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What else can I be doing to drive revenue? How do I optimize our go-to-market strategies to ensure effectiveness and ROI? If questions like these keep you up at night and occupy your thoughts by day, have we got a podcast for you.
Welcome to Market Mastery presented by The Bridge Group, the podcast where sales professionals learn to advance their careers. Join host and revenue expert Kyle Smith as he talks to elite B2B sales and revenue experts about the strategies they're using to win in the market.
From cultivating a killer company culture to navigating compensation questions, we'll provide you with the insights, education, and strategies you need to thrive.
For more from The Bridge Group, visit www.bridgegroupinc.com.
Matt Tait [00:00:00]:
So to us, one of the most important things is that from the first time you communicate with us or hear anything about us, that you start to understand a set of expectations that we can carry through the lifetime of you working with Decimal. And that that is a consistent storyline. And so that starts with our marketing and it then goes to our sales. And, you know, one of the hardest things in professional services is people. People are your best asset and your biggest risk.
Kyle Smith [00:00:31]:
Welcome to Market Mastery, the podcast dedicated to uncovering revenue driving strategies for sales leaders in B2B tech. I definitely appreciate you taking the time and jumping on, and it's great to meet you. Intro came through our mutual podcast production company.
Matt Tait [00:00:49]:
Yeah.
Kyle Smith [00:00:50]:
And so I did want to start there because that's what I used to start doing some of my preponderance for this episode. And so you're the host of seems like a couple podcasts, but especially After the First Million, is that right?
Matt Tait [00:01:03]:
Yeah. So After the First Million is what I call the main podcast. It's been fun to work with, share your genius. But it's really hit kind of a passion of mine, which is making it easier to just be a business person and run a company. I think that so much of doing this work is glamorized. And the reality of being a CEO is it sucks most of the time, a lot of the time, and that's okay. But some of us just love it. And getting to hear stories from people that have made it through kind of some of the tougher parts and scaling companies and the emotional toll.
Matt Tait [00:01:37]:
That's been really cool to do.
Kyle Smith [00:01:39]:
Why After the First Million, specifically?
Matt Tait [00:01:42]:
So I view businesses in kind of three phases. Phase one is that startup phase of getting from like zero to 1 million. And at that kind of point, if you're building a business with the intention of growing it, that's when you figure it out enough to think, oh, it's time to scale. And then you hit this kind of what I call the messy middle. But it's when you're scaling a business and then you hit enterprise, and there's a lot of content on startup and there's a lot of content on, hey, I made a billion dollars, here's how I did it. There's not a lot of content on the, like what it takes to scale a company. And oftentimes, particularly for people like me, the skills that it takes to get to a million are the skills that you hate that take you to that scale point. And so you have to confront the fact that you need to do a bunch of the stuff you swore you'd never do, which is easier for those of us who are parents that swore we'd never tell our kids because I told you so, after the 300th time of being asked why in a 1 minute period, you finally just yell it and it gets easier.
Matt Tait [00:02:51]:
But that's where After the First Million kind of comes into play. Because to me, it's after the first million when you can really look and say, all right, I'm going to grow this business. What's it going to take? I'm going to really scale rapidly, and you start having to do a lot of the stuff that's maybe uncomfortable.
Kyle Smith [00:03:06]:
Yeah. And I think it's an interesting breaking point, one in 10 million in particular, because I think five to nine, depending on your data source, five to 9% of companies even make it to a million. And it's like 1% make it to 10 million or above. So these are these massive drop off cliffs. And then I think it's super interesting that you're pinning back the layers to figure out not necessarily the negative side of it, of like, why don't companies make it to that next level, but how do the ones that make it actually get there?
Matt Tait [00:03:36]:
Yeah. And what is it take? Like, there's not a lot out there right now on the mental and emotional toll that it takes on a true, like, CEO and business owner, and yet we all deal with it on a daily basis. And I think getting to hear stories of people that have successfully made it through and what they've gone through, and I hear a lot of business owners listen to the podcast and they say, gosh, I went through the same thing, or I had the same thoughts, or I dealt with the same problem. And, like, honestly, to me, that's why I do it.
Kyle Smith [00:04:07]:
Yeah, I love it. And taking a gigantic step back. So you started your career as a lawyer, is that correct?
