All right, welcome to another episode of Sales Transformation. I'm your
host, Colin Mitchell, and the show's brought to you by Ledium.
Today, I've got Feras Alhlou on. He is the co-founder over
at Startup with Feras, has scaled multiple businesses, exits,
I'm doing great. Thank you so much, Colin. I appreciate being here. Great content
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's
an interesting transition, right? Going from selling these small local
mom and pop businesses to selling these large contracts. And
often I see founders that want to sell
to the enterprise before they're ready.
It's the typical... You got to crawl before you
walk. Absolutely. How
did you know that you guys were ready to start taking down some of these larger
contracts with longer sales cycles and more complex type
Yeah, so like I said, I read, I remember a couple books, one
on, I think it was like the Million Dollar Consulting and a couple other books at the time. This
is maybe 10, 12 years ago. And by
practicing some of the things we read in the books, and also one
thing that I tell entrepreneurs, I still do it, is go out
and meet people in your industry. If you
go to a conference, local conference, regional conference, if you don't have something in
your city, and go and just walk the
exhibit hall. A bunch of the competitors will
have an exhibit hall, exhibit will have a booth.
Go to that booth, ask questions, see how your competitors are pitching. I've
learned a lot from gracious competitors, just chatting with them about just
general industry trends. So seeing how others
are pitching, learning from others, including competition, and
then applying that to you, you don't have to copy everything. 100% blindly,
but take from what other people in your industry in sort
of similar company size selling to similar businesses and
Yeah, yeah. I think being resourceful and realizing
that you don't have to reinvent the wheel here, right?
There's a right way to do this. Many people are
doing it. You just got to surround yourself with the right people to learn
And I think asking, I remember the first lead that we got, we
got listed on the Google partners list and we started to get leads that way.
We invested heavily to become a certified partner
with Google. It's a lot of work. You have to really know this stuff. And
once we got there, leads start to follow through. And the
first lead, like, oh my goodness, what do I do? How
do I, what do I say? So we, we dropped everything and,
and worked on the presentation and how to find logos, like
of all the small mid-sized businesses, like what are the largest, you know, clients that
we can put a logo. So, so, and we did a whole lot of research on,
on the lead, on the business. So we came to that first meeting.
extra prepared, but I think that never hurts. And
then actually we won that very first deal. But then later, we did
struggle a little bit when we got to more sophisticated clients.
But initially, a lot of research, going to those meetings, very
well prepared, and then just present with
confidence and show
your competence. It's hard to do it early on, to your point, you
got to walk before you run. But once you have several projects
under your belt, you've sold and delivered, you know
Yeah. And was
the plan always to sell the business or when
did that kind of become on the horizon for
Yeah. So, I live in Silicon Valley. building and
selling is sort of everybody talks about it. So it is, it was always
in the back of our minds. But then in 2016, that's it, you
know, we want to do it in a couple of years. And that's, you know, we became very profitable
in that one specific business, the analytics business. And we had a
nice recurring revenue stream. And we had some really,
really great logos. And then we decided
the official process was in 2018, we hired an
advisor, financial advisor company, advising company, and then they
helped us in terms of pitching and we
ended up selling in mid-2019. So the whole process took
about a year and a half to sell, but
we had that in the back of our mind kind of
early on. We wanna do the Silicon Valley thing. So yeah, we were
very profitable. We had an amazing team. And
the funny thing is we ended up selling to one of our competitors who
actually were also owned by Dentsu, the global media giant. So
that was another thing is if you have your reputation precede
you in business, so make sure you're professional, including with
Yeah. Interesting. Was
there any learning lessons in that process for people
that are thinking of wanting to do the build
I think build a very viable, very
strong business is at the end of it. This
is really what matters. People buy companies for
different reasons. People sell companies for different reasons. But I think a
common thing is if you have a solid business where you're
showing year-to-year increase in your top line, you're
showing year-to-year increase in your profit in your bottom line, No
one is going to argue with this data. It will be a function of negotiating the
