I'm beating Bain, McKinsey, & BCG

Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs who are building their businesses. Well, check it out. Some of you may know that I already created another company called Bootstrap Giants. I did it along with a friend of mine who I interviewed years ago, Jesse Pujji. And the idea is it's basically like Mixergy, but we're focusing just on bootstrapped companies and we're expanding the educational component of it. Well, Jesse is actually not my full-time partner in the sense that he is in the business day to day with me. He is the head of a venture studio and the venture studio is my partner. And that's the way that, that this business is working. And it's super fascinating. And it's not just my business that GatewayX is creating, it's also Aux Insights. And I've gotten to know Aux Insights a little bit. I've gotten to know the founder, Casey Garelli, a lot, and I've seen such tremendous for what she has done. And I think actually, Casey, some intimidation for you because I think you're such like a hard-charging business person. And also you're coming from the private equity world and all these things come across as like she is the intimidating person. And so I thought, well, the one place where I can feel less intimidated is her house. So I did invite myself over to her house and I got to know her there. And the second place is here to do a Mixergy interview. And so that's what we're gonna do. I wanna find out about how Aux Insights the firm that she created got started. I wanna know how they're growing. I wanna know how she's working with this whole venture studio, and I wanna find out as much as I can about what she's learning as she's, uh, helping private equity firms. Aux Insights is considered the office of the CMO for private equity firms. And, uh, Casey, good to have you here.

Nice to be here. It's, uh, it's fun chatting. And I will actually say I was very impressed by your, um, boldness to invite yourself over for dinner and loved it. And, and you got to see the mess of crazy that is life at the Grellier household and you rolled with it.

I didn't just get to see it. I got the t-shirt. Look at this.

Are you wearing it?

So, you know, my husband today, you're—

he's an insane musician and has a number of projects. And this is one of his projects, the Playadors, uh, playadors.com if you'd like to check it out. And they have sweet merch. You can get yourself a t-shirt.

Let's get into the Aux inside story. What's your revenue at Aux?

So I'm a Midwestern girl and, uh, I was always told not to talk about money, politics, or religion. So this is a hard question for me. And one I struggle with in terms of marketing. Um, so I don't love talking about that. Um, I will say, you know, it's 8 figures in revenue and it's growing insanely quickly. And I think we're constrained not by demand, but really in supply. And so I'm really excited about the growth, but it is something that has been hard in terms of marketing myself to talk about.

Wow. I didn't even think I would be able to get that out of you. Over $10 million in revenue. For how long? How long have you been in business?

Uh, so we started this business officially, our, our incorporation date is June of 2023, so almost 2 years.

Wowee. Holy smokes. Yeah, that's kind of intimidating because I do know that Jesse keeps pushing, get to the $10 million, get to the $10 million. But I thought that was a goal that you eventually get to, even if you aspire to get to it in a year or 2, you accept that it's not going to happen for a few years. Wow. Profitable?

Yes, very since day one. So that's one thing that like was a huge lesson for me because my background prior to running the last company I was in was in venture. I worked for a venture capital firm, and so I was looking at all these businesses who were never profitable. And so the idea of starting a business for me was, um, kind of centered around the lens of these venture-backed businesses that were not profitable, and the founders really toiled and toiled and toiled and didn't make money for a long time. And I, I just thought, I'm too old for that. I'm expensive. I've got kids. Like, that's not the life I want. And I think what was interesting about working with Jesse is he showed me how you can really build a successful business without, by bootstrapping it and without having to take on external funding.

Yeah, I, I do appreciate that he is not just about bootstrapping, but also about profitability and about taking some of that money out. And we had some really heated discussions about that. Um, all right. I wanna understand the business better through like an example. Can you gimme an example of a company that hired you and what you did for them?

