Today’s episode welcomes Graeme Barlow, CEO of Iversoft - a software development company that provides expert mobile app and web development services for organizations looking to elevate their business and adapt to the digital world.
Graeme’s background is nothing short of spectacular. He’s a serial entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience who has built, scaled and sold multiple companies. He started out with a digital currency company in the early 2000’s, then moved on to a game development studio, spent 3+ years in venture capital investing in SaaS, then went on to co-found his own SaaS company, and now he’s joined Iversoft and helped them hit their growth spurt going from humble beginnings to a team of 50+.
Agencies are notoriously difficult to scale past a certain point - which is typically below the 8 figure mark. When Graeme joined Iversoft, he immediately requested a seat at the table. Before he joined, the agency had done a lot of relatively small revenue projects, with no single customer bringing in more than $100k. Here’s the kicker - they had worked with big brands on small deals. Brands like Audi and Michael Bublé had entrusted their app development process to Iversoft, but there weren’t any real enterprise-level deals to show for it. Graeme leveraged these projects to do some serious brand building for the first time in the company's history, and through that process they got the right opportunities to go upmarket.
One of the biggest pivots that helped them double their headcount was going from project billing to retainers. To take this step, Graeme first audited their historic projects and realized that half of their project based work weren’t bringing in any profit, while the other half were wildly profitable due to an incorrect scope. Looking at the data they realized that their profitable projects were already being approached as retainers - they just didn’t have the right model set from the get go.
Tune into the full episode to learn more on how to scale an agency to 8 figures!
HIGHLIGHTS:
00:54 Graeme’s background
03:26 How to build an 8-figure agency brand
06:45 What’s really stopping your growth
10:02 Going from project billing to retainer
16:56 Iversoft scaling challenges
22:09 Investing vs burning money
Connect with Graeme - https://www.linkedin.com/in/graemebarlow/
Connect with Mikael - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikaeldia/