How This Operator Found, Bought, and Became CEO of Their Own Business with Revenue Accelerator's Christi Loucks — Operations with Sean Lane

Today's episode is sponsored by the RevOps experts at Fullcast. With me is their head of customer success, Tyler Simons. Hey Tyler, revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does Fullcast's go-to-market planning platform help RevOps teams achieve these types of goals? Well, Fullcast lets you build better territories so that the right resources are always focused on the right opportunities. When reps are motivated and zeroed in on their targets, they'll be more successful and bring in more revenue. That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning in spreadsheets today, and I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is Fullcast any better than that? You must get rid of the spreadsheets because spreadsheets create lag and errors. With Fullcast, planning and updating happen automatically all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache-inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go-to-market plan changes, which, you know what, they happen all the time, Fulcast has your back. All right, you got me convinced. Where do I learn more about Fulcast? Our website, fulcast.io. Operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hypergrowth. My name is Sean Lane. Social media would make you think that it's all the rage right now to find small businesses, buy them, and then just sit back and let the passive income roll in. But while there might be some exceptions to the rule, this isn't the reality for most small businesses. Just making the decision to own and operate your own business is a daunting one. So I was wondering how this actually works in the real world. And luckily for us, I found someone who could teach us. Our guest today to share their story is Christie Loucks, now the CEO of Revenue Accelerator, a B2B lead gen services company that creates and executes outbound sales motions for tech companies. Prior to taking the plunge of acquiring and running her own company, Christie ran sales enablement teams at an impressive list of companies, including Ping Identity, Chainalysis, and Zeta. And in late 2022, Christie decided it was time to leave those corporate roles and go out on her own. In our conversation, we talk about the decision to take control of her own destiny. We talk about how she found and ultimately stepped into her new role as CEO, and why the pairing of a dealmaker and a visionary is ultimately what led to where she is today. To start, though, I asked Christie to take me back to late 2022, when she was deciding to go out on her own in the first place?

So, I had spent close to 10 years working in high-growth tech companies, primarily within cybersecurity, and primarily from there within identity and access management. So, I had held roles, sales enablement, managed our technical enablement, our customer training function, sales operations, lead generation, right? I had had all these roles over the course of those, call it 10 years. When I finally got to 2022, I guess it was kind of an existential crisis, to be honest, where I sat down with my husband. We were kind of doing some life planning and figuring out like, where do we want to go? Who do we want to be in the next chapter of life? And I had kind of this realization that I had spent the last decade building a foundation for my career, one that I'm very grateful for, But I was ready to take a step out on my own into a more autonomous career path where I felt that I, I guess, was really kind of in charge of my own destiny. And that was something that my husband and I were really anchored on in terms of our joint kind of career paths and family trajectory was taking that step into ownership of our careers and kind of subsequently our, our life. There was nothing inherently wrong with working in-house in quote corporate America. Like I credit where credit is due. Like I learned a ton there and I would not be at this moment in my life if I had not had all that experience. But there was an inflection point where I had to say, Am I working in alignment with my big life values? And if not, then how do I better align to those values?

And so once you started asking yourself those types of questions and you wanted to be more in control of your own destiny, like, what do the answers look like when you start to ask yourself those types of questions?

Well, for me, it was build versus buy. When you have that fork in the road, you can go out and either way you're kind of doing your own thing, but you either say, okay, am I going to start from scratch on something that I own and run, or am I going to look at buying something that I can own and run? And those are two similar but different paths.

And to start, you started in the build category.

Build.

We'll get to buy later, but Talk to me about what that first kind of path was once you decided, all right, I want to be kind of in charge of my own future here.

So what jointly Alex— I'll just say my husband, Alex— what Alex and I decided was we wanted to together start building a portfolio of small businesses that we owned and operated and held for the long term. Now that's a long game. That is not a get-rich-quick scheme. So we knew that was the path we wanted to take. And we were starting to look at deals, starting to search for acquisition opportunities. But in the short term, I said, okay, while this goes on, knowing that this is years of work ahead of us, I'm going to do what I know and do what I like, which is sales enablement, kind of sales operations consulting and start my own consulting practice aligned with that work. So I said, all right, I'm gonna set up my own company. I'm gonna start running it. I, at that point, didn't really know truthfully if it was going to be a long-term thing or not. I didn't know if I would be joining Alex on some business acquisition, running whatever random business we'd found, or if I was going to actually find a lot of success with the consulting practice and want to exists there in terms of ownership. So it was sort of a little bit of a testing ground, to be completely honest, but I also knew I could grow it and scale it if I wanted to go down that path.