Yeah, so our primary client, we sell through and we work with private equity firms. So we work with a private equity firm, they call us up and they're like, hey, we're looking at this deal, it's a huge deal. Um, and we're really concerned about their ability to grow this business digitally. So in this case, let's, uh, the business is a staffing firm and they wanna understand We're about to spend a ton of money on it. What are the risks to this business from a digital marketing and digital growth perspective? How do you quantify those risks? How do you mitigate them? And then once you've done that, like, what are the growth opportunities digitally and how would you quantify and put those in place? And so that's what we did during diligence. It took us about a month. We did that, um, in early 2024. And then that, that deal was so big, it took months to close. And so it just kind of went radio silent for a while. Then finally it closed and we started, they called us back and they said, hey, we bought the business. You found all those cool opportunities during diligence. We'd love to have you come in and actually do those opportunities now and work with the team to grow the business digitally. And so what we did during that time is we came in and we kind of updated our analysis that we put together. during diligence, quantifying the growth opportunities, prioritizing them from impact, effort, and ease. And then we worked with the team to kind of align on what things we were gonna go after and start to knock down. And then we've been working with them ever since to build up that growth plan. And it's, I mean, it's crazy because we only take engagements where we know that we can guarantee a 3x ROI on our fees. And so that's a really good, um, you know, we stand by our results. But it's insane how well this is working. And I think what's great about this company in particular is the team internally wanted to learn. They wanted a blueprint, they wanted a coach, and they have stepped up and they're executing on it like crazy. And their growth in January, I mean, just in January alone, we grew their revenue almost $4 million year over year from where they were in January of last year. Just on the initiatives we had put in place. So it's cool because it's working.

What do you charge for something like that?

Yes, it's, it's dependent on the teams that we put together, but you know, something when we put together a team, it's very similar to how McKinsey, Bain, BCG would staff a team. And so you've got an engagement manager, you've got 2 to 3 associates, you've got a handful of analysts. You know, I think McKinsey, Bain, BCG would charge somewhere in the $200K to $250K a week. We're not that, but, you know, I think it really depends on, uh, we're, we're more affordable than that, but I think it really depends on the right mix of people and team that the client specifically needs. Again, you're gonna try and make me talk about revenue and money and those Midwest roots are like, nope.

I grew up in New York. We talk about this stuff all the time. But, um, wait, what I didn't understand about this type of business is I always assumed that McKinsey, Bain, and the others, that they have their people full-time. And I assumed that Aux had your people full-time, but no, you find out what the client needs, and then you go and staff and manage that staff for the engagement, and that's it. It's like you bring 'em all together and then they, they separate, right?

Yeah. So, we have 2 buckets of ways that we're doing it, and I would say McKinsey, Bain, BCG, they've got teams that have been around, you know, they've been around decades, and so they, they do have massive benches of teams that they can call on. We operate in 2 ways. We hire kind of the unicorns, which are people who have both the consulting experience, but then the high-level growth marketing experience. And we marry those skills together and we staff our teams with those. And so we've got a team, um, we have a bunch of full-time teams that we can deploy on these engagements. And then we also have a huge amount of part-time, um, experts that we can deploy either on an entire project or if we just need like an ABM marketing expert for a B2B business, we can call someone in. And so we've built out actually a massive database of growth marketers that we can plug and play. Across all of our engagements. And so that's been really helpful.

One of the things that I love is that I've done an ask me anything with Jesse, with other, uh, agency owners. And they said, Jesse, how are you able to grow your business so much? When I get a client, I end up getting sucked into the work and I can't go out and look for another client. And if I do, I'm so stretched that I feel guilty. There's no way I'm getting a third. And Jesse said to one of them, pitch me. And the guy goes, well, here's how I talk to them. He says, I do. And Jesse stops him and he goes, no, no, at Aux, it's not I am gonna do this. It's not Casey saying I'm gonna do this, or Jesse. It's we do this, we do that. And he said, when you do it, you're basically putting a single person's price on your head and on the project. When we say we, we can maybe hire 5 people, pay $10,000 each, and then as a collective, if it's 5 people, $10,000 each, we might be able to offer them off at $200,000 for a project. Now, obviously these aren't the numbers, but that, that makes a lot of sense to me. What doesn't make sense to me, Casey, is you've got a private equity firm who's about to buy, I think you said over a billion dollars, uh, staffing business is the example that you just gave, right? They don't know enough about the marketing of the business before they buy it. They need to bring an outside firm to help them understand how marketing works in within this business. I would think they need to be experts in the business and experts in marketing before they took it on.

No, no. And if you think about it, think about, we often make this analogy. So where we are with digital and growth marketing is very similar to where, um, businesses were in terms of like the need to, to have tech or to be digital in the first place about 10 years ago. And so 10 years ago, you started seeing all these development agencies come up and we had a coder shortage and that, or maybe 15 years ago at this point, but then you also started to see all these diligence firms pop up that were working with private equity to help them understand the tech capabilities of the businesses that they were buying. When you look inside a private equity firm, you have mostly finance generalists and people who can look at businesses, look at their opportunities. They're looking at spreadsheets, but they don't know the nuances of how to run a business, a digital marketing business. Some private equity firms have brought in a digital marketing expert to kind of give them that expertise, but that's one person. They may have 30 portfolio companies and they may be looking at 2 dozen businesses a year. And that person now is a little bit stale and removed from the work because he or she is not in the guts of these accounts every day. And so, um, I think we can add bench strength to those firms and to the firms that don't have it. We become kind of their expert partner to help them understand what they're seeing and see if this is a good opportunity or not.