Matt Tait [00:04:17]:
I did. I always joke I'm a recovering attorney.
Kyle Smith [00:04:20]:
Okay, you are actually not the first person I've heard to say that, funny enough. So why did you want to pursue a degree in law to begin with? And then how did you shift from a legal professional to somebody who's owning and operating businesses and helping others do the same?
Matt Tait [00:04:38]:
So I was really lucky enough to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad ran a business. He was a home builder. My grandpa had some car shops and truck shops. And so I just grew up around entrepreneurial people. And when I was coming out of college or getting close to that point, I'd asked both of them, I said, hey, someday I want to run a business. What do you think would be a good first step for me? They both gave me the same exact response. They both said, you know what? Go become a lawyer.
Matt Tait [00:05:06]:
You'll save a hell of a lot of money on legal fees. And they were right. I have saved myself a heck of a lot of money on legal fees. I'm much better as a client than I ever was as a lawyer. So I always knew that I wasn't going to be a lawyer for a long period of time. I married a woman who is an absolutely amazing attorney, and she was always going to be an amazing attorney. And we met in law school and she said, even from day one, she's like, I knew you were never going to be a lawyer. So it ended up that I was at a big firm.
Matt Tait [00:05:37]:
They did a merger and they offered a severance package to kind of 2030 people. I jumped on it and got into tech and worked in tech for a while, then got the chance to run a legal tech business for somebody else and then start my own company and be an entrepreneur in residence and an accounting firm and help them start a new bunch of new business lines. And all of that just led to. My passion has always been to just make it easier to be a business person, make it easier to be a company. And I saw a lot of problems that I'd felt that I'd seen in people getting good bookkeeping, accounting, operations, and tax help. And so, like any good entrepreneur, we started a company to do that. And four and a half years later, we have 750 clients and 83. 84 employees.
Kyle Smith [00:06:26]:
84. Wow, nice. Good for you. I'm smiling. We have a lot of similarities in stories. I don't have a law degree, but my wife and I met in college and we were both bio majors. Both got a degree in biology, and it was very obvious that I was not going to pursue a career in that field. She works for a biotech company and has gotten advanced degrees at this point.
Kyle Smith [00:06:49]:
And so she was like, yeah, that is where she's going to go and make sense. Just immediately ran away and said, absolutely not. I don't care about this nearly as much as I need to to pursue.
Matt Tait [00:07:01]:
A career here to continue in it. That's the same was for me. And I don't know, probably like you, I'm very happy and lucky that I married somebody much smarter than me that was willing to slum it and get married.
Kyle Smith [00:07:13]:
Yeah, exactly. I want to touch on. Are you okay if we talk a little bit about personal?
Matt Tait [00:07:19]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kyle Smith [00:07:19]:
Okay. Yeah. So I also came from a family full of entrepreneurs and all, like, weird, different types of businesses, some more traditional. Like, it sounds like your father was, I think you said. My dad was a contractor, uncle electrician, another uncle a plumber. My aunt owned gas stations. My other aunt owned airport shuttle service. My mom ran a dog grooming salon.
Kyle Smith [00:07:42]:
So everyone had, like, some of these, like, consumer facing business, but everyone just did their own thing. And so from my perspective, when you grow up like that, you never have your view of the world shaped by, like, you have to go get a job. It can be your path to money. You can just make it up, right?
Matt Tait [00:08:01]:
And I think that's awesome. It's something that I've got three little kids. I've got ten year old boy, girl, twins, and a seven and a half year old. And my wife and I talked. She grew up, her dad was a lawyer, and that was just a steady job. They lived in the same house for her. They're still in the same house that she was born in, basically. And we moved every four or five years.
Matt Tait [00:08:21]:
Cause my dad was a builder. He'd find a new project, like, put his guys on it. Like, we'd rock it. Like, that was just kind of part of, like, the adventure of life for us and how we want to make sure our kids feel the choice to do both. And you don't really, like, intentionally think about it until you get to our age. And you're like, yeah, you're right. I was always given permission to seek out my own path. What was really cool for me, Labor Day weekend, we did a family reunion.
Matt Tait [00:08:47]:
All of my mom's parents family, there were 60 of us in the house. And we did the math and we looked, and out of the 60 people, twelve either were or had run large organizations or companies. And we thought that was like, to me, that was a really cool number. 20% of the people in there were crazy enough to run or start a business.
