167 | What business leadership needs to focus on, based on the stage of your business with successful serial entrepreneur Indus Khaitan

Businesses go through different stages and each stage requires a different focus in order to grow in the most effective way. But when you are in a business it is not always clear what stage you are in.
Hence, in this episode, we are reviewing the different stages of growth every business goes through and highlighting what should be the focus in each stage.

We are doing this with the assistance of Indus Khaitan, who uses an example of gold diggers from the gold rush, to explain the stages of business growth. It is a fun and highly educational conversation in which we will cover:

💥 What are the stages of company growth
💥 What does leadership need to focus on in each stage
💥 What roles need to be added to the company in each stage
💥 and much more...

In addition, towards the end of the episode, we discuss how can your company save significant amounts of money by better managing the software that you are using, and by optimizing the types and number of licenses you are paying for.

Connect with Indus Khaitan on Linkedin
Check out Quolum, and find where you can save money on your software licensing.

Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏

Transcript

Indus Khaitan: 0:00

Your job as a founder is to do only two things. You are building you are selling. How are you selling? Not with the help of tools, but the Rolodex that you already have. Say, Hey, I'm gonna go onto LinkedIn, find all my connections and pitch them my product. So if you need something, you need something that is helping you pitch your product to an audience, which is on LinkedIn rather than a Salesforce or a HubSpot.

Isar Meitis: 0:23

Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Matis, your host, and the amazing person you listen to is Indus Khaitan. Indus is the CEO of Qualom. He's a successful serial entrepreneur with an amazing life story. But in addition to all of that, he has an amazing way to describe how companies grow between different stages. and he uses this fascinating and fun analogy to the world of gold searching, literally gold searching not in current day term. If you would like to identify which stage of growth your company is in, what are the different stages and what is important in each stage, this is gonna be really fun and really educational for you for sure. In addition, in the end, we're gonna talk about how your business can save a lot of money on the software that is using, because that's what his company does. It's gonna be a great practical and theoretical conversation, and both aspects can help you grow your business. Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and this is going to be a really fun episode, and it's gonna be a really fun episode because we're gonna play a little analogy game on the business world and look at business growth, different stages that a company goes through. Through a very different lens, which I absolutely love, and that is gonna come from my guess today. Indus Khaitan and Indus by himself has an incredible story. He was born in India in a small mining town where, you know, two or three homicides a day was the norm. And he managed to escape that move to the US start businesses grow his business. He's currently the CEO and the founder of a company called Quolum, who helps other companies save money on their SaaS expenses, which by itself, could have been a whole different episode. But what we're gonna focus on today is because he himself has been through so many businesses and because he helps so many other businesses, he has an amazing view into stages of companies and what you need to focus on in each stage, and what do you need in order to transition in order to the next stage, which I don't care where you are on that journey, you'll be able to find yourself in description and enjoy the benefits of understanding what's ahead and maybe learn a little about what was behind you. So with that, I'm really, really excited to welcome Indus to the show. Indus welcome to the Business

Indus Khaitan: 3:59

Growth Accelerator. Hey, thank you, Isar great. Having

Isar Meitis: 4:03

Indus, before we dive into the actual process that you want to talk about, because I think it's really interesting. Take us through your journey. When did you figure this out? Like where in your career you're like, huh it's not really this linear flow of company going from a solopreneur to small company to a startup, to midsize to a corporate, there's steps. What and where in your career did you find that out and have it as a more clearer thing in your head?

Indus Khaitan: 4:36

I think it, it came very late. I'm gonna be honest with you. You know, just like everything in the world, you do it by learning and failing multiple times. So in my first startup, we built a mobile security product, and our customers are very large companies. These were Fortune 10. So we had 3 of the Fortune 10 in the first few years of a journey of a company. And we would do things that we thought are, you know, pretty normal for a startup. You know, team of 10 you were trying to sell to a large company. You'd do like a kid-like behavior. Yeah. As a young startup, of course we made mistakes, but we ended up acquiring some of these customers. Now where it dawned on me in the fast forward 6-7 years down the road, whatever advice that we got was not context specific, it wasn't for us. It was very general purpose advice on doing things. And I'll give you an example. Let's say you have somebody who's running a very large sales business, a hundred million dollars in revenue. You go to him saying, Hey Matt, I am closing this deal with this customer. What are the three things I should worry. about And of course he's going to give you the right answer from his perspective. Yeah, he's gonna ask you some peeling questions, but you know, that's not enough. So what I realized and what dawn on me 5-6 years down the road, so you know, Bitzer was incredibly successful We sold the Oracle, but what I, what dawn on me many years later that each company has its own stage of growth, which is different. For each individual, each company at a point in time, and you cannot apply a large, just like you cannot apply a large bandaid. To a small wound and vice versa to everything else in the world. You can't go, you know, talk to a corporate M and A expert if you are just doing an acqui hire for your startup. Or if you just need a$5 as a loan, you ask your mom. But if you need 500, you ask your dad. So So it's, the context that was missing. I kind of, you know, dawned on me many years later that companies have stages.