Like what? this? Because this seems brilliant. Jesse has a ton of digital marketing experience. You have a ton of private equity and digital marketing experience. You guys bring it together and you sell it as a service. Give me a sense of the kinds of things that you're telling them about that maybe to us is common.

Yeah. So, you know, I think things that we look for in diligence, I can give you an example of a business that we looked at that was actually crazy. I hadn't seen anything like this, but We were looking at a business, it was a healthcare business. And as we got into it, we started to see some weird things that looked like kind of shady SEO practices. And as we started to dig more and more and more into it, we just, we discovered this massive network of link sharing and link farming, and then just straight up plagiarism on the website of articles and content.

Ah.

And then we saw Google deindex. some of their location pages. And so we surfaced this all over to the private equity firm and we're like, look, the business is good. We can't argue with the numbers. Can you still do this business if Google takes the entire website offline? If so, go buy the business, spin up a new website, do it all right. But if not, like, this is a major concern and the health of this website is at risk. And so that's what we're presenting to the private equity firm and they can decide whether or not they wanna do that deal.

Are there opportunities for other people who are listening to say, look, I've got this expertise in some kind of online aspect of business and I wanna do this, like, can there be an Aux Insights for, uh, coding that helps analyze a code or people? There can, there are opportunities to basically take this model and, and do other things. Yeah.

So I, I would say like it exists for coding. I would say areas that are interesting right now, if I were starting this, um, or we might think about expanding to like own and become the expert in AI and understand like what tools You know, you could use and roll out within organizations, how to look at efficiencies, how to look at automation. Like, there are like little micro niches where you could build this out. What I would say the challenge you'll have is you're going to need to get into the room with these private equity firms, which is really, really hard. And that's why our network really was helpful. I would say too, the other thing that is challenging and that we also face is, you know, when they're going in to do a diligence, they're writing a massive check to McKinsey already for the growth model or the general diligence on how big the opportunity is and the McKinsey bread and butter diligence. They're also writing a big check to an accounting diligence firm and a legal diligence firm. And it may be easier to just write a slightly bigger check to McKinsey versus to write a separate check to us and to figure out how our work stream fits in. Now we've, we've solved for that on our end, but I would say that is a challenge is you're going to have to disrupt their current way of working and show that it's worthwhile.

Okay. All right. I can see how if the topic is meaty enough, the expertise is strong enough that they might be open to it. And if there's relationships, it would make it even easier. All right. I mean, I want to understand how you got into this. So before this, you were working at a company that I guess spun out of answers.com. I had no idea answers.com was big enough to spin anything out. What was the business?

Yeah, Answers.com sold for $1 billion to Apex Partners, who ironically is a private equity firm that we now work with. But we spun out of that. And it's interesting because when I took the job, I took the job to do mergers and acquisitions for them. Prior to that, my background was in venture capital. Prior to that, weirdly, I was a TV news anchor and reporter. So kind of strange background, but I took the job to do M&A. What the business was effectively was a, arbitrage business. All it did was it created a bunch of content online. Um, like it was honestly, remember those listicles, like the 27 craziest things flight attendants see in the air and you click on it and then it's just really paginated and tons of ads, terrible user experience. It printed money. And so, uh, the business basically—

Why did it work for them? I would see these, I remember, uh, uh, it was who, Gary Vaynerchuk, who apparently had done something like this. He would partner with a brand, he would buy Facebook ads. to send traffic to this brand site. And then on there, there would be ads. And because the brand looked respectable and elevated, people were more likely to click the ads and he'd get higher value click rates on that. What was it that answers.com was able to add to make the clicks more valuable?

So we were the OG, like we, the business model, like we started. So I will say Answers was the OG. So Answers started Um, you know, clicking on find a dentist near me and you click on the first ad on Google and it would take you to a landing page that had 100 different ads on it and maybe you'd find a dentist near you, but they, you know, they paid a cent for your click and they got 14 cents an ad, uh, in revenue per monetized visit. And so like, that's a great margin. And so they would do that all day, every day. And we would put tons, millions of dollars Um, on credit cards to finance those ads every month and then just print money. And so the business model of the business that I was brought in to do M&A for was take that money we're printing and go buy steady non-arbitrage businesses quickly before this arbitrage game dies.