Kyle Smith [00:09:10]:
Yeah. When I go to my wife's side of the family, I look around them, and the only non cop, oh, that's awesome. I have the opposite. I have the opposite thing happen. But, yeah, it is incredible when you're surrounded by it because you are empowered, like you said. But then also, I think it just opens up so much creativity where you just think through, how can I find something that I'm passionate about or good at or a problem that exists that I feel like I'm well suited to solve? And then you just figure it out as you go along. So when you you'd been put in a position, essentially as CEO in a couple companies before Decimal. But why'd you decide to start Decimal?
Matt Tait [00:09:51]:
Because it was a lot of things. But number one, I'd had the problem of good quality bookkeeping and tax work at my past companies. I tried to hire in house, and it was a terrible experience. A lot of turnover, just not a lot of quality. I then tried at my next company to hire the best accounting firms to do it, and it was exactly the same problem. It was terrible work, and it was a lot of turnover. And then we looked at how the general culture of bookkeeping existed, and we wanted to build something different, and I wanted to build something that was boring, that people have to do, and you have to pay your bills, get paid, and track it all, or the IR's comes after you and you go out of business. And so this fit the, like, boring, you have to do it thing.
Matt Tait [00:10:36]:
And it filled a need, and we saw that need almost immediately upon starting. I mean, we started January of 2020, so we saw some need pandemic hit. It died for like two months.
Kyle Smith [00:10:47]:
Great.
Matt Tait [00:10:47]:
Skyrocketed. And so it became a really cool thing. The other part of it, too, was growing up around my grandpa's businesses. My cousins still run them, and there are people that work in their company that are. You have a grandparent, a parent, and a kid. There are three generations in multiple parts of the business that have created a steady place of employment and a place of, like, employment safety for generations of people, and you don't really ever see that anymore. And we wanted to create, and I think have created a culture of people that really enjoy being around each other, of working together. And that is astronomically different than the other cultures in the space.
Matt Tait [00:11:32]:
And we've done it while being entirely remote. And that was also kind of what we were looking for, was the type of employee base and company where we could build a truly special culture that was a differentiator in the market.
Kyle Smith [00:11:46]:
Did you have the idea that you were going to be remote? Almost impossible to say. But you founded January 2020. Did you know, like, hey, we don't need an office, or pandemic happened, and it's just happy coincidence. You don't need to pay for brick and mortar, and you can just get the best talent wherever they live.
Matt Tait [00:12:02]:
We started in an office. There were four of us. There was my co founder, Jacob, and I, and intern, Sam, and then our first full time hire, Katie. All four still work of the business. And we actually, from the jump, talked about how we could become remote on a go forward basis. Like, that was a distinct conversation set that we were having. And so when the pandemic hit, we actually, like a week before it really hit Indiana, I mean, Indianapolis. And we made the decision to just test it out.
Matt Tait [00:12:32]:
We didn't really know that we would be testing it out permanently, but we did kind of thought that because as we look at the economics of the business, too, not having the overhead allocation of space and of brick and mortar gives us a much better chance to create margins that are unheard of in this space with, like, great client experiences. And so it was both a, like, desire thing on our part as well as an economic decision, and it just all aligned perfectly.
Kyle Smith [00:13:03]:
Great coincidence. Yeah. Do you do on site stuff with clients, or are your client relationships 100% virtual as well?
Matt Tait [00:13:09]:
Everything's remote. In fact, a couple of months ago, we do quarterly leadership off sites or on sites. And we do have clusters. We have a big cluster. We bought a company that was based in Salt Lake City. We have a cluster in New York. We have a little cluster in Indiana. So we do get people together for lunches or dinners or whatever.
Matt Tait [00:13:27]:
But there was an onsite for my leadership team, and I brought my director of operations, Nicole. And Nicole has worked for me for three years. It was the first time I met her in person. And so it was a, it was a fun time, but, like, we go through a lot of that.
Kyle Smith [00:13:41]:
Yeah. And so you, so you started with 420 20. You're at 84 now? Yes. And you said acquisition in there? What, acquisition or multiple? Two.
Matt Tait [00:13:52]:
Yep.
Kyle Smith [00:13:53]:
Okay. What made you decide to go in organic growth versus traditional organic growth?
