In The Thick of It

Whatever you think you can do from

a growth standpoint, like multiply that by

ten and that should be your goal.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

In this episode, I have an enlightening with

Jeremy Potoka, founder of Presales Leader,

a company

that is pioneering a completely new offering.

Jeremy and his team provide presale

services on a subscription basis.

Jeremy walks us through his journey from teaching Spanish

to making the leap into tech and ERP software,

where he discovered his passion for presales in 2021.

Jeremy made the leap, landing his first

customer and hiring his first employee within

mere months of launching the business.

He shares transparent insights on the ups and

downs of a rapidly scaling company with a

focus on talent development and customer success.

His thoughtful approach to goal setting, hiring,

training, and more, Jeremy offers inspiration to

aspiring founders considering taking the plunge with

a new business model.

Jeremy, man, thank you so much for joining

us on in the thick of it.

How we connected is kind of funny.

My team had met you at an event early in

the year, and they're like, man, Scott, you got to

meet this guy and just never reached out.

Never happened.

And then you and I were at a conference in Vancouver

this spring and sit next to each other totally by chance,

and I look at your name tag, and I'm like, oh,

my gosh, you're the guy I'm supposed to connect.

So, anyway, love getting to meet you in

Vancouver and appreciate you being a guest today. Man.

Real quick, let's start with just

kind of how you grew up.

Did you grow up in a working class family?

Were your parents entrepreneurs?

What was school like?

Give us a little insight. Yeah.

So mom was a nurse, dad was in the Air Force,

and then basically worked for the same company for a while.

So I grew up with three brothers, too.

So a lot of boys in the house, a lot of testosterone.

Yeah.

So for the most part, my family was more along

the lines of kind of pick a career path that

is predictable, which is why I was first a teacher.

I was a teacher for the first five years of

my working life after college, which was really cool.

I have another brother that's a state trooper. Right.

So it was definitely not raised by entrepreneurs.

It was kind of the opposite. Yeah.

I'm eager to hear more in a little bit

about how this came to be, but, man, what

kinds of things were you into as a kid? Let's see.

I skateboarded. All right.

You got any cool scars?

I don't have any cool scars.

I do still have the longboard though.

I actually had that out with my boys this weekend.

That was pretty fun.

I wasn't big into sports, I wasn't a big sports guy.

Played a lot of musical instruments, piano.

Played for like twelve years.

Guitar, drums, trumpet. Yeah.

Do you still play today?

The piano I tinker around with?

I have a little ukulele on the wall in our

living room, a home that I'll pull down every once

in a while, but not a whole lot now. Okay.

So were you like Super Studious?

I wouldn't say studious.

I think my parents were great about teaching us the

value of hard work, because that was always important to

them, and they definitely handed that down to us.

So when our other friends were into sports and

academics, I was an okay student in high school

and middle school, but I was a paper boy

delivering newspapers for the neighborhood when I was twelve.

So that was like, man, get out there and earn some

money and buy your first car with your own money.

That was just how we were raised.

So even when I turned 14 and was

able to do something aside deliver newspapers, that's

when I got a job at Chickfila.

And then I was 16, I got a job at

a bank as a bank teller, which felt like I

was at the top of the pack in high school.

Being a bank teller in high

school is a pretty cool job.

That was more of like, it was required academics, and

then it was kind of hustle on the side. Yeah.

How early did you have to get up as a paper boy? 530.

Okay, that's actually not as bad

as I would have thought. Yeah.

So when you went to Chickfila, you

actually got to start sleeping in?

Oh, I did both.

No, you kept the paper route.

So the deal back then with the Philly

suburb I lived in was for the newspaper.

It was called the Courier Times.

If you delivered newspapers from age 14 to 18,

they actually gave you a four year scholarship.

Not like a full pay or anything, but you got, I think

it was a couple of $1,000 each year for four years.

And you didn't have to deliver papers while you were in

college, obviously, but it was just the fact that you kind

of did that commitment from 9th to twelveth grade.

So, yeah, I held onto it till senior year.

That's amazing.

And I got to believe that getting up early, it

probably deters a lot of people, and I got to

believe there's also a decent amount of churn and what

a way to keep people long term.

That's incredible.

Yeah, it was a good program.

I heard that a couple of years after

I graduated high school, they dissolved that program.

But, yeah, I definitely took advantage of it.

Man, that's awesome.

So, grew up in the suburbs of Philly.

Are you diehard Eagles fan?

My dad grew up on the Jersey Shore,

and there's actually a lot of Cowboys fans

on the Jersey Shore down into Maryland. Right.

Because that team existed long before

the Ravens or the Eagles did.

So I grew up a closet Cowboys fan in the suburbs of.

So never, never wore my jersey

to school or anything like that.

I am a Phillies fan, not an Eagles fan. Okay.

Do you still root for the Cowboys? I do. Okay.

Well, we will tell, but anyway.

All right, so you mentioned college.

Where did you go to school?

What did you study?

So I went to Messiah College.

It's a Christian liberal arts

school in Central Pennsylvania.

And then I went to small college in Vermont

for grad school called Middlebury College in Vermont.

Studied Spanish, so I actually

lived abroad in South America.

I spent half a year in Quito, Ecuador.

And then the goal was I was

learning to become a teacher, Spanish teacher.

So, yeah, that's what I studied in school.

That's what I did in grad school as well.

Taught a little bit at the college level,

and I really like doing that work.

But after about five years, I just had this

itch to go do something that was tapping into

my entrepreneurial skills, something more business oriented.

You mentioned you studied abroad in Ecuador.

If memory serves, Ecuador is right on the equator,

and that's where it gets its name from.

So is it like 12 hours of sun and 12

hours of dark clockwork, or how does that work?