Like what, what are some of the businesses you were supposed to buy or that you did buy? This was your role.

CinemaBlend. Yeah, CinemaBlend was probably the biggest business that I bought. I bought that business and then I sold it to a publicly traded, um, British company called Future PLC. So buying in that business was great. We grew it, we put in new revenue streams to it, we launched a podcast, and then we sold it to Future PLC. So it was a huge win. So yeah, so that was my job was to buy normal steady eddy businesses that aren't dependent on an arbitrage model to basically counteract this arbitrage business. And that was, and the business strategy was basically just buy real businesses before the arbitrage game ends. And I got to buy 2 of 'em before Facebook kind of pulled out the rug from under us the first time, the first of like 18 times. And so at that moment, our CEO ended up leaving. It was weirdly the same time when both of my parents died of cancer within 2 weeks of each other. And I took over as CEO of that business. In the summer of 2016 with a failing business model, no revenue, $40 million in debt, and really no plan. And so took it over, paid off all the debt over the next 5 years, and then sold it to another private equity firm who we had at that point built up some more steady eddy businesses that we had homegrown businesses like Travel Awaits. We had a business called Seasons. They're all serving a 50+ audience. And they were growing and they had really nice revenue profiles, diversified revenue streams. And so when we sold the business, the idea was that the new investor would invest in these solid businesses and we would take the revenue from the arbitrage business and gladly take it, but we wouldn't depend on it because if you depend on it, then it's going to break this model and you're going to be back to square one. And that was the initial agreement. And then, you know, Over time, it became clear that we were not aligned and not stressing the arbitrage model. And so, you know, at some point I had to make the hard decision that, you know, I'm not aligned with the future vision of this company. It's time for me to leave. And so I had a conversation with the new owner and I said, you know, look, I think we're not aligned. I'm happy to help you transition and bring in a new leader to take over. And so that's what I did in January of 2023. And at that time, Um, you know, I was a mom of 3, uh, I live in St. Louis, Missouri, so this is not like the tech or digital media, digital marketing capital of the world. And I was kind of freaking out thinking like, what am I even qualified to do? And so I just started going and having meetings with anybody that I could think of here locally, trying to figure out what my options were. And one of those people was Jesse. And so Jesse, actually, we had worked together. I had hired him To try and grow some of our businesses probably 5 years before that. So I know it actually didn't work. Um, the business relationship with Jesse, like we ended up on a terse-ish call where I was like, Jesse, this didn't work. We shouldn't pay you any, you know, he was like, sorry, but our, our agreements are pretty airtight. And, you know, we kind of went back and forth.

What was he supposed to do? And then what, why didn't it work?

Um, we wanted them to basically be able to buy Facebook ads on our behalf at a better margin profile and with more policy cover with Facebook. And they couldn't get the margins to work, and so it didn't make money for us. And we, you know, we basically lost money on the deal, and so I didn't want to pay for it. And Jesse, Jesse is a great negotiator, and so we did pay for it. And you know, I think I left being like, whatever, I'll never see that guy again. And then the guy moved to St. Louis, and out of the blue he calls me up and he's like, look, I moved to St. Louis. You want to get coffee? And I was like, you know, why not? Life's too short. So we went, we actually took our kids to the pumpkin patch. We hung out and that was like our first reconnection. And then after that, every probably 5 or 6 months, we'd go for a walk and we'd just kind of trade notes. And every time we'd go for a walk, Jesse was starting a new business. So, hey, I think I'm going to start this offshore growth marketing business. Cool, Jesse. I'm going to start this Shopify plugin. Okay. Hey, have you looked at the margin profiles of supplements? That's Wild. I'm going to start a supplement business. And so every time I'd listen to him do this, and finally when we went for our most recent walk, um, I had just decided to step away from the business and I told him, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. And he's like, oh great, I have 18 ideas of businesses I want to start. They fall roughly in 5 categories. Let's start a business. Like, Jesse, I don't want to do that. I, I am old, I'm expensive, I've got 3 kids. Like, I know what the venture world is like for founders. I don't want to do that. But tell me what your ideas are. And so he told me, we started kind of like playing around with them and there was one that was like, okay, fine. Um, so that's what we started building. And, you know, as we were getting into it, Jesse one day mentions offhand, you know, when I was at Ampush, KKR used to pay us X amount of money to do diligence for them. I was like, what? What? That's a thing? Like, that's our business. I love diligence. That's my wheelhouse. We've got connections. Let's build that business. And so that's how it started.