Before we go too much further, I have to give Christie a ton of credit for just the earliest steps in this journey. She said to herself that she wanted to take control of her own destiny, and then she did just that. Christie said once she made her decision to leave her corporate gig, the decision at that point for her and her husband Alex was one of build versus buy. Their long-term plan was to build a portfolio of small businesses that they owned and operated. But right away, she chose to build her own sales enablement consulting business as a testing ground for both herself and the services that she was offering. And that sales enablement work ended up having two critical benefits for her. One, she was doing something she knew incredibly well, and two, it afforded her the freedom to continue to be on the lookout for those small business opportunities. So in that second bucket where she wasn't so intimately familiar with the process of acquiring small businesses, I wanted to know, where do you even begin? How do you assess companies? How do you narrow down the types of companies or industries or hypotheses that you want to test in your search? Here's Kristi.

And I'll give Alex credit here because he came from a private equity kind of investment background. So he's the deal maker and he knows the ins and outs of all of the acquisition details. What we had decided together was we wanted to go after profitable, cash-flowing, boring businesses. So we were looking at sewer line installation companies and power washing and the opposite of the tech world that I have lived in for the last 10 years. The thesis really was go after the longstanding businesses that actually have a lot of cash in them, even though they're not glamorous retiring business owners who have run the company for 20 to 30 years. They want to step out, they want to move on. And they just want to hand it over to the next person to kind of carry on their legacy. So that was our approach. But within that, yeah, I mean, we looked at a lot of very different companies. It was fun, it was cool.

Help me, you know, make this real for people. The difference between kind of like the perception versus the reality of that process, right? Like, I feel like I go on Twitter and everyone's like, yeah, there's a ton of the businesses that you just described. They're poorly run, they're inefficient, all you gotta do is buy them and add some technology and poof, everything's gonna be great and you're gonna be making all this passive income, like everything's perfect and easy. But I would imagine the actual process of one, finding the right company, and two, looking under the hood and understanding the realities of what it would mean to actually run that business are probably a little different than what is painted on social media.

Oh, 100%. Alex and I talk a lot about this because it is this new wave of, I don't, not entirely get rich quick scheme. I don't think that's fair to say, but I do think that there is a perception out there that you can buy a cash flowing business, make some quick, easy changes and be set. And you start living off seller discretionary earnings, a million bucks a year. You work 5 hours a week. That's kind of what's projected, right? And that can be true, but the path there is a lot longer and a lot more tedious than I think people realize. So I will preface by saying this world is new to me. This is where I kind of came alongside Alex's experience and learned a lot from him about how to even go about a search. And it was rocky. We got really close on a couple of different deals. And when I say really close, I mean We had done a quality of earnings review, financial due diligence, legal due diligence, financing, you know, with an SBA loan, getting all of the things in motion only to discover at some point in the due diligence stage that what was represented was not actually reality. So you start digging in. It's like buying a house, right? You put in the offer. You get an inspection, you find out more about the house during an inspection, and during that time you have to go back to the seller and say, hey, you have a hole in your roof, what are we going to do? We need to fix this, it's not accurate, we have to change the price, or you need to come up with $5,000 so I can replace the roof. It's, it's not dissimilar, it's just obviously a different context. So we got into those stages on two different deals and they fell apart. And so it is a roller coaster. There's a lot of hope, a lot of work, and a lot of soul-crushing moments during the acquisition process because you just don't know exactly what you're going to find when you start peeking behind the curtains of a company.

I would also imagine though that that was probably the time where Alex's experience and expertise probably was the most valuable because I could totally imagine myself getting emotionally attached and excited and be like, oh, you know, the house thing is a perfect example. It's like, well, the deck isn't that bad. Like, we could probably fix it. Or like, you know, those rotted boards, we can fix that in a few years. Like, you just start to talk yourself into it. And so the fact that you guys, I think, had the— you call them the dealmaker. And I think, you know, you're the operator to balance each other out is probably very helpful in that process.