Matt Tait [00:13:59]:
Well, we weren't thinking about it. And about two years ago now, we got a call from KPMG, one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the top four accounting firms in the space. And they had bought a kind of tech bookkeeping service a couple of years prior, and it just didn't fit their model going forward. And so they actually called and they said, hey, we've noticed that you've been taking our best employees we had. And we noticed you've been taking a lot of our bigger clients we had. And they called and they asked and they said, hey, do you just want to buy it all? And we had a lot of cash in the bank, and they threw out a price. I threw out half the price. They agreed.
Matt Tait [00:14:40]:
And it took us a few months to run through diligence, but that was our first acquisition. And what we learned from it was we gained some amazing, amazing people we gained some amazing clients and we realized that the operating leverage and economics of acquiring were much better than we had ever expected. And when the next opportunity presented itself, and it is now firmly something that we will do every year, a lot more going forward.
Kyle Smith [00:15:07]:
Are you looking at essentially competitors one way they're real or perceived, or do you look to complimentary service providers that you could basically cross sell back into the base? I work with tech companies, so I think in the way that tech companies.
Matt Tait [00:15:24]:
Operate and no, that's a great question and it's the right type of question to ask. I'm going to reframe it a little bit because one, the answer is yes and no. But sort of. So here's what I mean by that. We, as we've grown, we figured out our scope of service has narrowed. We do what we do really, really well, and we are going to continue to do that really, really well. We are not going to add new services like new service lines because we believe in scale. And scale comes in services in particular from doing the same thing over and over again.
Matt Tait [00:16:01]:
So we, for me and for us, this is a lot about acquiring great people as well as acquiring great clients. Now, the sort of aspect of that is we go very vertical specific. So we focus on like home services or professional services, orthodontist shops. Look where we do a really, really, really good job. What we are trying to do and what we are targeting over the next few years is acquiring more vertical specific firms that do what we do. So that does allow us to acquire expertise in an area and a client base in a specific area. And I come from SAS, it's not your traditional bolt on tech. It's more like your bolt on expertise.
Matt Tait [00:16:43]:
It's kind of like the acquihire with client model.
Kyle Smith [00:16:46]:
Okay, so, like if somebody had, whatever, an amazing bookkeeping business and they had a stranglehold on restaurants in the northeast or whatever, okay, yeah, that makes sense. But when you're evaluating a professional services business, what I have experienced up to this point, but I really want your perspective because my knowledge is limited here, is basically you're looking at for less than a million in EBITDA, 3.5 x EBITDA. And for greater than a million, maybe you could capture like five X EBITDA. And so when you're evaluating a professional services business to potentially acquire, is EBITDA your guiding light number that you're looking at? And what do you think about in terms of multiples for that?
Matt Tait [00:17:26]:
So the really awesome thing about the accounting space is as smart as accountants are. The general valuation of businesses is not normal, which is very nice for us. So they value. Right now, standard valuations in the marketplace.
Kyle Smith [00:17:44]:
Are one x revenue, assuming what for.
Matt Tait [00:17:47]:
Margin, 25% to 35% gross. Really. So occasionally, with a really well run shop, like we just talked to, one that's trying to sell for 1.3, you may get closer to that, you may get a 1.5. But realistically, everybody is close to that one x revenue with a call it blended average 30% gross margins. So that's another reason why inorganic growth is a really good thing. There is a lot of consolidation happening in the market. There's a lot of acquisitions going on. Most of it sits at the whey top space, the billion dollar 100 million plus.
Matt Tait [00:18:25]:
But we have a good opportunity for the next few years to continue to acquire with really good economics behind it. And thanks to the Fed today, that gets easier.
Kyle Smith [00:18:35]:
Okay, so I just wanted to talk about that. So do you use debt financing to fund the projects, or do you leverage outside investors, or how do you think about that?
Matt Tait [00:18:43]:
So we do have an awesome outside investor because we are venture backed, more like growth equity, I would think about it kind of like a minor private equity. So we do have a lot of cash. But I think one of the really important things when you have cash is using appropriate debt to amplify its ability. And so we do look at each deal on the balance of using cash versus amplified debt versus any number of things. And so that makes it so that we can be very opportunistic.