Why do you love diligence?

Oh, because it's like getting back to my reporter roots. I'm like digging in there trying to find all the problems, trying to find all the opportunities. Like, it is my love language. Like, love it so much.

And so, um, I know what you mean. You know what, even as an interviewer, one of my favorite parts is calling somebody up 5 minutes before an interview and go, I'm about to interview this person. You can't have him lie out there about you. Tell me everything I should watch out for. Boom, suddenly stuff comes out. And now I'm not the kind of interviewer who's supposed to, like, I don't want to get people, but I do want to stay away from the BS. And sometimes in this space, if you can catch a BS and you tell a person ahead of time, they love you for knowing it and they love reveling in it within the interview. And so that part, I totally understand the passion for. And I imagine with diligence, you get to do even more of that because you get access to their username and passwords. Oh, it's so fun. Okay, so you say, I love this, how do you get your first customer?

Yeah, so what we did at that point was, I think this is one of the areas, like if anybody's listening and is thinking about starting a business, this was a really big aha for me because what we started doing was building demand for the business before we even launched, before we incorporated, before we hired our first employee. So we started on a discovery tour of conversations with all the private equity firms and contacts in our network and saying like, hey, You know, when you're buying a business, how do you assess the digital marketing health of a business? How do you quantify it? Is this something that you're interested in? Is this something that you pay for? Is this, is there anybody out there who's doing it? How do you think of this? And every single person that we talked to said, oh my God, we need this. Nobody's doing it. We can't do it. We can't wrap our heads around it. We need it. And so I think one of the things that we thought about initially, well, when I built our first projections, I actually built it like 70% diligence. And then I thought, you know, hey, Let's work with the whole kind of lifecycle of private equity. So let's build a solution for pre-LOI before they go into diligence. Let's build a solution for diligence. Let's build a solution for once they bought the business and as they're going to take it to market. So we bought all of the, or built all of these solutions. And effectively when I started building out our projections in the first year, I had it weighted that, you know, 80% of our revenue was going to come from diligence and You know, 20%, uh, the rest. But because of where the debt markets were at that point, nobody was doing deals. And so actually it was inverted. We actually spent about 80% of our time and our revenue on value creation. And it wasn't until about 6 months later that we got our first diligence, which was a blessing because diligences are very fast and furious. And it was nice to cut our teeth in a more slow kind of methodical way. Um, but it was definitely not what I had expected.

I get the diligence part. The diligence part is they say, go and be a private investigator for us in the marketing and come back and report stuff. And you can say, hey, I can see that they're plagiarizing. I can see some shaky stuff going on on Google. I can see your big danger is you're going to lose Google if you want to make this deal, but go into it knowing that this is the problem. What's the other part of the business? What are they paying you? What are they paying you for?

Yeah. So, so part of like what you just described is where we're looking at all the risks. And then the other part of diligence is looking at the growth opportunities. So if we own this business, what are the levers that we would pull from a digital marketing perspective, and how do you quantify them to see how much each could drive? And so that's diligence. And then—

Got it.

And then when they—

Right, right. So it's not just, here's what to watch out for, here's some opportunities they didn't explore. And obviously companies get stale, companies have their own focus and their own way of doing things. So there are other opportunities you can bring in. All right. Still, take me through, once they've acquired the company, what are they hiring Aux for? What's the service they're looking for?

Yeah, it's called value creation, or we call it value creation, where we come in and we look at their current marketing function. We do an audit of all of their channels, all of their opportunities. We look at the competitive space. We look at, here's where you are today, here's where you need to be. How, how do we break this down? We actually have a growth model where we could take and lay over their P&L so we can see, Here's where you are today, and here are the channels or the ways that we would get to where you need to be. And here's what we would have to believe to be true to get you there. And then we start building out a growth plan that uses digital marketing and digital revenue tactics in order to get you from A to B. And so we put that together, it's prioritized, it's got the pretty waterfall chart that every investment banker loves to see. And then we quantify the opportunities, each individual opportunity for growth, and then we prioritize them on an impact, effort, and ease. kind of rubric. And then we say, this is the plan. This is what we think you can do in the next year. This is how it builds to your desired future state. This is what the year after that looks like. This is what it's going to take in terms of people, team, tools, process, external partners. And, you know, here's the blueprint. If we just hand them that blueprint, it'll sit on the shelf. So the second phase of that is we then come in and we build out the internal capabilities. So the the people, process, tools, partners, um, in order to execute on it. And then we coach them on execution. And so our goal is not to be the consultant that sticks around forever and ever and ever and ever. We really want to get in there, identify the opportunities, build up your internal capabilities, and then coach you on execution and make sure everybody's aligned on how to measure our impact. What are the KPIs we're going to look at and how are we going to have one single source of truth to measure our impact? And, and that's what we do. So that's value creation.