It really doesn't change.

Like, we have daylight savings and we do all sorts

of crazy things here to jack up the schedule.

And the sun.

It's pretty much the same all

year round because it doesn't move.

Yeah, man.

What was your undergrad experience like?

Did you work when you were in college?

Were you involved in things on campus?

So I figured out how to get

a four year degree into three years.

I did a lot of classes in the summer as well, so

I was really only on campus for two and a half years.

And if you even consider half, because half of

it, half a year in Ecuador, another half a

year student teaching, not really taking classes.

I basically had four semesters on campus.

So, yeah, I mean, it was busy.

I worked for one of those.

Another one, I started dating my wife.

That kept me busy for a while.

That was the general experience.

It was so funny when you're in college.

I just felt this way.

I was like, I can't wait to get out.

I can't wait to kind of be working in a field

that I want to be in and not taking classes anymore.

And now 15 years later, it's like, that would

be so awesome to go back to college.

I'm the exact opposite.

I wanted college to last as long as it possibly could.

Yeah.

And when I go back and visit campus, it makes me

want to go back and relive it all over again.

So I'm right there with you.

Do you get back to your alma mater very often?

Yeah, we've moved around a lot out of Pennsylvania.

Three years ago we came back to Pennsylvania.

We live about an hour west of Philly

now, not Northeast, where I grew up.

And we're only like 45 minutes from campus.

So every once in a while we

just happen to be driving past.

We'll drive through and check things out.

So a little bit.

We've taken our kids down to College Station a number of

times, and we'll walk around campus and actually walk into the

dorm and say, hey, this was my dorm when I was

in school, and it's a trip for me and for them,

they're like, wow, I can't believe my dad was 18 at

one point, living in that room. Exactly. Yeah.

All right, so you get your bachelor's in record time,

you go on to get your master's, and you're teaching.

I assume that you were teaching Spanish. Yes.

What level? Spanish.

Was it kind of intro level

or were you teaching more advanced?

The way that it works in education is that

even if you're like, you could be the highest

degreed person, but because you're the newest, you're going

to get the introductory classes like the Gen Eds,

pretty much what everybody has to take.

So I taught in a high school for one year.

Then I moved to a different school district that I really

wanted to be in, and I was there for four.

And so primarily what I

taught was actually eigth grade.

It was middle junior high,

middle level, eigth grade, Spanish.

One and five classes, 30 students, 180

kids coming through the door every day.

And it was the same thing five times a day.

It's funny how the way that I've even approached the

presales job, right, and doing software demos, so much of

that foundation, it's amazing how much correlates to standing in

front trying to be energized, to talk to eigth graders

about the same thing five times a day. Right.

We actually, in our onboarding and training,

we bring a lot of those concepts

into the mix because they're the same.

And I may be mistaken, but don't

you hire a lot of former teachers?

We do, yeah, because that was

the track that I had gone.

And I think you could look at that

and be like, well, why would someone in

technology and sales hire a teacher?

And I think a teacher with the right

soft skills or characteristics is a great fit.

So, yeah, we've got a couple of teachers,

we'vE got a couple of youth pastors, a

pastor like folks like that that have the

communication skills, can put together presentation, are public

speakers comfortable public speaking?

And with somebody like that, they can learn software, they

can learn a sales process and be very successful.

We actually had a conversation recently about hiring,

and the topic of hiring teachers came up.

And I agree with everything that you just said there,

but I also think that something that makes a teacher

a great team member in an environment like yours or

mine is you have to constantly adapt as a teacher.

The classroom is always changing.

You may have one kid that's acting out and you got to

deal with that while the rest of the class is going.

And business is so dynamic and the ability to

flex and move and flow is really critical.

And I totally get how that translates

to what you were talking about.

Yeah, it's almost like you're used

to having multiple managers, right?

You've got like a department curriculum supervisor, you have a

principal, you have every kid's parent with their own preferences

and things that they want to share with you and

things you need to communicate with them.

So I would go as far to say anyone who's really

successful at teaching would be great in so many roles.

Yeah, totally agree.

As an aside, I remember a little bit

of Spanish from school and actually recently at

the grocery store, it helped me find something.

But I still remember my very first

Spanish homework assignment from 7th grade.

I can't even do the math.

That was a long, long time ago.

So our teacher on the first day said, you

need to memorize this Masabe El Buro Quetu, which

means a donkey knows more than you.

And here I am, I don't know, 30

years later and I still remember that.

So there we go.

It's funny what sticks with you.

It is funny.

We have two job positions open right now, and I

had a call with a student, it's been like ten

years now, who I had in eigth grade.

He went on to study in college.

I don't know what he majored in, but he

minored in Spanish, actually lived in a semester in

Valencia, Spain, came back and started working for Amazon

and he's looking for a job.

It was super cool to get back

and connected with a student like that.

But also we jumped on the teams meeting

and he's like, do I call you senor?

Is it Jeremy?

Like, what do I do here?

That's awesome.

That is really cool.

My wife used to teach third grade and

she has connected with some of her former

students on Facebook and Instagram, and they're now

out of college and getting married.

And so just like, my kids can't imagine us being

young, it's hard for her to imagine these kids, these

third graders as married adults now and having their own

kids so full circle with your student.

That's really cool.

So you did hire him?

No, I don't know.

He's in our candidate pool right now.

But, yeah, really cool kid.

And usually when you're in the hiring process, you

don't think like, I wonder what you were like

in eigth grade because I actually know on this

one what he was like right back then.

Is that one of your interview questions?

What were you like in 8th grade? Yeah.

Were you a good student?

Eigth grade.

Nice.

So you teach for a few years, a couple

of different schools, different levels, and you went straight

from teaching to doing what you're doing now.