Kyle Smith [00:19:13]:
Yeah. And so we're recording September 1830, 45 minutes after a press conference from Fed chair and 50 basis point rate cut. And really, the interesting thing is where it looks like we're going to see potentially, I mean, who knows, another 50 before end of 2024 and maybe 100 in 2025. So, you know, full 2% down. So does that make you change your time horizon on going after acquisitions because you feel like cost of debt financing could be slightly less, or you're just going to make the deals you think make sense when they make sense.
Matt Tait [00:19:50]:
Yeah, it's all in equation. So it does play into it, but not astronomically. What I would actually say is, look, we deal with 750 businesses and it'll be close to 1000 by the end of this year. We have noticed a lot of issues in the economy through our client base. We can see in our general client base, which spans all different types of verticals, pretty good mid sized businesses, that payroll costs are down about 8%. And so even with cost of living adjustments, like in our client base, payroll costs are way, way down. So to me, this is, it's not just about what it means for us, but it's what it means for our client base and for small to mid sized businesses. I think they needed to see this rate cut because I think a lot of people have been holding on for dear life hoping for this rate cut.
Matt Tait [00:20:46]:
And now they can take a deep breath and I mean, I've been joking with buddies of mine that I swear I'm watching fed minutes the way I used to watch football scores.
Kyle Smith [00:20:55]:
I just had that same exact conversation. I watched the press conference live with one of my colleagues and it was like we were watching a football game.
Matt Tait [00:21:02]:
Oh, it's 100%. And like the other thing too is if you're in venture, if you're in tech, if you're in private equity, if you're looking at any of those things, the cost of money is essential to the continued operation of that. We're going to see better chances of ipos in tech, better chances of bigger rounds in tech, we're going to see more private equity funds that are doing better versus failing. We're going to see more PE investments. Like, the reality is it's getting better and better. Because what you also want to see is you want it to be less interesting for people to store their money in a bank account.
Kyle Smith [00:21:36]:
Yes.
Matt Tait [00:21:36]:
And it was too interesting to store your money in a bank account for a long period of time.
Kyle Smith [00:21:43]:
Yeah, you're getting a five and a half percent yield.
Matt Tait [00:21:46]:
I'm in. Yeah, my mortgage rate is still 2.2% and I can throw my entire mortgage into a bank account and make 3%. Like that's a de risked. Awesome thing.
Kyle Smith [00:21:57]:
Yep. Yeah, it is amazing. Yeah, we're, I mean, we playing SAS too. So we did an analysis of just using crunch based data, which is an awesome aggregate, like sample size, and you watch quarter over quarter vc funding. And I thought there would be this lagging effect between the Fed changing rates and funding moving up and down, and there wasn't, it was like direct correlation. And you see, oh, fall vc funding, like just falling as fed rates rise and then even with like, you know, they talk about the cut being built in. So even before this latest 50 point hike, or drop, rather, you saw this increase in Q2 vc funding. I think we're just going to see that continue for the rest of this year and into 2025.
Matt Tait [00:22:43]:
Yeah, I think, look, if you're looking at it too, watching some of the carta data that comes out, I think is even better.
Kyle Smith [00:22:51]:
What do you look at there?
Matt Tait [00:22:52]:
They've just been doing a lot of reporting on raising and on the economics. And the reason being is that just pretty much everybody uses cartae. Not everybody reports to crunch base. So to me, it's a more complete data set, and they're usually not far behind in lagging on reporting on it, but to me, it's just a more accurate source of exactly what you're talking about.
Kyle Smith [00:23:15]:
Okay. Shifting gears on you a little bit. So you have three kids?
Matt Tait [00:23:21]:
I do.
Kyle Smith [00:23:22]:
Okay. This is a topic that I love especially. They're young. Now, how old did you say they are?
Matt Tait [00:23:27]:
Ten year old boy, girl, twins, and a seven and a half year old.
Kyle Smith [00:23:30]:
Okay, so not that far away. So you and your wife both have not just degrees, but advanced degrees.
Matt Tait [00:23:37]:
Yep.
Kyle Smith [00:23:37]:
So let's say your ten year olds, who are the closest to this in eight years, how do you start to think about the decision of either two or not invest in higher education? Should they go to college? And how do you make the decision on which college, like, how do you think about the college experience for your kids now, you know, 25 years after you graduated, with costs, where they're going to be at, and you being in a distinctly different position than even your parents were at that time.