You know, when you say we don't wanna be there forever and ever and ever, I feel like that's good marketing for a good conversation when you're selling. But as a business owner, you probably do wanna find a way to be there forever and ever and ever. Do you have a way of sticking around, of being part of their business?

Yeah, so I think we're looking at what we call the 3 Rs. So we want every, every partner, every client that we work with to either refer us to someone, to re-up So to reengage with us in some capacity or, um, to, uh, refer, re-up and give a reference. Sorry, it's, uh, 3:15 and I guess my brain is shut. So give a reference. And so that's how we measure, you know, kind of our, that's our NPS score. Um, but if we want to stay on longer, like there may be additional work streams that we could take on, but we want to define those and there's a targeted start and end date, but. And the other, the more likely scenario is, hey, we just need a team to keep working with this. We're not ready to hire a full-time team to execute on this plan that you put together for us. Can you leave us with a fractional growth team to continue to work on this until we go to market in the next 6 months? And so we have a part of our business called Aux Talent Solutions where we'll put in fractional growth experts to do just that. Okay.

I've been watching that part of the business get started and grow. We both have a similar story about Jesse. When the first thing that I wanted to sell was some kind of like live educational thing that's very similar to what might happen within one of the GatewayX companies. And we decided on doing sales training and I did my, what are they called? I started having customer development calls and I asked people, what do you want? They told me, what would you pay? You know, or what is it worth to you? And so on. And the first person I charged $1,000 and I thought, okay, we can get a few people at $1,000. That would be pretty interesting. We'll learn and then we'll charge more. I go into Jesse on Slack and he goes, charge more. So I come into $2,000 and I go in on Slack and I say to Jesse, all right, we got a couple of people. We don't even know what we're creating here, but basically on just some ideas that you'll get on Zoom with them, they'll pay $2,000. He goes, let's charge more. And it kept going and going till we got to, um, I think it was $4,000. And then one person said, I want a lot more time with Jesse. So I go back to Jesse and I say, we should You should think about how to do this. He goes, tell him $25,000 in order to work with me. And I went back to the guy and I get on a call with him and I start talking to him about $25,000, what that would look like. And it was too long of a conversation. He would want a little bit too much, but man, he was open to paying $25,000 to get on a call with Jesse on a regular basis for a couple of months. And I backed away from that, but I still believe that in Jesse's head, it's like, how closely can we get to $25,000 and how How soon can we get it to get to that? And I feel like you've got a similar story. What's your version of that?

Yeah. So I think if I go back to where I was, you know, when we started this thing in April 2023, you know, we're starting to socialize pricing and every time we get on a call, Jesse raises the price $5,000 per week.

Without just on a whim on the call, he's just, they're saying, so what do you charge? And he's, Increasing the price.

Yeah. And it was terrifying. So like, picture this. I have 3 small children. I have no income at this point. And I've just like taken a leap of faith to start this thing that I hope will work. And, um, we have no customers. And not only do we have no customers, I don't know if we can deliver on what we say we have because we have no customers. And every time we get on a call, Jesse raises the price. And so I was terrified because I was like, well, no one will pay that. I've been an operator. I know, you know, what it would take to get someone to pay for that. And there's no way. And so it was really, really scary. And I think one of the things, you know, now we're looking at our pricing and, and today, like there is a, a very real possibility that we increase our prices in the next 6 months because our ability to deliver the quality of work that we need to do. I think we need to charge more for it because we are hiring some of the best and brightest in the world, and that's who you get when you work with us. And we know our competitors are charging $250,000 a month. I'm sorry, a week. And so like there is room if you can build the brand, but it is still really scary because at the end of the day, you have to go out and sell that, and that's a big number. And having been on the operator side of the business, like I know what it takes to find that sort of money in a P&L, and it, it's not something I take lightly. And so I only want to do it when I can guarantee that it will actually drive ROI. And so it was really scary having him do that.

One thing that he said within—

But he was right. I mean, it was right. We started here and we landed here, and that was the right, right price point to land at. And now we're going to start being here. So the advice was right, but it was scary.