Isar Meitis: 7:06

I love that. I, I, I agree with you so much. I think it's, it's amazing to, even today, like with so much data on the internet, so many books written on these topics, you somehow have to go through it yourself and get your own scars to go through"Yes, it is really, really different." And, and I've been, you know, in small startup, I've been in midsize companies and then two companies ago we were acquired and I spent two years in a really large corporation with, you know, tens of thousands of employees, well not tens of, but thousands of employees around the world and billions of dollars in revenue. And I don't even know how many departments. And you understand it's a very, very different beast. It can't work the same way. Like the smaller company. And the smaller company wasn't small. We were 700 people doing a billion dollar in revenue. You know, it wasn't a small company, and yet it was a very, very different company once you go to the next level up. So I think there are a lot of insights there that people can take from your journey. Let's really go through your process. I, I love the way you tell the story and I'll just let you run with it and I'll ask questions as you go along. So idea is very

Indus Khaitan: 8:19

simple. So, and this has happened to explorers of pioneers in the world who thought, hey, Gold is being found in San Francisco. Let's go west. This is 1849. If you remember the history of how California or San Francisco Bay, the greater Gold County, you know, again, I'm going visually into mid California, was founded A bunch of people thought, hey there is gold. And what we call it exploders, they towards that opportunity. This is very analogous to how two founders and a dog that jump on an idea, say,"oh, we got an idea about this, you know, cool software. Let's go build it." These two founders and a dog or the guys and the gals who rush to the west are explorers. They are the pioneers. They're trying to figure out whether really gold exists. They just heard from someone about this opportunity. And they go to this particular location. And the first thing they do is, where can I start digging? They don't care whether there's a river stream flowing by to feed them, to wash them, whether there's food. They just need to know the exact location to start digging for that proverbial piece of gold. And these are explorers. Of course, they dig and you know, some people come and say, Hey, can I help you? Say, of course I'm digging here and help me. And then they put a camp, they put a tent site, they find the nearest river to, you know, cook, wash meal. And essentially that exploration phase turns into a settlement, which is four or five more people join your journey to help you dig, to clean up to cook, because you as an explorer, you know how to dig. But you get a cook to help you with meals, to you get, you know, you know, helper to help you wash. So the explorer phase converts into a settlement and that

Isar Meitis: 10:22

not, I wanna pause you before that because I really like the analogy and, and, and, and again in the, in the other stages as well. But let's take this to business for a second. Right. In, in the business, really what even brings people on board is if it has one of two things, right? Either an amazing visionary, which will say, I know I'm gonna find gold, like you guys have to join me because we are gonna find gold together. And then he convinces people that they should join in your story. The settlement in my in, in the real world, the business, right? The startup, it's not just my crazy idea. My crazy idea is gonna be worth x number of hundreds of millions or billions in the next 10 years. The other option is he or she lucks out and actually hits gold the first time they dig. Right? In the business side, it would be, Hey, look. Look how many, how much money we made in the first six months with no technologies. Just the two of us. No real code, just you. A bungee cord in a clip, and we managed to put this thing together and there's a real need, meaning people are waiting to pay us money for this bungee cord in a clip that we put together, and hence why you should join us. So I think that the cool thing in this analogy is that, and, and in the story is that for founders to go from the early founder's face, I will not sleep, I will not eat, I will not get paid. I will do all these things. To go from that to your settlers phase of, okay, now it's a small startup. They either have to have an amazing, amazing conviction on what they're doing and convince people, or they gotta actually make this work very early on. Do you agree? Do you think there's other stuff that are missing?