Matt Tait [00:24:07]:
So a couple interesting data points for you. I have a co founder who is a 27 year old college dropout. Smartest person, one of the smartest people I've ever met.
Kyle Smith [00:24:18]:
Yep.
Matt Tait [00:24:19]:
And I grew up in a business truck stops, where technician can get out with no college degree, get a technical degree, and make six figures easy. So I think that everybody now has a much better opportunity to pick the path for them that gives them the best ability to be happy. And ultimately, that's what I will advise my kids, is to figure out what makes you happy and go do it. What I think of and have always thought of as college is college is a safe place to grow up a little bit. And so to me, if that's your goal in college, I think college is worth it.
Kyle Smith [00:25:01]:
Do you pay 160,000 to 200,000 to grow up for four years?
Matt Tait [00:25:06]:
To be fair, I'm going to pay for it for my kids. So that isn't part of their economic decision.
Kyle Smith [00:25:12]:
Yeah, fair enough.
Matt Tait [00:25:14]:
I'll do what my parents did. I'll pay for college, and they're in charge of grad school. I worked there. You go a full time job in law school while I was going to law school, which was totally against some code that I signed. Once again, really bad lawyer but. So that I wouldn't be saddled with too much debt.
Kyle Smith [00:25:30]:
Yeah.
Matt Tait [00:25:30]:
But I looked at it as a strategic advantage, and I'm very glad that I did it. I do recommend that most kids don't go to law school because it's a terribly expensive mistake. If you don't know what you're doing, it's a terrible place to figure it out. I think if people are still figuring out what they want to do, go get a job and figure it out while you're making money versus figure it out while you're paying money. And that's the way I view it. But to me, and look, I went to Duke University, and right now it's like $86,000 a year if I want to send my kids there, and I don't know if I think that's worth it. There are a lot of good things, like basketball and an alumni program. That's pretty awesome.
Matt Tait [00:26:09]:
But it was a great, safe place for me to grow up in, a great place where I was able to become something when I graduated that I wasn't when I got there. And that made it worth it for me.
Kyle Smith [00:26:20]:
Yeah, I agree. It's so hard for me to separate the reason why I'm asking. My. My wife is due early next year, our first. And so we're. Thank you. So we're starting to just, like, have these conversations. And so I'm talking to you.
Kyle Smith [00:26:34]:
You're a business owner. You have kids. So you're sure you've already thought of it. So I'm sure kind of you personally interested in it. But I was just thinking about the fact, like, Duke is a great example, but just call some of these that are in the eighties to 90 range times 4320. I was like, what if you instead, I don't know, bought them a car wash? I don't know, a boring business. Like something like, what if I just buy you a car wash? It's the same. If I could spend similar dollars, put, you know, some financing into some pick your small business, and you got handed that, or you got handed the degree and the experience that you get over the.
Kyle Smith [00:27:13]:
Those four years, which one makes more sense?
Matt Tait [00:27:16]:
I think what makes more rational sense is that car wash. Yeah. What makes good emotional and personal sense a lot of times is that college.
Kyle Smith [00:27:24]:
Yeah.
Matt Tait [00:27:25]:
And, you know, to me, and, yeah, we think about this all the time, and I talk to my friends about it, and I talk to my coo. Michael is a little bit older than me, and his son's a freshman in college or in high school. And he's thinking this through in a very, like, I'll be paying for this one way or another soon. And he's super happy. His son right now is all about going to college in Europe, which is a three year degree that's a heck of a lot cheaper anyway. And so, like, there was a lot of those options out there, too. But I was an idiot, my wife would tell you and pray, still an idiot. But I was a really bad idiot when I graduated high school.
Matt Tait [00:27:58]:
And being able to grow up in a place where other people were doing the same thing and to also, like, be in a place that allowed me to explore intellectually who I wanted to be, that was pretty awesome. And that's something that I still carry with me today. Sports was my identity in high school and helped me get into college. It wasn't until I got into college, shredded my knee, couldn't play sports, that my brain started working a lot better and I really started to accept who that was. And it's funny, I just got an email from a friend of mine. My college mentor just passed away today. He was the first person that I knew that I firmly remember being unapologetically authentic. And he was the world's most liberal Methodist minister, history teacher, dean, and all things that I was not.