I thought that one insight that I got from it was he says, look, once you start charging more, everybody on the team knows you're charging more and they want to elevate the level of their service, their work, their everything to justify that. Because you as an owner, you feel the pressure to deliver on that, but so does everybody else. And then it levels them up and they have a point of pride about it. And he was 100% right. I really saw things change when I went from $1,000 to $5,000 where we ended up. Like the number of people internally who wanted to participate and make sure that everybody got what they needed, who wanted to be supportive. It just went up and up and up. All right. Another thing that I'm dealing with right now is switching from being the owner-operator to being more of the owner and less of the operator. And I'm so— I've known about this, like find your zone of genius, stick with your zone of genius, you know, and not do every single thing. But man, I will do things like run into slides and edit all the slides design. I was on a call earlier today and someone said, stop designing it right now. You're not a good designer. Let someone else do it. And you had a bigger version of that. How did you make that transition?

Yeah, it was really hard because I actually took for granted, I figured, you know, I'm running this massive business, this private equity-backed business. It'll be just the same when I switch over and I run my own business. And what I took for granted is there is an emotional At least for me, like I described it as the roller coaster of like every 20 seconds there was this up and down, up and down, up and down of like, oh my gosh, this business is going to be great to, oh my gosh, this is terrible. We're selling our house and I'm pulling the kids out of school.

Yeah.

And it was like that on repeat every 20 minutes for the first, you know, I would say 6 to 9 months. And that was really scary. And I think what was really helpful for me was figuring out You know, what are my zones of genius and, and where am I a superstar and where do I suck, quite frankly? And, um, you know, I'm ADHD and I love to sell. I love to push the gas. I love to go, go, go. I love to build structures. I love to look at like, how do we grow this thing? I love looking at those things, um, and thinking strategy, thinking, you know, how do we, how do we build for growth? What I am not great at doing is building structures and processes and figuring out You know, the how we're going to build an accounting rubric or work with an external accounting firm. And so I had to figure out like, let's, it is worth my time to find someone to do that for us because I'm going to spend 3x the time that's needed to figure that out to make that work. Or I could go do this thing over here that is my zone of genius and that will drive 3x more revenue. And so figuring out where you can actually best drive the business and where you're better to outsource, that was huge.

You know, so things like finding an accounting firm, I totally get. It's easy for me to pass to somebody else. In fact, the beauty of working with GatewayX is there was Nak. Nak's their COO. He became my COO while, like, until we find somebody. Um, and he just naturally takes that stuff on. It's other things that I struggle with. Like, I do love sales because sales is very much like a, like a conversation like this. And so I will get on sales calls all the time. I love customer satisfaction as much as I can. I'll get on calls with our, with our members. And Nak had to stop me and say, you can't do that. Your calendar's filling up. It doesn't make sense. And really pushed me not to. What were some of the things for you that you needed to get out of in order to run the company properly?

Yeah, I'm in that right now. If you look at my calendar, my husband had an intervention with me last weekend 'cause we looked at my calendar and it's literally back to back to back to back to back to back to back. He is like, when do you eat? And, um, I think right now we're at that inflection point where We need to hire and we're in the process of hiring another case partner, which will help take me out of some of the day-to-day project work and give me some leverage there. And I think we're in the process of building out more of our ops capability because we need better operating systems in order to help give me more leverage and help free me up so that I can spend more time on the things that I want to be spending on, like strategy, like culture and team building. Biz dev versus like right now I'm really in the guts of a lot of these projects.

Like what? Give me an example of something you're in the guts of.

Yeah, like literal the project works that we're doing. So, I just got off a call with one of our project teams who's trying to work with this behavioral health firm to help them increase their census in their facilities. And so, like looking at how to communicate and work with their strategic stakeholders, how to measure our impact, what are the new levers that we're going to pull? And I love doing that, but if I'm doing that across 10 different projects at the same time and they all have an hour check-in twice a week, my schedule fills up pretty quickly.

Lever that they want to pull, meaning what? Like what kind of ads they could pump up, what kind of marketing they could cut back and increase? Is that the kind of thing?

Yeah, so levers, those are too specific. So they have a contract with a a firm that they had been working with, an agency, $2 million a year that they paid for. They have no idea how many leads that's driven, if any. And so one of the things that we did is we went through and tore that thing apart and we ended up saving them $500,000 by replacing it with new partners. And then we ended up optimizing their paid search accounts ourselves. And now we're driving more leads that are converting at a higher rate for a lower cost. And so things like that, those are the levers that we're trying to pull.