Indus Khaitan: 12:21

No. I think the three key ingredients is when you go from, hey, just two guys and a dog. Is absolutely right. You need people to help you dig more or build the product and help find early customers. And the group that was, you know, two people in the dog now becomes, you know, team of five or 10, which is, you are absolutely right. An early startup, which is, you know, our 10 member team helping you build something, helping find people who could pay for. And, and the third part is keeping all of this together, a little bit of a back office, some finance person, some HR person. Again, very small. This, you know, one person could be playing three or four roles, but you still need to be fed, need to grow, need to dig and need to find customers.

Isar Meitis: 13:16

I like that. I, I think the other interesting thing that you brought in here is the idea that now there's overhead. Because you said in your settlement thing, like, okay, somebody has to wash the clothes, somebody has to make food, somebody has to, I dunno. In the settlement thing, and here again, now we have a business. Okay. You, yeah. Maybe you don't have a CFO but somebody has to do finance. Finance, yeah. And, and it's not gonna generate revenue. It's an overhead to the business that when it's just the two founder. There's really no overhead, you know, especially if one is like the visionary salesperson in the other writes code if we're talking about software, there is no overhead. Like everybody's a hundred percent productive and towards the goal of generating revenue. And once you start getting bigger, the concept of overhead becomes very, very clear. And I think even there again, when you think about a settlement that has to balance with how much gold you find, right?

Indus Khaitan: 14:09

That's correct. And it has to balance how much goal you found and or, or if you find more and then you get more and more people engaged with your startup and, and how would people engage? And to your other point, they don't trust you. They don't know whether this is viable. So it is your own charisma. Look, I found this one ounce and I'm gonna found, I'm gonna find kilos of it. Right? And that's where you attract more people for a cause of what you're trying to solve. In, in a tech startup, it's easy, right? Hey, we have a problem, we have a solution that we are solving. Look at these early success, which is, you know, we have few customers who are paying us money. Do you wanna join the party? You know, do you wanna become part of the settlement? Yeah. The

Isar Meitis: 14:58

other thing you said that I think is, is again, is a, is a perfect analogy, is there needs to be some operations, right? Again, you talked about cooking and, and cleaning clothes or washing stuff, but what that means in the business is once you grow beyond the first few people, you have to have some kind of process in place. Not necessarily for everything, not necessarily down to dotting all the i's and crossing all the T's, but you have to have processes. Otherwise this thing will be very inefficient. And going back to your your story, you won't be able to feed all the settlers that are now around you because it's just not efficient. So what's kind of like from a size perspective the stage that the business can, let's call it sustain in this early stage startup thing.

Indus Khaitan: 15:55

So, you know, the early stage startup is two or three people, or four people in the founding team, which is, Hey, let's go dig or let's solve this problem. And then the settlement phases between four to five to 25. Got it. Where you, you. And this is very, very proverbial. You found gold, which is equivalent to product market fit in the tech world, right? There's early signs of of glisten and success. And now that we could see, oh, we need to put processes in place. We can, we can dig in other areas. We expand the product, we build more features, we go to other towns to sell the gold, which is, you know, doing more sales. And that's when you realize, oh, this is much bigger than we thought. This is not just one ounce of or few ounces of gold, but this is a much bigger opportunity. And then, you know, from a team of 50, then you start thinking about what's the next stage of the growth? Where do we go next? How we become bigger than where

Isar Meitis: 17:00

we are. I love that. I, again, I think. You know what, let's talk about the next stage and then I'm gonna add what I wanted to add. So, so now you're in, basically from a company perspective, it means I have real product market fit, I have real clients that are paying me, I have systems of operation in house. What I'm lacking is scale, right? It's working. Now what?

Indus Khaitan: 17:29

Now what is the word goes out? Or you push the word out saying gold is found. Or you have a product market fit. Or customers start coming to you and you don't have enough salespeople to sell them. Or you do not have products to give them. So now you are ready for scale. And the next phase is what we call is town planning or town building. And, you know, which is very analogous to your real world. So think of a village, doesn't have a sewage line, doesn't have a sewer, doesn't have a water supply. You know, we go to a well or to a hand pump to grab water. Town planning is we have electricity 24 by 7. Plug the toilet, it goes to a central system. So there's a lot of effort that goes on to building that stage and in a real business, I'll give you an example. When you are 25 people team, you will not have a CRM. You are managing the clients in a spreadsheet. You're contacting them ad hoc over phone call. There are very lose record keeping. In the town planning stage, you say, oh, I need Salesforce, I need HubSpot, I need a customer success tool. I need a dialer. And these are essentially Indirect revenue generating functions that support the business to scale. And you go from a team of let's say 25-50 to team of 500, which is incredible scale, incredible amount of talent, and then more sales, more customers, more people kind of start building the infrastructure and the company growth. And I wanna ask

