them the first three seconds let them talk about themself that's what works and follow up emails cold emails six eight sometimes ten warmer emails five to seven is the range that I like to work with and do you include when when you run campaigns now do you include cold calling do you include linked in DMs or are you still very heavy on just running an email sequence so we have not because our team is on Serbia and it's tough the phone is a little tougher for them most of our team we've only implemented email and social and LinkedIn so we email we then add them as a connection on LinkedIn we send them a message and then we do another email and then we'll do like I call them intangible touches which could be the common done scott's podcast we go to listen to scott's podcast and give him your feedback as a comment like Scott endorse Scott for podcast as a skill something like that where they don't have to really reply to it but they see in the news feed Sean finder just sent you a comment I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot HubSpot is the leading business CRM now creating a legacy business start with investing in sustainable scalable tools HubSpot is the number one CRM for starting growing and scaling businesses with the HubSpot CRM you have a purpose built solution that's tailored to your business and your business alone now I've used HubSpot for many years now but just this year the releasing some new features these are some of the ones that I'm definitely most excited about so first new feature is called business units so business units allow you to confidently manage contacts marketing and sales assets and settings across multiple brands which means clearer insights to empower whatever it is you're trying to do there's also new admin features like permissions templates and OKTA integration which makes it easier than ever to add remove and edit users give them the proper missions as needed and lastly a new HubSpot feature that's rolling out is called sandboxes so with sandboxes all admins have access to production like accounts allowing them to test iterate and experiment with new go-to-market strategies campaigns before they actually push them life this is a game changer because now you can actually see what works in this sandbox environment very similar to what a developer would do in a pre-prod or a testing environment if you want to learn all about HubSpots latest features some of the new features I just spoke about you can customize your serum platform as well as learn about all these new features and all the old legacy features as well at HubSpot.com and then when Sean find your read message to Scott and email Scott be like man I've heard five times last week Sean and they answered the email okay okay so you've you've built out and you you exit it to vanilla soft so this is you know there's more there's always more than than one way to do anything and I think that's really the the way that I want to the thing that I want to pull out from this so yeah like you can have sales orgs that do cold calling you can cold call you can pick up and dial but there's other ways to successfully scale a sales organization based on the resources you have and you're like you're living proof of that so let next point in your story you built auto close up you sold it to vanilla soft walk me through that transaction and and what's the what is the partnership with the vanilla soft look like what are they trying to achieve? Perfect well first of all I wasn't even looking for an acquisition so I wasn't even looking to get acquired I was actually at a conference if vanilla soft booth was 10 feet away the CMO at the time Darrell Prale came over talked to me he said oh we must we we we do very well with phone and SMS but we struggle a little bit with email and I said well we only do email and then the next day the CEO came this was in Ottawa CEO came to our booth looked it and goes are you looking to get acquired like well no but always want to listen and then we talked for about a week we sent that we sent him over non-disclosures and due diligence and medicine Toronto went through some numbers and it's too interesting because at first you know we got a you know like every negotiation we got a number that I was like I'm not selling for that and that was the start so I was kind of the floor and then I came back and said well I'm not selling unless it's led unless it's this which is the ceiling so we got the floor and the ceiling in there and then you know you each try and push as close to your number as possible and that was about 11 months of push in two months during covid we actually just didn't talk because we were so far apart and we just kept staying in touch we kept growing our company covid actually helped auto closed because people left the phone left the office and needed email platform and then October of 2020 so we are about nine months nine months now um 10 months actually um we got acquired by vanilla stuff and the plan is to turn um it's more multi-channel to take a our team be our data as a good play for them and see um put our email and integrate it into their um platform where they are you met there are really really good at phone SMS and some other stuff so you you're you're you're fresh off of this negotiation so for anybody that does have a start there's an entrepreneur do you have any advice for them who to negotiate a successful exit any any tips yeah I you just need to make your podcast 10 hours Scott yeah yeah well no it's good because I don't usually talk to people that are this fresh out of an exit I'll tell you it's an experience um so we had a co-founder myself there's a lot that goes into it a lot of like I come from an MBA in finance so I kind of knew a lot of it but um some recommendations um we were in growth mode always so our numbers were never audited um we never had our financials updated like regularly we had stuff we had car expenses in a food expense column and they look for absolutely everything so the first thing is keep your book up keep your books up to date because you'll never know when an acquisition is going to happen number two um was working capital a little bit of a surprise at the end I knew what working capital was but if anyone doesn't know what working capital is how that works is for a SaaS company