And we're also trying to— That's you looking in? That's Casey saying, let me get on my computer and I'm gonna look around and see what it is. I'm gonna challenge some people on the team and get some questions answered. That's you personally doing it now?

I'm not in those accounts specifically, but I have team members who are in those accounts and then they're coming to me and they're saying, hey, this is what we're seeing, this is what we're finding. And I'm coming to them like I'm the owner of that business and saying, well, that doesn't make sense. Or I'm looking at it like this. Or, but why is the census not going up if you're saying that the conversion rate is going up? And so I'm, I'm stress testing their findings so that I can make sure that we're actually delivering results that will impact the business.

That's what you were telling me earlier. That role is called the engagement manager, and you're saying, I'm the engagement manager right now, and that's one place you want to start.

So I'm not the engagement manager, I'm the case partner. So I'm the partner who's coaching the engagement manager. And so we have several case partners that work across these projects, and we need more of them. 'Cause I'm doing more of it than I need to do right now.

Okay. All right. 10 years out, Jesse keeps saying, think about what your desired future state is. And I go, all right, here's what I want. Here's what I want. And everything is like exactly what I would've learned at NYU Business School or undergrad. Then he goes, no, no, stop. Think about how Casey says she would like St. Louis to be so popular for private equity that they add another flight route or something. What's the phrase that you use for the goal for 10 years?

So I would say like our DFS is, I think I'm passionate about the city of St. Louis in particular, and St. Louis has a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities, and it's an amazing place. And I think if I look at Charlotte and the way that Red Ventures built out a community of really, really incredible growth marketers in Charlotte and was able to attract young talent with huge salaries to come and live in Charlotte. I want to do that for St. Louis, and I want to build out a hub in St. Louis where not only are we able to retain and attract young talent, we rebuild the city, we rebuild, we bring families here to build really good lives here. Because I think you can still have, like, you could still buy a home, a really nice home here in St. Louis for like a fraction of what you would pay on the coast. So I think of the St. Louis piece of it. But I think beyond that, like, we are building a platform here where I think there's amazing growth opportunities, not just within the aux consulting space. I see a jumping-off space where, you know, we may build our own agency to service these clients. We may build our own fund to co-invest alongside these private equity firms. We may build, you know, different product and service offerings owning the AI space. We've got a, like a database component to our business where there may be a research and survey arm of the business. I think there's a lot of ways that we can go. And I think Ox is really just in the infancy. And so that's the thing that really excites me. I also see us moving into Europe and into Asia as we continue to really establish ourselves as like the leader in this space and the true office of the CMO.

I could see that too. I love the vision of that possibility. I think you're right. Going to see Red Ventures was an eye-opener for me because I'd never heard of Red Ventures before I met Jesse. Like, Red, who are these people? And then you go out there and you realize not only are they like big, massive, but there are roads named after them. There are buildings and buildings and buildings and buildings all over for Red Ventures. And it turns out they own a lot of the brands that we know, like Lonely Planet. Like, don't they, they, do they own NerdWallet?

Points Guy. It's not NerdWallet.

Points Guy. They own the Points Guy and all this other stuff. And you're right. And I'm talking to people saying, how, how are you even living here? Well, they either went to school there and they decided to stick around cuz they got a job there, or they moved somewhere else and they decided that they didn't like living in San Francisco or New York. And it really was inspiring to see how big this got, who they were bringing in, and how culturally significant they were. All right. Hell yeah. Yeah. I like this a lot. I'm glad that you and I got to do this interview. Through Bootstrap Giants, we're gonna tell stories of other bootstrappers who are building businesses the way that you are. And frankly, more specifically, we're talking about what you're doing on a regular basis internally in the newsletter. And if anyone out there is listening and wants to sign up to the newsletter and see some more inside information, some of like how the management is happening, what are some of the other businesses in this venture studio, and so much more, sign up at bootstrapgiants.com/newsletter.

Nothing.

Just bootstrapgiants.com. All right, Casey, I'm gonna go pick up my kids from school today. Thank you. This was fun. This was helpful.

I love it. That's a great, that's one of the best parts of being an entrepreneur, right? Get to spend time with your kids. You have flexibility.

I do like that a lot. I'm actually, my brother's coming in with his kids next week. I'm just gonna take a couple of days off, but I don't know, at night I still answer. Do you still answer Slack messages at night?

My time is 4:00 AM to 6:00. 6:30. That's like my work time, my added work time, but I love it. It's magical for me.

Right on. All right. Thanks, Kasey. Ox Insights. Have a good day, everyone.