In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Michelle Terpstra, the founder of Revenue Rascals and a fractional Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) who helps both B2B startups and local B2C businesses scale. Michelle explains her dual role as a podcast host and CRO, describing how she leverages the AI tool Claude to generate sales pages in minutes, saving time and costs compared to hiring designers or copywriters. She outlines two primary client profiles: scaling B2B service‑based startups aiming for $50 M in revenue (typically engaged at $2‑5 M with a $100 k annual contract) and local brick‑and‑mortar businesses where she applies B2B growth tactics such as pricing, packaging, recurring revenue models, and creative low‑budget marketing like digital flyers for summer camps. Michelle shares a failure story about an overly long 8‑hour workshop, emphasizing the importance of failing fast, pivoting, and delivering digestible value. She discusses her preference for Utah‑based B2B service companies over pure tech firms, citing a hybrid SaaS‑consulting client in Series A with about ten staff members. Engagement models include both project‑based work (e.g., fixing post‑sales processes) and retainer‑based full‑stack revenue leadership, with a limited client roster due to the heavy lift. She highlights common post‑sales transfer mistakes such as delayed onboarding and lack of proactive customer success, especially for product‑led growth (PLG) micro‑SaaS ventures. Finally, Michelle provides contact information: listeners can visit revenuerascals.com/listen for her podcast and a complimentary monthly coaching call, or michelleterpstra.com/workwithus to explore three service options.
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Hello everybody, Michael Falato here again from Full Throttle Falato Leads, the CEO and founder, and we're on my podcast Full Throttle Leaders. We have Michelle Terpstra.
You got it.
All right, tell us, Michelle, I saw that you are with the Revenue Rascals. That's your consulting company that does podcasts, or do you have a whole bunch of other things that you're doing.
Yeah, so, um, yes, I am the host of Revenue Rascals, and I also am a fractional CRO for scaling startups, specifically mostly for B2B companies. And then I'm also helping some local companies grow brick and mortar using the same strategies we use to grow B2B that they've never thought of using for B2C. So here I am.
What's, what's your really cool tech that you've run into lately that you're like, this is something you guys got to try.
Oh my gosh, I'm obsessed with Claude right now. So I was on ChatGPT forever and then they had a developer leave recently and I just noticed my outputs weren't as great. So I jumped over to Claude and my favorite thing on Claude is the fact that Claude can create code super fast. And so I can create sales pages in 5 minutes. And I can copy and paste it, put it on my clients' websites, and I'm ready to rock and roll. And it is such a massive time and money saver. I don't have to hire anybody to design these pages anymore. I don't need the copywriters. I don't need anything. I need 15 minutes in Claude. And I'm obsessed because, you know, it's helping my margins stay high. And my clients, you know, they don't have to pay extra money for all these people.
And what's your— typical client that you love to work with?
Yeah, so there's, um, two profiles of who I love to work with. The first one is the scaling startup that is primarily B2B service-based and trying to get to $50 million. I usually get brought in between $2 to $5 million and as a fractional CRO. And as a fractional CRO, I own marketing, I own sales, and I own customer success. So depending on the stage of the business is what I will tackle first in order to generate the results needed by the founder. And the second profile is something that was a bit of like a hobby project for me that turned into just so exciting for me, and I love doing it. And that's helping, helping local businesses grow in the same way that like a scaling startup with a lot of funding would. And I like to hack the stuff that we can use from B2B scaling to go B2C. So for example, really simple fixes are adjusting pricing and packaging and positioning so that their profit margins go up. Sometimes they don't think about that. They also don't think about recurring revenue options, memberships. And, you know, when you, when it comes to marketing for B2C and brick and mortar and local companies, it's very different. So right now I'm helping a local barn here promote their summer camps, and summer camps is a big moneymaker. I know it sounds crazy, but it is. Huge money. And so just doing really creative things like going to the school districts and getting digital flyers distributed for $100. So there's certain things that you can do that are really fun and creative when it comes to being a local business, and I've had a lot of fun doing that. Now my client split is 50/50.
And then tell me, like, what's a thing or two that you've learned that from either failing miserably or really coming up with a really cool idea like you talked about with the flyers. Probably, yeah, losing would be nice to hear.
