1000 Strong: A CEO's Reflection on a Milestone Moment

Foreign. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally today. You got the OGs, you've got me and Scott on the call. Scott, how are you doing today?

Doing great, doing great. Excited for a good session.

This topic overdue, definitely overdue. So what we want to talk about today is the journey to a thousand rooftops. What that's looked like some of the learnings that there have been. And like Scott said, you know, this is a little overdue with meaning to get it done, but. But there's no time like the present. So Scott, just to kind of kick things off and set aside the fact that we're, we're well above a thousand now, it's no small feat to get a business bootstrapped to any level of success. So what have been kind of some of the key moments for you with the journey from zero to a thousand?

Yeah, and by the way, I don't take any of this for granted. Getting any business to be profitable, make a thousand dollars a month is a great accomplishment. Really. People trivialize it with restaurants or small businesses and such. It's all hard for me. It's very gratifying to get over the a thousand. Like you said, we should have done this last year, but always a goal of mine. I've got the next goal in mind as well. I mean, obviously we're going to hopefully go from 1 to 2 to 5 if we do a good job. Very meaningful. For me, I, I feel like it also was a lot of learnings along the way, a lot of lessons.

So is there anything so far that you would say has been a key moment or really a really pivotal spot in the journey that's helped us get thus far?

Yeah, I've got a few of them. The first one that comes to mind, we always intended this to be dealer BDC software, but we did not know how we were going to go to market. Would we sell direct? Would we work through resellers, white label, etc. We had an occasion early on before COVID when we just worked with vendors and they kind of. We had one vendor that kind of sold a direct to dealer model and we saw all the mistakes we made or the, the flaws of that method and we decided that geez, no one is going to love our customers like us. The other thing is, is without a selling directed dealer, our product market fit would, would not be as good. So the second real seminal moment was when we started selling direct to dealer and Covid hit and there were no cars on the lots. Sales BDCs were really eliminating what they were doing it focused or caused us to focus and really focus on service BDC and it really, really established us. That was in March of 2021. The last thing that comes to mind was we had a product launch I was very excited about came out and we did not get as good of adoption as we'd hoped. And I visited with customers and realized that it just was kind of good. Right. It wasn't great. And I realized we needed to have a much more in store presence customer visits. I know you're going on one next week. We all, they're a big part of what we do and have been for the last couple of years. It is, it is key to do this to have a great product market fit. If we are going to serve our dealers, we need to work on product market fit every month and the only way that happens is to be in stores. So those three things were really key moments to get us here and we won't ever be able to leave the stores or we're not going to make the next level either.

So you kind of bled over into the next question I was going to ask. But aside from that one, what are some of the other key lessons you've learned along the way?

Well, unfortunately I've learned every lesson. You would think in my 50s that the stuff would get easier. Lots of lessons from the growth from 0 to 50 some employees putting the structure in place where everything's not so word of mouth. I mean it seems kind of trivial but we've had to, you know, systems that worked at one level are broken at the next level. We're, we're going through that in a couple areas in the company right now. One of them you're working on and, and it's, and it's going good but it's, it's work. Key lessons. I would think one of the biggest key lessons that I've learned is that if we want to really help the dealers, we don't ask them to change their processes. What we need to do is say use Volley and this will improve your current processes. We're taking this tact. We took this tact with Volley with our service bdcs. We're taking it with our integrations. We're doing for sales VDC now Volley Express, our AI products. Key learning. It's. People are too busy, they got too much stuff to worry about. And, and what are we going to sit and argue with them that are always better. We need to, we need to make what they're doing better.

Sounds like a hard fought lesson for.

You every time it stinks.

And, and it still comes up sometimes too where we're like, you know, instead of saying, well, why don't you do this instead? How can we complement.

So I've got a great example of this where, you know, we've had a bias towards not allowing multitasking and it's not true multitasking, but it's a project that we have and, and we kind of stood firmly on saying you should, you know, people don't successfully divert their focus. But then we were just wrong and it's under development now. So.

Yeah. What makes Valley unique and special in terms of the team and the culture that has helped you get to this point?

It's been our focus from day one. And when culture is getting frayed a bit because it always does because we're all, we're humans and we're emotional, we talk about it. We had a, we had a fairly tough conversation a couple days ago. Right. We've really focused on, on culture. On top of that, just as important, we have not had outside financial pressures so we could take the time and make the long term decision for the customers all at all the time. We built our customers company profitably and we added employees when we could afford to. It really took the pressure off. It's hard, it's hard to make good decisions when you always think with your pocketbook.

Totally. Is there anything unique and special about our customer base that reflects well on Voli and the journey?

Obviously we're going farther and farther out the tail now of who we sell to. But I think one thing that made us really unique at the start was in a lot of ways the early sales. Our customers found us. They already had the good business model in place running their BDCs and they were looking for a tool. Our customers are awesome. They care about volley. They thoughtfully give a tons of, tons of feature advice. We had a lot of people with investor mindset, hey, you know, I want to help make this better. I mean I, I think, I hope it's common in business. Certainly it's common with our customers. I can tell you there are many people I, I've thought of about 10 on this call right now that long after volley's gone or, or long after I'm no longer a volley. Not anytime soon. It's coming. But I'll still consider these people friends. I'll still wish them happy birthday and such. It's, it's been great.

That certainly is one of your strengths. And for those of you who don't know Scott. He also prides himself on being the first one in a day to wish you a happy birthday, which is helped by the fact that he wakes up at 4am every day. So 5am so Scott, tell us a little bit about the next leap, the next chapter for volley. What what is on your mind and how we get there.

In the past when we added a customer, you know, there were a few compelling reasons. Save labor, improve productivity, grow your business. And generally, if your choice is to save labor in your bdc, we make that pretty easy. If your choice is to grow the business by making it easy to reach out to your customers, we help people be two to four times more efficient and, and help them grow their business. Well, we look at the next chapter as being vital. We want to, you know, with our AI projects we've got on on tap, we want to be able to empower the agents to do double what they're doing today. We also want to extend communication throughout the entire dealership for them to make it easier to to make data driven decisions as they communicate with their customers. I honestly, I can't wait. I've never been, I'm having just as much fun now as I ever have, so. Looking forward to it. We're going to keep working hard, of course, and let's see where it gets. I mean nothing's a for sure, but we're going to give it our best effort.

Awesome. Well, thanks Scott for taking the time to sit with me and chat about this and thanks for everyone who's helped us get this far and thanks for tuning in. Let us know if you have any questions or want us to chat about something else and we hope you have a fantastic day.

Thank you. See you.