Oh yeah. So Alex is a realist and he operates purely on logic. I'm the visionary, like the creative visionary in the relationship. So we start going into these companies, we start learning, and all of a sudden I metaphorically start decorating the room, so to speak, right? Where I'm like, oh, we can do this and we can do that. And I have an idea for a rebrand and like, this is the market presence we can have and add this service. And I start getting emotionally involved there. Where Alex is a lot more like, calm down, we need to get to the facts first and then we can start thinking in terms of, yeah, the creative parts. So it was very much a check and balance throughout the whole process. And I'm grateful that he thinks very differently than I do.

The dealmaker and the visionary. Pretty potent pairing. And if you're someone considering making a similar jump to the one that Christie has made, maybe this is a good opportunity to reflect on your own strengths and shortcomings. If you had to go find a partner to go on this journey with you, what blind spots would you want them to fill in for you? For Christie and Alex, going through the ups and downs and near misses of the search process eventually led them to a company that they felt confident enough in to buy. What was that company and what made it different? After the break. This episode is sponsored by Fulcast, the company that helps operators build better sales territories. Their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable. And the cherry on top, Fulcast automates common go-to-market activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchy, hierarchies, routing, and more, so the plan is always in sync with operations. With Fulcast, say goodbye to go-to-market planning headaches and hello to your own personal planning assistant. Learn more about Fulcast today by visiting fulcast.io. Okay, back to Christie. Before the break, Christie was describing for us the search process that she and her husband Alex set out on to find a small business that they ultimately wanted to buy and run. In early 2023, they had a break in their search process.

By the time the second deal broke, which was early this year, early 2023, I mean, we kind of sat— Alex and I sat down and had a regroup, like, okay, what's our strategy? The credit markets are tight, banks are slow to loan. How do we deal with this market and still get a deal done? So I decided that I was just going to start looking for businesses that were more in, I guess you could say, my wheelhouse, meaning some sort of sales-related business out there. And I didn't even know what I was going to be able to find, like how many of those actually exist. So what I found was the best marketplace for that particular sector was acquire.com. Which is a fantastic website. You know, you still gotta sift through a bunch of— I don't want to say crap, but questionable listings to find the good, the good ones. And so I was filtering, I was looking, and came across a company called Revenue Accelerator on acquire.com. And they make it really easy to kind of get in touch with the, the seller, have a conversation. You get kind of basic business summary details, and then you take it from there.

And what about it, other than kind of being in a sales-adjacent skill set for you, like, what was it that jumped out to you as like, okay, this is starting to meet our criteria for what we're looking for, and it happens to be in a realm, in an industry that I know I can add value?

Yeah. So that's when we start getting into some of the financials and operational elements of the business. So one of the things that Alex and I, you know, we cared about was we wanted like a minimum level of revenue because that indicated a minimum level of stability within the organization. So kind of that $1 million mark was where we felt comfortable starting and Revenue Accelerator was doing that. We also look at profit margins. We look at some of the operational efficiencies within the business. I'm trying to be specific without going into all the nitty-gritty, but like, there's just kind of like checkmarks that you define for yourself in terms of what's important to you. We also were really, what was really important to us was some of those intangibles as well, though. We wanted to, buy a company that we felt operated with integrity, that we got along with the owner well enough. You know, you don't have to be like besties for besties, but you know, you have to at least be able to get along and see eye to eye on what the company does, what the potential opportunity is, and the foundational values that that company's built on. So we were also looking for kind of some check marks on that as well.

The company that ended up hitting all the checkmarks for Christie was Revenue Accelerator, a B2B lead gen services company that creates and executes outbound sales motions for tech companies. And that has to be quite the moment, right? To wake up one morning and all of a sudden be the CEO of a company that you just bought. That's exactly what happened to Christie. Where do you even begin?

Where do you begin? How do you eat elephant? One bite at a time. And I think where I began was with the team and with the core of the business. So getting to know the people and getting to know the foundations of how the business works. That sounds a lot easier than it was. It's a lot. You're coming in. I mean, in full transparency, there's always a little bit of a, can I do this question in the back of your mind? I think any normal human is going to have those insecurities and doubts of like, oh shit, now I'm at this starting line and I have to actually do this. And like, do I have the capacity and do I have the skills and the leadership? You ask yourself all those questions, but at the same time, you have to come in and present a level of confidence with the new team that yeah, you can, and you are the right leader. And you're here to support them, here to learn from them. You know, it's interesting, you come in as the new leader, but you have the least amount of knowledge in the organization. I think there's a very big dose of humility that comes with that. And I think that's an enjoyable process, right? To get to know the team and say, you have to teach me. I'm here to lead, but you're the expert in the specifics of this business. So just educate me. And within that, you start learning what the functions are, how things kind of flow across the business, and you just sort of build from there. It's weird. It's a daunting place to be, but it's also really exciting. You have to kind of embrace both sides of it.