Matt Tait [00:28:52]:
And he took me 15 years to learn to be like him. And I'm really glad I had the chance to.
Matt Tait [00:29:20]:
When I break it down, the only thing that I really want to do for my kids is give them the options to do what they want to do.
Kyle Smith [00:29:29]:
Yeah.
Matt Tait [00:29:29]:
And to me that means I'm preparing for both pathways.
Kyle Smith [00:29:33]:
Yeah. And then they get to make the decision and, yeah, I've seen some cool workarounds, too, where it's like, let's say you pick your state school. I don't know what yours is. UMass is ours, where I went. And so UMass, you can go and it's like, call it 45 or you go to Bu and it's 85. You know, like, I'm gonna pay for UMass, which means you just get. You're going to get 40 a year. If you decide you want to go to bu, that's on you.
Kyle Smith [00:29:57]:
But you're going to have your own loans to deal with. The delta.
Matt Tait [00:30:01]:
I've heard of the opposite, too, where I'll pay for Bu and I'll give you the difference if you go to the state school.
Kyle Smith [00:30:09]:
Cool.
Matt Tait [00:30:10]:
It's giving options and everybody's different. And like I want to say, as I've gotten older, that's what I've come to be okay with. More and more is everybody's different. That's cool.
Kyle Smith [00:30:22]:
Yeah. Definitely agreed on the podcast front. Why did you, and I know it's huge for you to help to expose stories of people who have figured out some of the stuff that happens once you're over a million, getting up to that $50 million range. But do you see that as a lead magnet or anything other than essentially a gift for the audience when you think about why do it and spend time on it?
Matt Tait [00:30:47]:
Yeah. I mean, look, economically, it does work out. My social posting and podcasting is our second biggest lead gen source. So there is an economic reason. But it took them two years to convince me to do any of that.
Kyle Smith [00:31:02]:
Yeah.
Matt Tait [00:31:02]:
I am not a social media person. I didn't love doing podcasting and stuff like that. And ultimately it was figuring out how I could be authentically myself and use that in a way to positively impact other people and our business. And, you know, we're one year in, and I feel like we finally, we've hit our groove on that and everything's kind of aligned and incentives are fully aligned, and that's why we'll continue to do it. But it wasn't a, it wasn't a decision that I came to lightly. And, and it took them a lot of convincing to get me here because someday I'll sell Decimal and I'll disappear from the Internet and be very happy.
Kyle Smith [00:31:44]:
Yeah, there you go. Okay. And so of the, of the 84 employees, how many of them are sales focused, if any?
Matt Tait [00:31:54]:
Five, I think.
Kyle Smith [00:31:56]:
Okay. And so what does the process look like? Because professional services is obviously a different beast than software or SaaS. And so what is the process for you? Do you have full lifecycle reps who take it from whatever somebody goes and fills out a form on the website because they listen to the podcast, they take it all the way through and manage the relationship? Or what are the different roles that you have built out?
Matt Tait [00:32:16]:
So, to us, one of the most important things is that from the first time you communicate with us or hear anything about us, that you start to understand a set of expectations that we can carry through the lifetime of you working with Decimal. And that that is a consistent storyline. And so that starts with our marketing, and it then goes to our sales and our sales team are people that have an accounting background. Some of them actually have worked as accounting managers at Decimal. And in fact, Katie, that first full time hire is now one of our top salespeople. And they are explaining first their job is to what I call create the pain equation. Why are you calling? What is your pain? What are you dealing with? How does Decimal solve that? And how do we match that together? And that pain equation then follows you all the way through your onboarding and lifecycle. And so we create that.
Matt Tait [00:33:12]:
They sell the deal, they then hand it off to onboarding, and our client delivery teams take it from there. And, you know, one of the hardest things in professional services is people. People are your best asset and your biggest risk.
Kyle Smith [00:33:26]:
Yep.
Matt Tait [00:33:27]:
What we have figured out in our space is we give people a team. So you start, you do have a single point of contact. Talk to Matt, hopefully not me. They don't even give me access to my own quickbooks. But you have somebody who's single point of contact, but behind them, you have a team of people. And then you also have a team in the Philippines. And so you can literally every month have seven or eight people that are helping you on your account on a consistent basis, which also means that my team can take vacations and be okay. It also opens up capacity a lot more, which opens up margins a lot better.