How did that come about?

So the way it all started was

I always had an interest in technology.

And in my school district back in 2012, 2013K through

twelve schools were really far behind in elearning and being

able to do even think of like 2019.

I mean, pretty much public school systems in this

country before 2020 didn't have online ed figured out.

So we were as a school

district just starting that initiative.

And I think just some of the things I

was doing with technology in the classroom led the

administrators to think maybe I was a good fit

to start building out what a hybrid model could

look like where students still come to school.

They're in half classes, but then they also

then are in a collaborative environment, basically doing

their own work at their own pace for

the other half of their classes.

So I was also excited to not do

the same thing five times a day.

So I probably would have said yes to anything.

So my final year teaching, I was teaching maybe two

or three classes, and then my other time was spent

kind of launching these virtual programs and online programs.

So that was a little bit of a key into technology.

And I thought it was really cool that

I could travel to a tech conference rather

than teaching for a couple of days.

And it was like the first time I ever traveled

for work, and I was like, wow, this is in.

I forget where I even was.

It's probably somewhere not even cool.

But I was like the rest of my

teacher pals know, back in Pennsylvania in their

classroom, I'm in DC having lunch with.

It started.

That's how the transition at least started

out of a formal teaching role. Yeah.

Are you a technology person?

Are you an early adopter of things, or

was this more of like something new and

you wanted to do something different?

I think back then I was probably more of

an adopter of things than I am now.

I took like a computer science class in college and just

was writing some basic HTML and thought it was cool.

Did some basic website development in

college, thought that was cool.

And I always remember when I got my

first laptop, that was a pretty cool day.

First iPhone.

And before the iPhone, I had a BlackBerry.

You remember the BlackBerry days? Oh, yeah.

I love touching all that stuff.

And so it was just something fun

and cool to tinker around with almost.

So from there you get the bug.

The technology thing is incorporated.

Your school, your job as a teacher.

And then what happened next?

Yeah, I had an opportunity through a friend of the

family to be able to basically break into ERP.

So someone I knew just through my personal network

was a longtime Solomon Dynamics SL reseller, and he

had just picked up Acumatica in 2013, 2014 and

needed some help building a product that would complement

another solution he was making.

So tHey're still in business today.

It's called Nonprofit Plus.

It's a nonprofit package for Acumatica built

by a company called ASI in Connecticut.

And the operating thought in the early days

was a blocker to a nonprofit organization.

Implementing a new ERP is training and budget.

So if we can create a really in

depth training course, not like just an open

university experience, like what you might see from

Big Tech, where it's like an open course. Right.

Something really tailored to almost to be able to allow

that company to self implement if they wanted to.

So it was a product I built called

Accucademy again, still around today, still exists.

And so that's how the education piece,

that was what bridged the gap, right?

I had no formal accounting experience.

I'd never sold a thing in my life, but

I knew how to launch an e learning program.

So that was the first project I worked on.

It took me about a year, but everything from developing

the LMS within that platform to creating all the content,

taking what, a lot of times publishers make an hour

webinar breaking into like five minute videos with questions and

activities, something real, tangible for people to be able to

take and consume on a lunch break.

Not just sit there, be bored, and forget everything.

For people who may not know, there are

two acronyms in there, can you talk about

ERP and LMS for just a second? Yeah, sure.

ERP is Enterprise resource planning, basically a

fancy acronym somebody created at some point

to stand for business software, right?

Accounting software, inventory manufacturing.

And then LMS is a learning management system.

So there's all sorts of LMS, but pretty much every

high school and college offers some sort of learning management

platform that they put all their content on to be

able to take and provide courses to their students.

So with this job you talked about,

you were actually helping build the product.

Was that from the content creation side, or was

that from the coding out the interface and building

the back end of the tool, or both?

We built it on a low code

platform, so it was like 90% baked.

There was very little programming involved in actually getting the

course to look the way we wanted it to.

It was like some basic HTML formatting and stuff.

The hardest part for me was learning an ERP

system and needing to understand what a general ledger

was and accounts payable, accounts receivable, to be able

to create the course content around it.

It was both of those things.

Is it safe to assume that you never took

financial or managerial accounting in your Spanish major?

Yeah, I took Spanish for business, but that

was pretty much the extent of it.

I started as an international business major.

That's what I actually started as a freshman.

And I think I just had a really bad course load.

My first semester of an

HR class and financial accounting.

And like, three weeks in, I was

just like, this is not for me.

All this stuff is super boring.

So I actually have since gone back.

I'd probably been working within the accounting software industry

for three or four years when I thought, all

right, it's time for me to actually understand double

entry accounting and all the nuances around that.

So I went back to a community college

and took financial accounting and cost accounting courses

just to get up to speed. Yeah.

When you were working and building the

celms, was that like a summer? That was.

You used your time off in the summer to do that,

or did you actually go all the way in and left

teaching and you were doing that full time permanent?

The interesting thing about the teaching profession, at

least in public schools in Pennsylvania, is that

you're a tenured teacher at your fifth year.

So I just crossed the threshold to be

vested and tenured in the state program.

So it was an awesome safety net for me to be able

to tell them I'm going to step away for a year.

They had to hold my contract for a year

so I could come back if I wanted to.

About three months in, I knew I wasn't going to go

back, but I still waited a year, had a conversation.

TechniCally they had to hold it for two

years, but after a year, I just was

having too much fun doing this other stuff.

So it didn't take you long.

You drank the Koolaid and you were all in.

Where did you go from there?

So I was with that company for about

four years, and we built some really cool

products and had some really good success.

Very small software company you wind up

is an amazing opportunity for learning.

Anyone that's trying to ever break into a new career,

my advice to them is always like, go find a

company where you're going to learn a lot.

You don't need to stay there forever, but

find somewhere where you can learn what you

like and what you don't like.

So I did everything from after

that first year of building.

Once I learned Acumatica, the software that we

had built, the nonprofit modules around, I was

able to be a project manager.

I was able to be an implementer.

I learned loading data and data migration.

I learned a little bit of SQL.

And then we started doing demos, and I was doing demos

and I was starting to sell a couple of deals.

A quarter, let's say.

So that's like a dozen different career paths, right?

And I, after four years, decided I really

want to focus on one of those.

This has been awesome, but I really

want to focus on one of those.

So I went to work for one of the larger

resellers of Acumatica in the country called SWK Technologies.

And they were a couple of years into their

Acumatica practice and were looking for someone to just

focus on pre sales, which is a perfect fit

for what I wanted to do.

So that's what I did for

the, basically four years after that.

Okay, so five years teaching, I think four years

at one place and then four years at SWK.

About how old are you at this point?

Oh, man, I was 33.

Okay, and you're married and have kids? Yes.

I'll never forget when I started presales leader because it

was the same month that we had our second child.

So July 2021.

All right, you've got four years

at a premier partner organization.

I'm going to make the assumption fairly stable.

YoU got a paycheck you can count on.

At some point you decided, hey, I want to

go do this other thing, and I want to

dig deeper into that in a minute.

But one of the things I'm always fascinated to

hear is for people who were married, and especially

if they had kids when they made the jump,

what was that conversation like with your wife?

Hey, I'm going to go make this jump and paycheck is

not guaranteed and we've got a baby on the way.

What was the mood like in the house?

What did your wife have to say about that?

My wife told me when we first got married, or

even maybe after I proposed to her, she said, I

have three basic requirements, just that I know myself as

a spouse that I'm not a fit for.

One is somebody who's in the military who's going to be

away for like six to nine months at a time.

She's like, I just don't know that I can do that.

Number two is someone who's in full time

ministry just because that often takes you out

of the house nights and weekends a lot.

And number three was the owner of a small business

because she had seen that from other family members lived.

And it's tough.

It's challenging in lots of ways.

So that was kind of how I broke it to

her, was I said, I've got to break this.

I'm going to have to break one of these

three, but I have a really good plan.

So that was the conversation.

Here's not just what I want to do.

Here's why I want to do it.

And she already had a sense that

I was headed that direction anyway.

But, yeah, we still laugh about that today.

Was there a series of conversations that led up

to the, hey, I'm doing it, or was it

just straight to, here's the plan, I'm going.

I think at that point she was

so ready to just have a baby.

You hit that seven month Mark and it's like,

I just want this baby out of me.

That I think she was just kind of like along.

It was like, yeah, this sounds good.

It sounds like you thought about this.

I trust you.

There wasn't a ton of pushback or concern,

but I think it was because she was

mentally occupied on, everything was fuzzy for her.

And you can tell me offline if you

planned it that way or just happened that.

But so real quick, no military, no

full time ministry, and no small business.

Well, we know you did the third with your dad.

Having been in the Air Force, was

the military ever a consideration for you.

I was always fascinated by the military, but I think

almost because my dad went that route, he made sure

that none of us went that route because he didn't

go into the academy, any ROTC program in college.

He literally enlisted and was in Vietnam during that.

He was based in Las Vegas at an Air Force base there.

But it was during the time period of

Vietnam, so it wasn't like something that he

wanted all of his sons to go do.

And having grown up presumably in the faith and

going to Christian school was full time ministry.

Ever on the radar or I'm just trying to figure

out, did your wife have some basis for these things,

or was it just like, I know myself well enough

to know that these are not a fit? Yeah.

That one's never been something that

I felt called to full time.

I think that was more growing up in and around a

church, and we went to a Christian college as well.

So I think that you look at people that did

go that route, and I think she's very self aware.

I think that was just her own self awareness to

say, I've thought about what my life could look like

as someone who's married to somebody in the military, for

example, or someone that's married to a pastor.

And I don't know if I want that for me.

We had another guest recently who his wife said,

I don't want to be married to a business. And.

Sounds like a lot of similarities there. Yeah.

All right.

You have your second child, and in

that same month, you start the business.

What were those early, early days like?

I think even leading up to when I made the

cutover from a full time employee to running my own

show, which was basically two years ago in August, it

was just trying to get my first three customers.

That's like, all I was hyper focused on was, how

can I get enough recurring revenue to basically float what

I was used to making as a W two?

Our business is a services business, but we

do very little time and material work.

Almost all of our revenue is subscriptions.

Right, subscription as a service.

So I was just laser focused on that.

Our website today is still almost embarrassing because I've

grown this word of mouth, and literally, the website

that my wife helped me put up two years

ago is what we still have today.

So we didn't put a lot of

focus on marketing or anything like that.

I've been in this business for eight years now.

I have some great relationships.

I feel like I can help some

of my colleagues, friends, software companies, Excel.

How do I at least start with my first three,

so I know I've got a six month runway that

was really the first month, was just locking that down.

I want to get more into what the company

does in just a second, but I am fascinated

by the way that people and companies have found

ways to turn things into a subscription.

We've had Netflix for a long time, and

we've had Spotify and Apple Music for a

long time, but you've got razor blades you

can get on subscription now, and car companies

have experimented with subscription programs for a vehicle.

You are doing something that, to the

best of my knowledge, nobody else is.

And if there are other people, I heard

it from you first, and I'm blown away

that this could be a subscription.

And for people who might be listening, if

you're thinking about a subscription business, let this

be an encouragement to you that you really,

truly can turn anything into a subscription.

So with that, tell us what it is people subscribe

to Presales Leader for what I had done for the

four years prior, and then, like I mentioned, wearing lots

of hats, but doing some of this before that, after

teaching, is what we call presales.

So within complex software sales, meaning not something

that you can just go on someone's website

and pay $49 a month for. Right.

There's no complexity in business process or

technology that will require you to have

a meeting with that company.

Our bread and butter is folks that have applications

that have a big project associated to it.

So you're going to pay somewhere between like

20 and $50,000 for a software solution.

And then there might even be an implementation.

That's two times that.

That's the type of sales where

presales is generally more prevalent.

So we're not salespeople.

We're kind of quasi salespeople.

We're not consultants or architects, but we're alone.

But we are basically those three things

put together, and that's what presales is.

So we take the requirements and have

initial meetings with an end prospect who's

looking at a software solution.

We put together a presentation of the solution

and the software for them, and then we

help the salesperson resolve any concerns, objections, put

a proposal together with a lot of details.

So that's just a general, I just want to make sure

I define what presales is, because I know not all the

listeners would know exactly what presales is or does.

Solution engineering, presales solutions architecture, they have

slightly different purposes, but that all falls

under the umbrella of presales.

So I had this idea of almost every

company in a mid market ERP channel that

I had worked in struggled with pre sales.

A lot of times the companies, there's so

many software companies out there, but when people

think of tech, they think of like Google,

Salesforce, Oracle, they think of Big tech.

Those companies have benches of pre salespeople, right?

They have people with all

different levels of experience.

But there are so many software companies out there

that built an app because they had a great

idea, but they really struggle to demonstrate it.

If you've ever been part of an evaluation

process of a software, and you walked away

and said, that demo was terrible.

Like, I'm sure the software is good, but it

was actually a really bad presentation, I was so

distracted by fill in the blank, right?

That's what we do.

We help those software companies present their software in

a way tHat's going to be really cohesive, that's

going to allow them to achieve more sales.

So that's basically what we did.

That's what I'd done.

And then what we did when I started the business

was I took that to market as a subscription service.

That's how it started.

And you talked a minute ago about your goal was

get your first three customers as quickly as you can.

Who is your customer?

It's either a software reseller of an ERP

system or it's the software publisher themselves.

So it's someone who's reselling software in a

channel like Sage or Acumatica or NetSuite.

Or it's actually those smaller software companies that kind of

live in those ecosystems that usually the target is somebody

that's under 40 or 50 million in revenue.

But we have everything down to like startups that are

pre revenue, that aren't ready to bring on a new.

They're not going to go get a presales person

on staff because they don't need somebody full time.

So they bring us on as a service.

You mentioned something a minute ago, and I may have

misheard it, but I think you said something to the

effect of it's really hard to hire for presales.

Why do you think that is?

I think, number one, a lot of

people don't understand what presales is.

So I think there's no career path in

college to go take for presales like there

is for accounting or software development.

Every single person that is in

presales did something else before.

You are a consultant and you liked the sales

side, you are a salesperson and you actually like

to dig into the technology deeper than just kind

of running a sales process and doing deals.

So everyone's path into this, it's amazing to talk

to people that have been in presales for five

or ten years, because teacher, programmer, I've heard all

sorts of crazy prior careers before getting into presales.

So I think that part makes it hard to start.

And then I think on top of that, unless you

come out of a really big tech experience that had

a formal education and training program around how to do

presales, well, people that do stumble into it aren't always

given the tools to be successful.

And that's why part of what I see

my job is, is creating new presalespeople.

That's like, we hire probably 50% people that have done

this before and 50% people that are brand new.

And that's because the talent

pool just is that shallow.

The whole genesis of why we exist and why our

customers use us is because they struggle to either retain

presalespeople or find them in the first place.

And that's kind of the obstacle that we take away. Man.

I was thinking about kind of the

pool of talent that's available for this.

If we think of this in concentric circles, that outer

ring of the entire ecosystem of people that know this

one application really well, such they can demonstrate the value

and walk people through it and translate the requirements to

the system, we start with that outer circle, and it's

not that big of a circle.

I mean, there's probably several dozen players, maybe

100, maybe 150 players that do this.

And then from there, within their teams, you've got accounting

staff and you've got HR, and you've got all this,

and then you've got go down a layer, and you've

got your salespeople, and you've got your technical people.

So you're absolutely right.

I mean, the bullseye is pretty small.

How have you found talent?

Or maybe, I guess the question is,

how have you developed the talent?

So, for me, I'd say 75% of the people that

work at the companies today were people I knew or

knew of or had worked with in some capacity in

the past, even, like, from a partnership standpoint, or they

were a customer at one point.

Something along those lines, how we develop people, I

think it's the teacher in me that actually has

always wanted to build out a pretty rigorous onboarding

structure for folks and training experience.

I still don't give it the amount of time that

I would love to today just because we're all time

constrained, but I think that we probably do that piece

better than most, even though I'm not 100% satisfied.

Even where we're at, we really have a

very formal structure to bring people on.

Teach them the application, teach

them the role they get.

You know, submit recordings that are reviewed and get really

detailed on based on a rubric that we've built.

And then the other part is, most of our

staff is in our office here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,

or we have a small office in Portland, Maine.

So our junior people are usually seeing it in

person every day, which I think if you look

at the industry as a whole and presales and

technology working remote, and that flexibility is awesome.

But for someone that's trying to make a change in their

career to a new, totally new field, totally new role, being

able to open the office door right here and then knock

them, ask me a question, or when we're walking for coffee

across the street, tell me about what they're struggling with on

a deal is a differentiator for us.

The world seems pretty divided on the

whole, in office versus remote front.

And it sounds like you guys have really focused on

hiring people that are going to be in office.

Do you have a handful of remote folks? We do.

The majority of them are people I've worked with

in the past or know of or have experience. That's.

I think the biggest piece is if

it's not necessarily trust like you're not

working, it's more you're autonomous.

And those roles are also field. Those people travel.

Sometimes I'd almost prefer them to be on the road

in front of customers or at home in front of

customers than hanging out with us here in an office.

But the more that we evolve and the more that

we grow as a leadership team, we talk about it.

It's almost like at this point, we're almost to the point

of, if you can't be out of one of our physical

locations and you're a junior employee, we can't hire.

Just we're not going to be able to pour

what we want into you over Google meet. Yeah.

There's so much that gets learned just

by osmosis of being around your colleagues.

So I wholeheartedly understand and appreciate that.

Going back to kind of getting the business off the

ground, Was it just you right out of the gate,

or did you have other people that joined you?

Did you have a co founder?

It was just me in August.

I brought on my first hire

in September here in Lancaster.

This was the year that you started?

Yeah, basically 45 days in.

I brought in a second employee, my first employee. Wow.

So you must have found those

first three customers really quick. I did.

I had a good pipeline of three more,

so that was my concern of, this is

awesome, but how do I expand and scale?

Which was always the goal, not just to be kind

of a Rogue 1099 for a couple of companies. Right.

It was.

I actually want to build a business around this. Yeah.

So you land those first three customers really fast,

which, for brand new businesses, that's pretty rare.

And that must speak to the relationships

that you've built over the years.

Not many businesses hire that first employee that

quickly unless they've got some capital behind them.

But from what I know, man, you've just been

on a hiring spree and you've grown a ton.

How many people do you have on your team today?

If I take, we have two open positions right now.

We'll probably be around 18 employees

by the end of the quarter.

So by the end of September,

we'll be somewhere around 18.

So two years in, going from

one to 18, that's fantastic.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

It's definitely added a lot of administrative back end to

the business that you also have to solve for.

So we've recently started hiring some of those

types of roles, like administrative assistants and just

folks to help out with payroll and all

those things that before were super easy.

You could run the business on a spreadsheet.

That's right.

For a lot of founders, there's kind of a

progression where when you start, you're doing it all.

Are you at a point now where your

job looks dramatically different than it did two

years ago or even twelve months ago?

For me, it's actually gone through different waves because we'll get

to a point where I feel like we're fully staffed and

I'll get out of some of the presales work myself and

solution architecture work, and then we get busy and you can't

ask people to work 60 hours a week, so you just

take on more yourself and then you hire again and then

you get back to a better balance.

So I've probably gone through that three times.

We're in another one of those seasons right now

where half my week kind of looks the same

as it did in August of 2021.

The other half looks totally different.

Mondays, all I do is internal

meetings and presales leader work.

I don't do any client calls just because I always

like to start the week off making sure my team

has everything they need to be successful that week.

And if they need any help, obstacles being cleared

or need to buy something or whatever they need

one to bring to the table on those calls.

So it's starting to change.

But, yeah, for me, it hasn't been a slow transition.

I thought it'd be a line of 90, 1080, 2030, and

it's been a little bit of a Yoyo for me.

I want to talk about that a little bit more.

You said that you thought it was going to be this way.

You had some expectation.

Are there some things that you have tried that have

not worked out the way that you hope they would?

Yeah, definitely.

It's just trial and error, especially for us.

I don't know of any business that I can

look at and mirror what we're doing after them.

We're kind of a new category of business.

We're not a software company.

We're not a software reseller.

We're also not a recruiting firm or a staffing agency.

So I don't have somebody that I can look

at and say, hey, this was their path.

And mine could look similar with my own flavors.

So it's a lot of just trying to

make informed decisions with my leadership team and

committing to follow through on whatever we decided

and also committing to pull the rip cord

and do something different if it's not working.

That's been the evolution for us.

And a lot of times I joke with people, you take

a bunch of solution architects and ask them to start a

company and build a company, and we're big on process.

That's what we do.

So everything we do has process documentation.

We use Monday.

We built our whole operating system in there

for all the things outside of accounting, and

that's just in our nature as our role.

So we've done that for ourselves.

But, yeah, sometimes you get down a path and say, this

just isn't working, and we either need to throw it out

or we need to vastly change the way we're doing it.

Is there a specific example of something you've

had to pull the rip cord on?

So we started this.

Our business is divided into three business units.

Presales, product marketing, and

post sales solution design.

And early on, I had great leadership in presales.

And as the solution design was getting

more traction, I hired a leader.

He's now a co founder for that business unit.

It was like, all right, we're

good here, we're good there.

And trying to figure out what to do with product

marketing has been a big question mark for us.

It's a really important service for majority of our

clients, and it's also a way that we help

train new ses it's like they're not doing live

demos, they're building click through demos, they're building videos

that my team can kind of review and approve.

And if they go through three or four

iterations, it's also a learning experience for them

so that one day they can do presales.

But when I interpret the business from a financial

statement, I look at that and say, we need

to grow that a lot more before we can

bring on a leader for that business unit.

So those were some of the things

that we've just had to figure out.

What we try to do all the time is just

make sure we're doing quality work for our customers.

We don't have any super secret

sales strategy of growing our business.

It's just if we evaluate ourselves based on our

customers growth, and they pay us a certain amount

of money, and they grew ten times what they

sold the year before, everybody's happy.

They stay a customer.

We're their best friend, right?

So we want to do quality work.

So that's been the question is, do

we still even have that practice?

If so, who's going to manage it?

Should we bring someone on and actually

run a loss on a business unit?

Which is weird, for me, at least.