multiplier and how much you want to sell for, but just build a
strong culture, take care of your people, master
your domain, and just be nice to your people, be
good to the customers. just have just
a solid business. And I think people potentially could
come after you to buy as opposed
to you're trying to sell. And you can get a huge difference
Interesting. Yeah. So you know the timing is right when people are
Yeah. And, you know, now you work as an advisor for
many startups and working with founders
and such. So kind of curious, you know, what has kind of
changed? What are some of the things that you're seeing, you know, kind
of new that, you know, people need to be educating themselves
about or that have just kind of generally changed in the startup landscape?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So after we sold the business, I stayed with the Acquire for a couple
of years and then I took a couple of years off to to something I've
been wanting to do forever is to dedicate some time for nonprofits
pro bono. I was fortunate I was able to do that. So,
you know, money is one thing, but money is not everything. And again, I was so
fortunate to be able to do that. And then I said, how do I share my
background, my experience, my co-founder, Eric
and I. So that's what we started, the Startup Affairs, is
to help founders Avoid the
mistakes I made and leverage the frameworks, the
systems that we've seen work over time. And to your point,
in our days, early days, there weren't a whole lot of resources out
there. I think today, in a way, it's more difficult
for people, especially younger founders, I think, there are a lot of resources. But
there's also a lot of distraction. There are personal distractions. We
won't talk about that now. But also, there's so many resources. So
you have to be up to speed in learning. But also, look who you learn
from. Learn from those who have been down the path you
want to go to. And leverage AI. We talked about AI. I
mean, if you're struggling in sending a follow-up email, give
ChatGPT or Google Gemini, give some context and
it'll help you make sure you should not send an email with grammar issues
anymore. You should not send any, you wanna be professional. So
that's just a simple way of using AI, but obviously in terms of scripting, in
terms of like scenarios and personas, you can say, here's
what I'm good at, here's the clients I'm about
to speak and pitch to, give it a lot of deals. It could come back to
you with some ideas to maybe tailor that pitch for that client.
Yeah, yeah. There's so many tools and resources today,
and I think that people
have to learn how to use them to their benefit. It
does require time and tinkering around and building enough
context to get good output, but the AI-powered
seller or the AI-enabled founder can
have an upper hand if you really spend the time to
really figure out how to implement it into your
Absolutely. I mean, if you use Google Slides, I used to go to iStockphoto and
buy some pictures. Now, AI within Google
Slides. You can give it some context and it'll give you a nice image you
can add to your presentation. That's amazing. That
saves you 30 minutes. Again, scrolling is
a distraction. So founders out there, count how
many minutes a day you're scrolling. I'm on a
YouTube fast for, I'm in YouTube, we have a YouTube channel. I'm
in a way a creator and I decided to be on a YouTube fast
for like three weeks because sometimes just too much. I just gotta, I've
learned, I have my long list of things to make my videos better. So
I'm gonna go and work on that for the next three weeks and then I'll go back and learn something
Yeah, absolutely. Feras, it's been awesome having you
on the show. Appreciate it. Any final thoughts as we wrap things up
and then where's the best place for people to get out into
Thank you, Colin. This has been a really, really amazing conversation. One
final thought. I would say passion
is important. Passion is, I would say, is
optional, but skills and sacrifice are
not. work on
something that you're interested in, but there's no passion in
maybe HR or back office or accounting or
legal contract. You gotta do it, you gotta learn the skills, and
you gotta just sacrifice and work hard, I think, to build
and grow your business. You can find passion later, you can find
passion outside of work. So that's just one thing I've been thinking about
a lot lately and wanted to share. But you can check out our, YouTube
channel at Startup with Feras, and Feras, F-E-R-A-S, my
first name. Or you can go to our website, startupwithferas.com. We
have a daily newsletter you can sign up for, and we'd love to hear
back from the audience if they have any questions or they're struggling. We
have a weekly live stream where we answer the questions that come our way
Awesome. We'll drop all the links there in the show notes to make it easy for everybody. If
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