Matt Tait [00:34:00]:
So it has a lot of really good things to it that no one else in the industry is really doing.
Kyle Smith [00:34:05]:
How do you know when to hire your next salesperson?
Matt Tait [00:34:10]:
Slowly for us, we look at it vertical by vertical. So we have two salespeople right now that are full time, a third that kind of hops in, and each one of them can sell quite a bit of business in the like, couple of million dollars a year type thing. And when we open up new verticals that we're going after and those spin up, that's when we've hit capacity. Like, for me, if my sales team is spending all day, all week on discovery calls or proposal calls, it's time for me to hire a new salesperson, because they also have to be doing some of their own pipeline creation. They have to fill a good portion of their own pipeline. And so I need to make sure to manage just like I do on my operations side, we manage capacity. And when capacity fills up or gets to a 75% mark, we then hire. And that allows us to alleviate the capacity overrun.
Matt Tait [00:35:08]:
And to be fair, like, salespeople are totally happy being at capacity because they're making an absolute killing.
Kyle Smith [00:35:14]:
Yeah, don't dilute either my target market or my lead flow. But the salesperson is usually never going to complain about being overcapacity. It's just, you notice the results where conversion rates start to take a slip because you don't have an appropriate amount of time to dedicate to each prospective customer.
Matt Tait [00:35:34]:
Or what you do is you look six months ahead when they're looking 30 days ahead, and you say, hey, we're not putting in enough work to have six months from now's pipeline full. And so we need to bring in somebody that's allowing us to rebalance at that. And so that's where you're also helping them. And we've got, our sales team's been with us for a long time, and so they also notice it. And we've tried a lot of different things. At one point, we had like seven salespeople and two sdrs. And like, I come from tech, so we run a lot of. And it's what's allowed us to grow a lot faster than other companies in the space is like, we put a lot of those same metrics, methodologies, tooling, all of that stuff in place.
Matt Tait [00:36:14]:
But ultimately we found that we are highly successful with a small, lean team that sells a lot.
Kyle Smith [00:36:19]:
Yeah. Why'd you get rid of the SDRs?
Matt Tait [00:36:23]:
I don't know about you, but being a CEO, I get inundated with so much content and outbound on a daily basis that nothing cuts through the noise. Quite literally. It's impossible for you to get me on cold outreach because I'm getting hundreds of emails, dozens of LinkedIn messages. My phone rings off the hook and I'm just, I'm not listening. And so to me, that means an SDR is not going to be heard either. And we were just seeing less return. The other thing too is like, there are some crazy anomalies in our business. Anomaly number one is we have a, our average client pays us over $20,000 a year, really over 30, $35,000 a year, and our average close happens in under 30 days.
Matt Tait [00:37:07]:
So in under 30 days, you are paying us a lot of money on an annual basis. But theres a certain level of trust from the initial standpoint, and we just really started to learn that sdrs werent doing that. And so we just removed the SDR from the process and we reinvested that in more like thought leadership, marketing, and really standing out from the competition in other ways.
Kyle Smith [00:37:32]:
Yeah, I don't know what it is. I mean, I have guesses, but I do think that you're hitting on it, which is if you're buying a product, the person positioning it to you is not. They are somewhat of a representation of the thing that you're purchasing, but it's pretty widely disconnected when you're selling professional services, the person you're engaging with feels a lot more like exactly what you're buying. And so that's where, like, somebody more junior, which the traditional SDR profile, of course, is less industry expertise, less ability to tell customer service. All of those things, I think, is what has a greater impact on making a hard job even harder when you shift that function to professional services companies rather than point it at going selling some SaaS product.
Matt Tait [00:38:19]:
I completely agree.
Kyle Smith [00:38:20]:
Yeah. Yeah, we struggled with it, too. We tried it in different forms over the years, and our best success has come full life cycle, direct ownership over lead to close the whole thing.
Matt Tait [00:38:30]:
Yeah, I agree.
Kyle Smith [00:38:31]:
Yep. Cool. All right, well, thank you again so much for coming on. I really appreciate the time, Kyle.
Matt Tait [00:38:38]:
I appreciate it, too. It's been great chatting, man.
Kyle Smith [00:38:41]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Market Mastery brought to you by The Bridge Group. If you're a revenue leader in the b2b sales space or know someone who is, connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes.