SaaS Acquisitions w/ Spencer Scott - President of Median

Foreign.

I am live with Spencer Scott, who recently acquired a SaaS company, Alpha Microquire for six figures. I believe it was in the quarter million range. Is that correct?

Yeah. Yes, slightly north.

Awesome. Well, thanks for joining me on this podcast. I really appreciate it. To kick things off, do you want to just give a background on yourself and also maybe a little bit about the company that you acquired?

Yeah, I don't know how far to.

Go back, but just you can give me the 5 second version or the hour version, whichever one you like.

I'll do the crash course one and then if you have questions we can, I can answer them. But long, the long and short of it was I was a door to door sales guy at a telecom company. I made president's club, went to Vonage. So I went from there to Vonage, climbed the ladder at Vonage, got into enterprise. They call it software sales because everything Vonage has is software. And I was a sales guy and I had a customer come in who was like 14,000 users and they needed like this really niche software product that Vonage didn't have. And so I hired a team in India and I built it and then sold the customer at Vonage. And then I was like, I have a platform here, I should be able to sell this to other people. So I left Vonage thinking I could start a software company and kind of quickly realized like, it doesn't work like that. Like you should probably have some income. So I took a consulting job for msp, which is like a managed service provider and for three years. So I ended up being like their director of sales and it was a six figure position where it turned into a six figure position. It was commission based. So I did pretty well. There were.

What were the deal sizes? Was it? I come from a sales background too. Of I've done SMB, high flow, high velocity, which is super fun. Have you ever done SMB sales?

My whole life was SMB sales. But the high velocity thing, you lost me.

Well, like you close a deal every day.

Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That those roles are fun but they don't pay as well as a mid market or like enterprise. Were you mid market or enterprise?

No. So I started off SMB. Like when I got to Vonage, I was like, sweet. I made it at a big company. I don't have the door knock anymore. So I'm in Dallas and I'm not kidding you, when I was like early on they basically said if you have nothing to do, meaning like you have like no leads. Or calls, I think, scheduled. I wanted you to go to door knock so I would join like you.

And I'm not kidding.

I hit every. Listen. If you're listening to this and you're in Dallas, I for sure was in your building, and I for sure knocked your door.

Wait, okay, we got. I got a question, but what was like, maybe like the. Like. Okay, you've knocked on a ton of doors. Do you have, like, a good story of like, some. Let me hear a good one.

So here's how the trick, if you're doing the focus is to hit a tower building, right? Cause you're wearing a suit, you want to be in the ac, and you can hit a bunch of businesses at once if you.

I love that ac. It's the little. The little parts.

Yeah. Oh, come on. Okay. There's a lot more to that. Like, your shoe. Your shoes count. Like, everything counts. And here's what you do. Like, the big buildings, you got to get a little more creative than, like, the shopping centers. Also, bigger businesses are in the big buildings and the shopping centers. I mean, you're gonna destroy your shoes. You're gonna sweat your butt off for, like, small commission deals.

So 30 minutes in, you're just sweating and you look, dude.

Yeah. You don't need shopping centers.

You walk into the fifth place and just drench.

Yeah. And you're wearing a suit, so you're trying to look nice. And by the way, like, your shoes are destroyed. Like, I was wearing really nice shoes, so.

Sorry about your shoes.

Yeah, rip the shoes. So anyways, when you hit a tall building, you hit the elevator button, you go to the very top because. Or as high as you can get. And you've got to kind of evade the security. So like, the front desk is there to make sure people don't doorknock. Like they normally have, like an on staff security person. And they're like, watching the cameras, which are also in the elevators. So if they see somebody going up and down and they see the elevator going, they, like, catch on and they'll come get you. And I've been caught many times.

What do they do? And they catch you.

They just tell you to leave. Yeah.

Yeah.

So. And then you play this game like, oh, no, I was just on the wrong floor.

Let's fast forward to, like, the nicest. Because that door to door sales. Huge respect. That is the hardest sales role. Well, what was like, maybe like the nicest deal, you close like, door to door. Like.

Oh, man, there's a handful of ones. The nicest There was like, I mean, a lot of the times people respect your hustle. So like, I was like, if you can find somebody that will agree to door to door sales, which I didn't agree, I got the job. And then they said, by the way, this is door to door. Like, it was a bait and switch scenario. A lot of people try to hire you. Like, they're like, if this guy's willing to do this. And so like you get to the end decision maker to pitch them and then they're like reverse pitching you to come work there. They're like, so how much do you make? And get into that? The best deal was probably a mortgage company and I was selling VoIP, so it was phones and they had multiple locations. So it was like the way we did business was we billed monthly. So it was like, I think it was like eight grand a month. And then it was a 36 month contract. So it was three year.

Not bad.

Yeah. And that was through the door knocking. And then it's like a dance, man. You would like.

I always. So when I was hiring at Business Apps, I would always specifically look for people who had. Did you enjoy the job? I mean, it was, it was, it was probably not your dream job.

Yeah. I mean, no one signs up and like, I want to do door to door sales. I liked. Here's what I liked. It was different every single day. I must believe it or not. Somewhat easy guy to please in the sense that like I was in somewhere new doing something different, like trying to get past new people every single day. So I liked that obviously, like the sweating and getting kicked out of buildings and dealing with rejection.

Yeah. I personally love sales. I love, you know, like, you get a lead and then, you know, I don't know how advanced you were with, you know, your process, but like, you know, you get someone in, they're an opportunity and then you put a percentage on that opportunity and then like, you're just kind of like. And then you commit that deal to. I don't know if you did like pipeline commits.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

Like, we had weekly meetings. What do you think? 8am you have the meeting.

When I would do pipeline reviews with the teams I was managing, like half the time it was like, is this really going to close? Are you sure?

It's so hard to tell. And like, there's variables that you can look for. But like, sometimes, I mean, sales guys are trying to hang onto their head while also bringing the business deals because, like they carry, like, for me, it was a monthly Recurring revenue number monthly that we had.

Yeah, I think it's. I think it's one of the best roles, the best starting roles. Someone looking to get into tech and possibly get into especially like sales development where you're cold calling all day. You're basically just getting, you know, callous for rejection. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, that's so key. And the point I was trying to make previously is I always used to, like, I don't know what it was, but some of my top performers at my previous company, Business Apps, they had roles previously that they just deeply didn't enjoy for one reason or another. And then when they finally found something that like, basically I always tell people to work at a role maybe that they don't truly enjoy because the next role that they get there, it's like going to Disneyland. They're like, at least it's not this place.

So there's something because, like, I have a friend who just graduated college who became an sdr and like, no one wants to be an sdr.

You got to pay your dues.

But I told him, I was like, listen, you need to treat this differently than I did. Like, I kind of got into the slog where I'm like, I hate this. But I didn't have like a long term goal, which probably was painful for me at the time because I was like, this just sucks. Eventually I was like, I'm sweating. Like, this is miserable, but like, sweating. Yeah. Like, that was the underlying thing.

Like, do you have AC on in your house right now? I'm guessing you do.

I do. But dude, this makes for a bad joke because I'm building out a part. We have a detached office and it doesn't have AC right now. So I will start sweating.

But nice. A fun fact about me. I want to be when people. Have you ever heard the term, like, FU rich?

Yeah. Yeah. Mark Cuban says that all the time. I don't wear a shirt because I'm FU rich.

Yeah. My definition of F U rich is being able to run the AC all day, all year long. That's it.