like us we get paid up front so if I sign signed people up for an annual contract we get paid that today but we still have to supply that annual contract from today until you know next 2022 but when you get acquired I've been paid the money but the new company now has to provide the service to keep them happy for the year that they've already paid me so all that money and that working out when money actually goes to the new company and gets taken off the purchase price so that number for some of us you wouldn't think it's a lot but for us it almost worked out to half a million dollars so it was a lot of money that I knew it it was and knew it was coming didn't think it was as much as it was so that was a big surprise another tough thing was keeping it a secret from all the team members and everyone that was in my team that we're so close with and we let them know like a week and a half before and you know one of the mistakes that we did not mistake but we sold the company on September 30th I started working for the new company October so there was no break it was just like well now I'm an owner and now myself is general manager so it was like it was a it's a lot and then lastly I would say a recommendation is negotiate your salary if it if you have to state that company negotiate your salary early on because what happens is when you get to the last in the end and you're already in for for us at that point was like $40,000 just simple Eagles those certain things for to negotiate a salary for extra $5,000 $10,000 it was going to be tough when you know you don't want to walk away from the deal because you already steep in the hole with with all the Eagles so a lot of different missing pieces and if anyone is going through it right now and listening to the podcast send me an email book at time would be a more than happy to share my experience and and give my recommendation yeah that's it's good advice because I think that's something that there's a lot of like you know there's a there's a fraction of founders that are currently actively going through an acquisition that I probably have access to and even then like even if you went through it like five years ago I feel like for some people like it's you know it's it's done it's settled and it's not top of mind anymore so I just appreciate the the insight because it's very very you know recent and relevant for you and and how did you and did you have the opportunity to bring over the team as well or did you have to so one of my things and part of my agreement with the acquisition the only way I would get acquired and people love this is if every single person had a job so I said my team's been everything my team got me to where we were and we've become a very tight knit group we're all good friends now we've known each other for many years I did not let them get rid of one person and part of the acquisition on their half was they wanted the team we had about 30 people 32 people but we were we had an amazing team very smart people a lot of Eastern Europeans hard workers great people so part of the acquisition was we are all or nothing you get us all you get none of us and and was there was there issues integrating into vanilla soft culture how did you how did you manage that piece so so David's built a very good culture there David would use the CEO of vanilla soft and but it's tough when you bring 32 people people from Europe from Canada from US and everyone into one place early on we had you know there was some difficulties I don't remember one instance where we had like a slack channel and we were announcing everyone's birthday saying happy birthday but we forgot to put all the people from the auto closed teams birthdays in there so we were missing all the people's birthdays and people were like well everyone gets happy birthday for vanilla soft but nobody gets it for auto closed so we had like cultural stuff like that early on I would say it's we're nine months in now and we're starting to really feel as one team but it did take a while but but as I said David who is a very he's a CEO that's involved with many different ways with our team he was an absolute gem when it came to making sure our team felt at home making him feel comfortable making sure they felt secured he did a great job and how do you how do you I guess maintain the vision of the company after you hand over the reins was was David it was he wanting you to just basically run this unit within the company or did you feel like now nine months later there's conflicting opinions as to where the company's going to go I think there is there's conflicting opinions early on it was just I was running with it but I think as every CEO you know David's a CEO I'm a CEO everyone has a difference of opinions with how you should scale you know because vanilla sauce been around for 17 years yeah they've done an amazing job they grow year over year they're they're very profitable where we were only a few years old so the way you you handle a company that might be 17 years old and a company that's two years old where a company 17 years old might be let's focus on branding where a two years old is like we need to focus on just growth there's a little bit of conflicting views but we actually funny enough we are like meeting in person two weeks ago to discuss those views and I think we're getting on the same track for where we want to see from the next one to three years but definitely have different views on how to scale how to hire and it's something that you know just every organization will go through but something we can definitely work on so okay so that's amazing so I want to I want to ask some rapid fire questions to pull some insights from your career in your life before we pivot into that sort of session around whatever you want to call it um closing thoughts on uh so three points what's next for you closing thoughts on some more insight or best practices for email or sales that we didn't touch on and then where do people reach you so social and email perfect so what's next uh currently part of our deal I am there for 18 months so we're halfway there it was a cash equity deal so I have do I do have incentive to stay there after um the goal is to stay there and hopefully at some point either raise money or have an extra self so um no other plans but you know helping the know us off and helping that boat continue to sail um other tips uh for email is just um be in between annoying and persistent if you're not in between there and you're just annoying you're going to be annoying if you're just persistent but not annoying you're not persistent enough so you have to be in between persistent annoying um and where could people find me I'm always on LinkedIn um and uh I just started our own podcast called the zero to five million podcasts so we do some podcasts with Ollie and we'll probably have yeah with Ollie yep um so we have a podcast uh LinkedIn is a great tool or as I said you could email me shaw and sh-a-w-n at autoclose with the k dot com email me any questions I love talking about exits acquisitions and sales in general and for anyone that's you know listening in scott's audience I'm more than happy to jump on a call with you for 10 50 minutes if you're going through an acquisition and you have some questions about um things in the contract or in the agreement more than happy to help you amazing amazing thank you and thank you for the offer that's that's very valuable um okay so biggest challenge that you've had to overcome in your career biggest challenge I've had to overcome in my career is is probably happening right now is where you get acquired and it's like it's great you have a lot of cash of a lot of things going on but it's like what's next um so that's the thing I kind of think about right now is like it might be two years down the road three years down the road I don't know when it'll happen but at some point I'm going to start something else yeah and it's like like what do you do next that's my biggest challenge that's a good challenge to have that's a that's a see it's a fun that's a fun mindset to be in because after your entrepreneurial like you know you just keep building and actually that's something that I've noticed across a lot of people that exit like they could exit doesn't matter it could be like a million 10 million a hundred million like they could exit at any level and they'll most of them will just take some time but then just start building again doesn't matter like the money doesn't matter well I always say I always say to myself my most successful business will be my next one yeah good I love that quote that's a good one yeah um pick one person obviously there's been multiple but pick one person has had an incredible impact on your life uh who was that what did they teach you so the person uh this is he's probably in his 80s maybe mid 80s now I worked before my MBA I know right after my MBA I worked for a manufacturing company here in Toronto out of Vaughan and his name was Louis Waxberg and they actually do um I worked for them they do all the private label hand sanitizer shampooing conditioner for for you name it proger wallmer cost guard work and he taught me everything about business how to write business emails how to be respectful how to work with Europeans how to work with people in in Asia how to negotiate uh he was a big mentor of mine I worked for them for three years we became friends after he's got to be late 80s now and he's still one of the smartest people sharpest people I've ever met in my entire life amazing um a book or podcast that you'd recommend people go check out well yours of course but uh besides that um a book I love it um never split the difference by Chris Voss uh it's a negotiation book amazing book I've read it twice um you need to do negotiations not only in business and sales but you need it for I just bought a house and you can house sales you need for car dealers you need for everything so know your negotiation learn your skill learn learn the floor and the ceiling and learn how you can keep creeping up towards that ceiling for you I love that okay um if you could tell your uh 20-year-old self one thing what would it be not many people will understand this one but you probably Scott will and I wish I never rented a condo here in Toronto and I bought a house in my early 20s because let's just say I probably could have retired right now if I would have bought a house instead of rented in downtown Toronto for many years because our houses that cost three hundred thousand dollars years ago are now we're three million dollars so that was my biggest mistake Scott you didn't have to work you just had to live in a home for 10 to 15 years max and you would have been a million there multi-million there yeah Toronto Toronto is an insane real estate market just it's so funny so one of my good friends is a mortgage he doesn't mortgage is mortgage broker and I've built two companies I've worked my ass off I've worked sales over me six figures every year since you know 2013 and he had more money than me for so long because he just bought a house in Aurora and had another house he was renting but I had two houses that both made him millions of dollars and he never had to even he he woke up at 11 o'clock and went to bed and was done by two o'clock every day but he had real estate which made him not have to work yeah that's uh yeah listen man but I'll tell you something you are you are more recession proof so that's all that matters that's all exactly recession and last question what does success mean to you so success means to me and and people I when I can make and help out the people that helped me be successful so success to me with autoclose was I didn't have to get acquired obviously the cash was great to me but what it was for my co-founders and my developers was I got three people enough money to buy their first house and that was success to me because for me I wasn't worried about what I was gonna do and I always know I'll always go ahead and make more money and do stuff but I got three people one who moved from Serbia here he took a job with us I gave him some options he worked with us from day one veterinaristic and office acquisition you know everyone my entire leadership team ended up buying their first house and as you know what we talked about real estate here's tough and we each bought their first house with the acquisition that's what success was to me I didn't care about me buying my house I worried more about my team buying their house amazing that's amazing man all right that's all I got thank you so much I appreciate it thanks for