Yeah. I mean, I would imagine it's probably, you know, similar to the difference between like the, the founder of one of the companies that you and I have worked at in the past, and then that first non-founder CEO, right? Like there's a whole separate vision and path probably coming out of that. And so you're probably uncovering new stuff. I don't care how good the diligence was that you did, you're gonna find new things. And what are you learning both about yourself as you're going through that process, as well as kind of who do you lean on to go back and get the answers when inevitably new things come up? Is it on that previous owner? Is it on the team? Like, how do you react when inevitably that new surprise pops up?

Yeah, it's a combination of both. Well, it's a combination of leaning on your own gut instinct and then leaning on the team who is doing the work day to day, and then leaning on the seller for, I would say, kind of bigger strategic questions that, you know, you might need help with. So Oh gosh, there's so much to say about this. What I have found is there are certain questions and yeah, as you start peeling back the layers of a business and finding areas that are going well, and then also areas you're like, uh, we can do that better. There's certain questions that I have really relied on the team for, and that is tell me what's working today. Tell me what's not and tell me how you want to change it because you are the one doing the job every single day. That's a question for my team in terms of how do we tackle something moving forward? That's not a question for the seller. I'm friends with Gabriel and he will probably listen to this and then this is all out in the open, but you have to be able to draw a line between the chapters of the organization, right? And so, the seller is the foundation in so many ways because he's— I mean, Gabriel's the one who built the damn thing. So he's got so much wisdom and so much insight in terms of what has worked and how he built it. But you also don't necessarily want that same voice for the next chapter of the business. And it's absolutely not to discredit him at all. He's done an incredible job. The team respects him. Like he's done Amazing work, but you have to find the lines of what do we pull from the seller to understand the business today? But then how do we now as a new team in a new chapter of the organization create the future? And that's a very hard line to walk. But I continually go back to Gabriel with questions on like, tell me what you would do in this kind of situation or help me understand historical context. But then when it comes to future, I always bring the team in, like, what do you guys want to do? How does this look? Why doesn't this work?

This is a really tough balance to strike. Kristi is simultaneously learning about this company from scratch, presenting herself as a new leader to her team, learning on the fly, leaning on both the previous owner and her own gut instinct. That's a lot to juggle at once. And I can't help but think back to what Christie originally said about her build versus buy decision at the beginning of our conversation. When she first went with build, she said that building her sales consulting business in an area where she was an expert was such an asset to her. Now fast forward to buy, and instead of buying in one of those non-sexy industries that she admits she knew nothing about, she purchased a company in the world of outbound sales that she knows intimately. So I was curious, has she found that to be an advantage? Has it made this transition any easier?

I don't know, because I still feel like I'm learning so much. My brain is still completely overflowing with new information. And I think I would have also felt the same way if, yeah, I was learning like a power washing company or a laundromat business. The learning is just never ending. So I would say I feel, I don't know, maybe more confident in the fact that I know the sector, I know what works, I know what doesn't. I understand how to create outbound sales motions and campaigns. I know it, but there's still so, so much to learn because as CEO, you're doing it all. For a small business like this. Like, I also have to learn the technology. I'm like talking to our engineer trying to figure out how the whole tech stack is built and how everything's integrated. And then I get on a call with our controller and I have to like go through cash flow and I have to approve payroll and make sure the payroll looks good. And you just are bouncing back and forth so much that there's still endless things to learn.

The scope of what you're responsible for didn't just get bigger, it's everything.

Right. I think I just feel equally overwhelmed as I would have with any other industry.

So now that you're kind of putting your own voice in here, right? And to use your analogy, turning to a new chapter for Revenue Accelerator, fast forward 6 months, 12, 24, what will good look like? What will kind of success look like for you coming in as the new CEO?