That's like a new concept.

Again, we're not a software company that ran losses for

two years and then became profitable in year three.

We're services company.

There's no VC funding.

We have to turn a profit.

It's just how we've always had to operate.

So, yeah, that's been one recently.

And we actually did decide we hired somebody full

time to run that practice six weeks ago.

So we're still waiting through that.

But that's one example.

What you talked about resonates with me big time.

And my big takeaway, or my experience is that when you

get into something new, if you're going to do it, you

really have to jump in with both feet and do it.

And you can't kind of dabble

with it until it gets traction.

You have to be dedicated to it in

order to get to that point of traction.

Yeah, that's kind of where we arrived to, is like,

if we're going to do this, we need to do

this well, or we shouldn't do it at all.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Your growth has been pretty incredible.

Again, going from you to 18 people in two years

and to the point you just made without outside funding.

Are you surprised at the speed of your growth,

or did you kind of expect this all along?

I think it was a big question mark for

me in the first three months, by month four,

in the second month, I brought on employee number

one, so a second person outside of me.

By month four, I brought on employee number three.

And so I was surprised very early on, I was like,

wow, this is building a lot faster than I had.

I actually learned that I set my goals too

low because when I started the business, I had

set some goals on, like, a five year horizon.

And I think we already are

crushed through those in year two.

So I set the bar way too

low, which is something that we learn.

We go like, whatever we think, we just

go higher now in our goal setting.

But I think for me, we

talked about the subscription model earlier.

That has been the fuel for our growth.

It's easy for me to make decisions when I

can look out six to twelve months and have

subscription agreements with customers that know and like and

trust us and I can count on are going

to pay their bills, right, to make decisions on,

even when you're bootstrapping like we are.

So, yeah, I mean, that's.

From that three to six month point on,

we adjusted our goals and we've just kind

of been executing and adapting since then.

You said a minute ago that you

have just blown through your goals.

Are there things, are other things that

you've been surprised by along the way?

Either surprised in a good way or

surprised in a not so good way.

Two things that I guess one was more surprising.

The other is more something I heard of a really

long time ago, which was the superintendent of the school

that I worked at in the Philly area, which is

like one of the top schools in Pennsylvania, to really

get all sorts of accolades nationally and in the state,

it's a large school district, right?

I mean, we're talking like, their

annual budget is $200 million.

So it's a big organization, even

though it's a public institution.

And the superintendent of that school district, when I

was onboarded as a teacher, said that being the

superintendent is like the best thing in the world

because he gets to participate in the coolest things

that the school is involved in, and he hears

about the best things, like students going to Harvard,

and he's a part of all of that.

And then he's also like the janitor

that cleans up messes after everyone leaves.

And I totally get that now.

Like, the life of a small business owner

and an entrepreneur, you have the highest highs.

And for me, getting an email from a new client

saying that they loved the demo that one of my

new SES did and can't wait to do more opportunities.

With us, you get the highest of highs, and

then you also have to deal with just all

the other stuff, which is a lot.

Sometimes a client is upset.

Sometimes clients struggle to pay their

bills at a company our size.

I don't have an accounting team

to deal with things like that.

It's literally me taking a call sometimes

after hours to understand what's going on.

So I would say that's the biggest

thing that I never understood before.

Now I see it every day.

I think that most people who start a business know in the

back of their mind that not every day is going to be

rosy, that there are going to be bumps along the way.

And I'm sure you went in with that same mindset.

Have you had more of that than you anticipated?

I would say it's been equally balanced.

I don't think it's too set one way than another.

I think I've had to learn to not strive

for perfection just because people are imperfect, including myself.

And when you get a bunch of people together to

try to do anything, you're going to have gaps.

And there's definitely something to be said for just

being able to recover quickly and recover well.

But no, overall, I think anytime we get to

that point, we just slow down a little bit.

And I had great advice from actually a neighbor of

mine who's on like his 7th startup or know, he's

had six successful exits and a really cool guy.

And he told me in month one, he said,

jeremy, I can see it in your eyes.

You're ready to go.

You're just ready to go.

He's like, the biggest advice I can

tell you, slow down a little bit.

And we've had great growth, right?

We've had great growth.

We've built the team to a

really good size in two years.

And there are certain times that the demand for

what we do is big to a certain extent.

Sometimes I think we could be excelling faster, but

I'm trying to take his advice, number one.

But number two, also, just like, let's make

sure that we have an administrative backbone.

I can't add 20 new clients tomorrow, and that's okay.

We're going to do it slow.

We're going to do it methodical.

So the back of my T shirt

says, demos that don't suck, right?

If we start doing demos that suck, that would

be a really big problem, like monumental problem.

What are the parts of your job you talked a minute

ago about today, about half your week, looks like it used

to and about half of your week is different.

What are the parts of the job

that you enjoy most and least?

I would say most, and this has surprised me a

little bit, is I've loved just building the team.

I've managed teams at other companies, but never one

this size and never one that I owned.

Right from a company perspective.

So that part has been super validating, super fun.

We bring our team together twice a year in person.

So we did like a holiday party last year, and then

we did a company on site in May and just getting

everybody together and having some fun, playing golf, going out to

eat, working on stuff here in the office together.

Those are some of the best days.

And it has nothing to do

with revenue growth or clients.

It's just literally building this team

and hanging out with one another. It's culture.

Yes, culture.

Those are some of the best times.

And even seeing some of the junior folks we bring

on that don't know even what Presales was two weeks

ago, and watching them win their first deal, that's pretty

exciting too, for everyone when those happen.

The other side of it, the administrative complexities of

running a fast scaling company, especially one that because

of what we do in our client work within

accounting software and solution design, it's almost like I

can't let us do something poorly administratively.

