In this presentation, Kerry Barrett, President of Accretive Solutions, addresses a room of entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners. She opens by explaining how a personal network led her to the speaking opportunity, underscoring the importance of leveraging relationships to achieve goals. Barrett emphasizes that regardless of title—engineer, product manager, or founder—every professional plays a sales role because revenue generation, resource acquisition, and market delivery are essential to any business. She provides a brief overview of Accretive Solutions, noting its 900 employees across ten U.S. markets, headquarters in Chicago with a San Francisco presence, and its core service offering: outsourced accounting, finance, and HR for roughly 350 startups. The firm serves clients throughout the business lifecycle, from early‑stage startups to mature enterprises valued at billions. Barrett introduces the core of her talk, “Start Today, 10 Things You Can Do to Impact Revenue,” positioning it as practical, role‑agnostic advice that can help attendees now or later as they seek funding or scale. She frames the session as an opportunity to share lessons learned over a 23‑year career, aiming to shorten listeners’ learning curves and help them avoid common pitfalls.
Chapters
It's really nice to be here. As she mentioned, Carrie Barrett, I am president of the company called Accretive Solutions. I'm here today to talk a little bit about a few different things. How did I get here today? Actually, a friend of a friend suggested or recommended me to come and speak today, and a bit of the talk today is about that, sort of, you know, networks and resources and how do you leverage the people around you to achieve your goals. I've been very fortunate to have amazing people around me throughout my career and throughout my life that have helped me get to do the things that I get to do today. Just a couple things that I thought would be interesting. I understand this is a room full of entrepreneurs or budding entrepreneurs. How many of you are business owners today? Raise your hands. Yeah, and how many are sort of working toward business ownership? Great. Investors here? Any— just wanna know my audience. A couple, few, great. How many of you perceive your role to be in a sales capacity? Okay. Interesting, yeah. How many of you perceive your role to be one that influences revenue, earnings? Okay. I mean, the reality is, my belief is that everybody, if you own a business, everybody's in a sales role. Everybody's in a role where you need to get either resources, money, whatever it is, revenue, you need to get your products, services out the door. And so every single one of you, you know, you may be a brilliant engineer who's built a product to go to market, but at the end of the day, we need to get the product to market as well. And so a lot of what I'm gonna talk with you today about is the things that you can do, regardless of the role you're in, to impact revenue. And some of you today might even say, well, that doesn't even really matter to me right now 'cause we're pre-revenue or funded or, you know, what have you, and it's not really on my radar. Um, but I'm going to work hard to make this as relevant for you as possible, 'cause my belief is if it's not on your radar today, it's gonna be on your radar relatively soon. And if you're looking for funding, um, looking for funding sources, that is 100% sales, right? You are out there talking to people, explaining why they should fund your product. or your service. So my belief is no matter what we're doing in our lives, professionally, personally, and so on, that there's a big sales component to what we do. Just quickly, a little bit about my firm. As mentioned, so we have about 900 employees nationwide. We're in 10 markets. I live here in San Francisco. We're headquartered in Chicago. And our business is essentially broken into a few different segments, but our Our goal is to be a lifetime partner with our clients through the lifecycle of their business. We actually work with about 350 startups. For those startups, we actually outsource the accounting, finance, and HR functions for those startups. We work with entrepreneurs, business leaders, business owners, venture capital firms, and others daily. We have a good understanding of what are those issues and challenges those companies face. We also then, working through the lifecycle of a business, we work with emerging growth companies, you know, those that may be in the, you know, $50 million to a couple hundred million, and then up to mature businesses, the $100 million to a couple billion, and then sort of the enterprise clients, the $2 billion and up. And we perform a number of different services for all those. But as it relates to startups, we, you know, have a very good understanding of the issues and challenges that you face every day. in making your business successful. So if any of you at any time wish to talk more about that, you know, we have an amazing woman who leads our startup practice, a nice Irish woman named Morchini. She's brilliant and highly networked. If at any time you're interested in hearing more about that or talking more about that, I'm happy to do that as well. So I'm gonna segue over to our talk for today. And full disclosure, this is a talk that I've given before, but I've given it primarily to sales-focused audiences. And so the topic is, you know, Start Today, 10 Things You Can Do to Impact Revenue. I still think that there are many, many parallels between what I'm gonna share with you today and all the issues that you're facing. And again, if it's not totally relevant today, you know, maybe make note of a few things, and if there's some things that you can sort of pocket away and it will become relevant for you a little bit down the road, then hopefully that will be interesting as well. I've had the good fortune of just being around a long time. I've been in business now, you know, 23, 24 years now, I think, and I've just seen a lot. And so one of the things that I hope to do too is just offer perspective. I always say that if I can, through discussions, help someone shrink their own growth or learning curve on something, And, you know, overstep some of the landmines that I've stepped through and learned the hard way, I consider that a success. So hopefully we can achieve that today.