Oh boy. These are all the big questions I'm asking myself too. I mean, immediate success is growing our revenue, getting bigger, getting more clients. With that comes scaling the team, scaling our processes, just finding all of those efficiencies. The great news is we do have a really awesome process for how we manage our client load. I mean, we're sending 22,000. Emails a week, and we're doing it with a 98 to 99% inbox rate, which is crazy given how big brother Google and Microsoft and whoever else is out there watching. We have really good scale already. So I think success looks like amplifying our current efforts, but it also means adapting to where the market's going and how outbound is evolving and what other kind of services our clients are looking for in terms of enablement, like helping to convert meetings into closed-won opportunities, kind of coming alongside them as a partner throughout the entire sales process, as opposed to just being on the front end. I think there's a lot we can explore and add in that space, but you know, this is kind of going back to the ownership piece and acquisition. There are big questions you have to ask yourself of what is worth changing now versus what do you sustain? And you don't want to come in as a new owner and like shake everything up right away. For businesses that are doing well, they're profitable, they're running efficiently, like you can't come in and just toss everything out the window and change it. So you have to make strategic decisions about growth. But at the right pace.

And do you have kind of like a litmus test right now for— there's no shortage of things I'm sure you could find or could change or could improve, but to your point, to not upend everybody and just drown them in change management, how do you pick the 1 or 2 things that are going to move the needle the most without rocking the boat?

Yeah, that's an art and a science is my answer to that. I mean, I think it's a level of the way I've been approaching it is how does this change impact our financial position, our profitability, our ability to run a good business with the resources and tools we need? I don't want to say versus, but maybe and. How does whatever change it may be, how does that impact our presence in the market, our, the elevation of our company, those intangibles, right? Where, you know, we're looking at, do you do a rebrand or not? I always made fun of like chief marketing officers who came in and were like, oh, we're immediately doing a rebrand. It's like, all right, cool, easy play to make a splash. And here I am eating my own words going, I think we're going to do a rebrand. But you know, you sit there and it's like, yeah, what is that gonna do for us? Is that going to elevate our position in the market? Is it going to be a more polished presentation of what we do? Are we going to be able to articulate the value of what our services are in a better, more updated manner? And to me, that then impacts the financial position of our business too. So that's sort of my litmus test of how I'm approaching these things.

Before we go, at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last 6 months?

Killers of the Flower Moon.

That's the new movie, right?

It is. Yeah. Well, and I'm mad because that's what the response is like, oh, that's the new Leonardo DiCaprio, right? Leonardo DiCaprio, I think.

Yeah, you're right.

Oh my gosh. Read the book though. All right.

Read the book.

Got it. Such a good book. It's nonfiction, but it reads like a novel, and I learned a ton.

Okay. All right, cool. Favorite part about working in ops? CEO's ops.

Ooh. Favorite part about working in ops. I really like seeing how the puzzle pieces come together to form the whole, right? So at Revenue Accelerator, I won't make this long, but we have different, we have a lot of different functions that operate within their kind of expertise. And if all cylinders are firing, we absolutely crush it. And so making, like, putting those pieces together of every individual component to make the whole is what I find very fun and challenging.

Definitely both. Flip side then, least favorite part about working in ops?

When things break and I don't know how to fix them, then I call my My experts.

Someone who impacted you getting to the job you have today.

My husband, 100%. He doesn't like taking credit, but truly would not be here without him. And yeah, full stop.

It's awesome.

Cheesy answer, but it's true.

No, I mean, I would have been surprised if you said anybody else based on the rest of our conversation.

Yes, yes.

All right, last one for you. One piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday.

Put yourself in uncomfortable positions so that you can learn because being a CEO is constantly uncomfortable. So I would say that is the thing I'm most grateful for is the times in my career where I have felt stretched and out of my league and challenged that I've been forced to rise to the occasion. And I practice that pretty much daily. Now.

Thanks so much to Christy for joining us on this week's episode of Operations. Also, special thanks to former guest Kathleen Schindler for introducing me to Christy in the first place. All right, if you like what you heard on today's show, make sure you are subscribed to our show so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you learn something from Christie today or from any of our guests, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other folks to find the show. 6-star reviews only. All right, that's going to do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Today's episode is sponsored by Fulcast, your go-to-market planning platform. If you've ever spent hours or days building territory and quota plans only to have them be out of date the second the reps hit the street, you need to check out Fulcast. With Fulcast, you set intelligent rule-based policies that automate all of the time-consuming manual tasks that hit RevOps teams throughout the year. With virtually no effort, operations will always seamlessly align with your plan. Learn more about Fulcast today by visiting fulcast.io.