So good example.

I was talking to a friend's company.

They just were acquired recently and

they weren't on accrual basis accounting.

They were a cash basis company, which is really common.

But for me, day one we've been accrual

and there's an administrative overhead to do that.

And for listeners that don't know what that is, it's

just how you look at your financial statements, right?

If you're a certain size company,

you have to be Accrill basis.

And to make that change at some point is really hard.

And I thought, well, if we're going to scale to

be that revenue number eventually, let's just start there now.

So I've almost put more work on us in some ways.

And that's the stuff that it's always the last

thing to do on my list, and it's also

hard to train to get somebody else to do.

So it's just like all those, it's like

five minute tasks, but it's 100 of them.

And that's the stuff that is the later nights, I'm not

up on late nights doing demos or things like that.

It's that other stuff and it's not fun.

It's just kind of like rote administrative work.

So those are the times where I'm like, oh, man, I

got to figure out how to transition this to somebody else.

But that also is going to take

more time too, that I don't have.

If you could talk to the jeremy of two years

ago today, having been through what you've been through, what

advice would you go back and give to yourself?

I would say trust the people you hire quicker.

Number one, I would say shoot your goals higher.

I think being okay, shooting for more.

I'd rather miss the mark by 50% than

exceed it by 200% because that means we

were operating under our true capability.

And there's all sorts of business

books and stuff to say that.

But until you actually put a goal together that

you think is really high and then achieve it

too fast, it just feels a little lackluster.

So, yeah, that would be a definite.

Another one would just be really go set your if whatever

you think you can do from a growth standpoint, like multiply

that by ten and that should be your goal.

Hire an admin six months in rather

than a year and six months in.

Those would be my top three.

Those are great suggestions.

Well, man, what do you attribute your success to?

So we have a quote on our wall.

It's actually by Kathy Truitt, the

founder of Chick Fil A.

And we still are working on a company

mission statement and vision as a leadership team.

It's hard to carve out time to do that, so we

do it in many workshops and we're working on that stuff.

But I would say that quote from the founder

of Chick fil A says, it's something I'm paraphrasing,

but it's like the more we focus on becoming

better, our customers demand that we become bigger.

And that has been, from day one for

me, something that we've had on the wall.

Even at our first co working space,

before we had our own offices.

And anytime someone's visiting us at the

office, they ask what it is.

We explain to them why it's on the wall.

And we're not a business that

has hundreds of customers, right?

It's subscriptions and people doing

things to fulfill those subscriptions.

So that's always been our mantra.

If we can offer presale services on a subscription

basis that are more cost effective than a full

time W two, and allow our clients to grow

their business, close more deals faster at higher dollar

values, then we'll grow without trying to do it.

We don't need a new website with SEO and AdWords.

At some point we might get immature enough to grow into

some of that, but if we just take care of the

customers we have and focus on doing better demos ourselves, the

rest of it's going to take care of itself.

And it worked for him.

I mean, there's Chickfila everywhere, right?

I probably had it twice last week.

So real quick, you talked about the website and

we stated early on that you've really invented a

whole new category of business, SEO or not.

Are there people out there searching for this?

We've had a couple people come to our website

that have looked at pre sales as a service.

I only know of one other company that I

don't even know if they're in business anymore.

It was like one guy in the UK that

does pre sales as a service for one application.

So I don't know that people necessarily are going to

Google and searching for pre sales as a service.

But mean, like I said, our business has

grown word of mouth and just through the

little ERP ecosystems that we operate within.

So I'm not sure.

And that's where the question you asked me

earlier about are you quick to adopt technology?

And my answer was, I used to be.

One of those reasons is because one thing I've learned

in the last two years is that in a certain

way, business hasn't changed in hundreds of years.

People do business with people that

they know, like and trust.

And that's really what it's about for us too.

It's all of our growth and the

customers that continue to renew with us,

it's relationships providing them value.

The more value we can provide them, the

longer they want to stay with us.

So, especially in a world where so many marketing

technologies and inbound methodology, and we've dabbled in some

of that, and I have in prior companies too.

But for me, it comes back

to relationships, people, nothing tops relationships.

Yeah, absolutely.

What's one question you've been asking yourself lately?

One question I've always noodled on, especially recently when you're

a self funded business, I think there's always this question

of, do we do a round of funding?

Do we bring in a capital injection and

throw kerosene on what we're already doing?

People build businesses both ways.

That's one that I don't have plans on looking for.

But when you have other peers that start a

business that way, do a round of funding for

$20 million, spend a year building something cool.

And I feel like to a certain extent, they have

less stress on them because it's not their own money.

The more people I've asked, though, they said not to

do that because it comes with a different stress.

So, yeah, that's one that I've been asking myself.

There's always the desire to do

what you're doing better and faster.

It's one that I've kicked around myself and thought,

is that a route that we should go?

Last question, what's next? What's next?

We're doing more of what we have been doing.

We're going to focus on the customers that we have.

We may extend into another business unit at some

point when we feel like we've primed the four

that we're doing right now, but all still largely

within the core offerings of what we do.

My quick answer would just be more of what

we've been doing, and if we talk in another

two years, I hope to be 40 employees.

Fantastic.

Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for being

a guest in the thick of it.

I look forward to checking in with you in

a couple of years and seeing where you're at. Awesome.

Well, thanks for the opportunity to get on to chat.

It's always fun to talk to somebody that you guys are

definitely ahead of us in your life cycle of maturity as

a business, so it's always good just to hear from you.

And even the questions you asked were very interesting.

Appreciate that.

Was Jeremy Potoka, founder and principal

solutions Architect of Presales Leader.

To learn more, visit presalesleader.com.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at intro@founderstory.us.