The losing part, is that you're gonna say? Yeah, so I'll tell you exactly, I'll tell you exactly. A lot of everybody like wins all the time, right? I would be ridiculous if I said that. So the biggest thing with quote-unquote failures is that if you're committed to something and you want to do it and you want to push it and promote it and sell it do it. But at the same time, if it's not working, do not try to shove a round peg into a square hole, okay? Like, if you miss the mark, you miss the mark. And money loves speed, and you just have to drop it and take that information and do better next time. So I'll give you a very specific example. Fail fast, fail fast, fail forward, and you'll keep moving. So I have some IP and a protocol on high performance that I have built over the last 15 years of me doing this. And I decided I wanted to share it with the world in a new way with a two-part workshop that was 4 hours each time. So a total of 8 hours. What I realized promoting this is nobody wants to carve out that much time to fix anything right now. So basically I asked for too much. So what I need to do is now pivot and do something that is more digestible, that is more powerful, that is easier for people to take the protocol and implement it. I asked too much. And so sometimes when we think we're giving a lot by like, wow, I'm going to give these 8 hours, it's going to be this amazing thing. But if it doesn't stick, it doesn't mean the idea was horrible. It doesn't mean the product was horrible. For me, it was asking too much time from people who were already stressed out. So, and as soon as you just pivot and you move on, that's when money follows you, ideas follow you, and you can't be afraid of putting things out there and being like, meh, okay, that don't work, and just moving on.
So tell me like what, what kind of, what type of clients, you know, on the B2B side do you work with more? Are they, are they tech companies? Are they Salt Lake companies?
Yeah. So I Yeah, so I absolutely love Utah. I live in Park City, Utah, and the greater Salt Lake area, including Lehi, is just a wonderful place of B2B startups that I have enjoyed supporting and having clients there. And then, but really what it comes down to is, you know, tech companies, they usually have a co-founder that has a pretty big CRO or CSO background, and so they hit the ground running pretty quickly. And so for me, I prefer actually going out outside of tech and going to B2B services. So for example, one of my very large clients right now that I am helping scale as their CRO started as basically like a mini McKinsey with management consulting services, but has added a SaaS platform. And as a result, now it's integrative services that they're providing, both SaaS and, um, and leadership development. I like that niche because they started as leadership development, right? So they don't have all of the components your traditional go-to-market PLG SaaS platform is going to do. And so this is a fun project for me because I get to marry the two, separate the two, and we're in Series A right now, which is fun.
And how big is, how big is that company?
You know, I don't want to release that information because it's private, and, but it's, it's going towards, it's going up, it's going up in the millions of AR.
I mean, I'm talking about the size of the company.
Oh, okay. Got it. Good. Okay. So there are about 10 people in the company, a combination of a few W-2s and the rest are freelancers.
Awesome. And what's— would you say there's an average revenue model of a customer's ACV? You know, what's the average contract value of a company you work with? Are they selling $5K a month? SaaS or AI, or they sell them $500,000?
Um, typically it's $100,000 a year spend per client.
That's what, that's what they'll get for their clients, not for you?
Correct.
How do people work with you? Like, is it a retainer-based? So is it project-based?
It is. Well, I do both. So if somebody came to me and said, I have this very specific problem and I need it fixed, so for example, post-sales actions, um, I am I mean, beyond myself sometimes when it's sales work so hard for top line revenue and it gets handed off to customer success or ops and the ball is dropped and the needs are not met that were sold. And I'm really good at fixing that problem. It's no one's fault. It is just needs to get figured out. So post-sales motions support expansion and renewals. So if somebody came to me and said, hey, my post-sale motions are broken, that would be a project for me and I'd happily do that. It'd be super fun. The alternative is, We need you, um, on retainer to actually run marketing, sales, and customer success. And that's another option. But I only take on a few clients per year doing that. Um, cuz as you can imagine, that's a very heavy lift.
And what, what do you see as the biggest post-sales transfer mistake?
Yes. So it depends what you're selling, but for example, if you are selling a service The second someone signs that contract, the customer needs to be taken care of, the client needs to be taken care of. So what does that mean? It means, it means scheduling, expectations, setup, communication. If there's too much of a lag, the purchase energy falls to the ground and crumbles. If there is a platform involved, you can't just like hope that everything goes well and everyone's using the product, right? So for example, um, one of my friends who's scaling this super cool, uh, product right now. And he has 56% of his 14-day trials are converting into paid clients. And on average, they're spending $1,000 per month on his platform, which is like really exciting. And he's doing the post-sales motion correctly. He has his product doing most of the work. It's like, here's your onboarding step by step, step by step, step by step. However, he still has humans involved that goes and checks it, that checks in with the client and ensures it's being used. Do you also, if it's a product-led growth, um, initiative for customer success, like you need to remind people to use it, why they've used it, how they've benefited from it. And these are really important things that you absolutely have to do, um, especially for what I would call the micro SaaSpreneurs out there that are playing around with code and launching things left and right. Like it's, you're, you're biting off more than you know sometimes. So pay attention to the big guys and research PLG.
So how do people get a hold of you?
Yes. So please go to revenue rascals.com/listen and listen to my podcast, please. It'd be awesome. I'd love to have you there. I do one complimentary coaching call per month for any listeners. You sign up once, you get the invite every single month. And I do that for two reasons. Is one, coaching is really fun for me. I like to give out ideas. And two, it keeps my podcast nice and spicy because it actually reflects what's going on in the real world. And then also, if you'd like to work with me, you can go to michelleterpstra.com/workwithus and see the 3 options that I have available.