Isar Meitis: 19:09

you the question I wanted to ask before, especially with your background in, in the SaaS monitoring world, right? Because I was hoping you're gonna say what you said. You go to that level. Now you need a CRM in place, now you need, sales management. Now you need to record your calls. Now you need a better finance infrastructure, it infrastructure, all these things that a bigger operation needs. I'm a, I'm a weird animal in the business world because I've been in large businesses and in small businesses, but because I've been in the bigger business, And because SaaS could be really, really cheap today, if you know what to pick and what level of product to pick within it. You can start with all these things In day one, like I just ran a company. We were very few people. We had literally everything. A large company would. From a CRM perspective, to an HR payment platform, to IT infrastructure, to emails to automation systems to production processes to task management, distributed solutions, all these things because it's really cheap. If you know what you're doing and you're getting the benefits of a large setup. with Almost no overhead because it's, it's relatively cheap. What do you think pros and cons of doing something like this in an earlier stage? Meaning of actually putting in place all these systems and processes, let's say day one, just because I think today it's doable. Literally having them, all these things that the large corporations have in day one when you're a founder and co-founder. When the dog, like you said, what are the benefits, but also what are the disadvantages of doing these things?

Indus Khaitan: 21:00

I like to keep things a little bit more, like a minimalist, you know, don't put processes in place. Even if you want to have systems, put minimal systems in place. For example, don't get into Salesforce right away, not even HubSpot right away, you get something which is very easier to use to send emails to customer. So, you know, and then graduating into that direction. So you could technically put processes in place, but what's gonna happen is when, let's say when you're ready to scale, a vice president of sales would come out and say, ah, I don't like that. I need something more flashier and scalable to scale my business. Or he or she loves a totally different tool. And then it would have more pain migrating than adopting a brand new product. So be very careful in choosing an early set of tools. Second point I wanna make is, although it's easier to adopt brand new tools today and then you know, put in place, but it also, you know, the right word is we get jaded with what the tools could do. And you kind of, for keep in mind, your job as a founder is to do only two things. You are building you are selling. How are you selling? Not with the help of tools, but the Rolodex that you already have. Say, Hey, I'm gonna go onto LinkedIn, find all my connections and pitch them my product. So if you need something, you need something that is helping you pitch your product to an audience, which is on LinkedIn rather than a Salesforce or a HubSpot.

Isar Meitis: 22:34

I love your answer. I think it's brilliant. I, I, I really agree with everything you said and I wanna make it into actionable. Recommendations. So recommendation number one is find tools that can easily then export the data into another tool that is not completely proprietary, that has clear integrations and or clear transfer capabilities to the next level up, or five levels up. It doesn't matter, whatever the thing be. So I think that's an awesome recommendation. Recommendation number two is look for the tools who will serve the things you're trying to do at that point versus just, I need a crm. So instead of the concept of I need a crm, the concept is I love the concept of job to be done. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but Job to be done really analyzes what am I actually trying to achieve? And look for the tools that can help you do that with, again, looking into the future. Okay, a year. Am I stuck with the data in a place I can't use it anymore, or can I use that data in the next thing over? I think both are really great recommendations for people who are just getting started. That being said, I must say, again, coming from my world, and again, it's not totally fair, I'm a very techy guy. I love systems and processes, so for me it's easy and it makes sense to put these things in place. But I think again, the availability of cheap and in some cases, free tools that are out there today that are actually really, really good to help you manage basically anything in your business is there. And it was not there 20 years ago. Like 20 years ago. You had to buy the thing, install it, have it, people have somebody set it up. And that's somewhat still true for like Salesforce, but, but there are cheap CRMs and you know, to, to be fair, even HubSpot have a free CRM and it's a really good free CRM. Now, it doesn't have the bells and whistles, but just as a CRM to manage your contacts and see who did what and so on. Even if you don't use any of their other tools, you connect it to your Gmail account and run emails from over there, it will still track everything that you're doing. So I think there's an interesting opportunity today to do both things that we're saying on one hand, don't go crazy. Look for things to solve problems you actually have in your current stage. On the other hand, two that are very, very capable to grow with you, that are again, practically free in the view of a young business. Totally,

Indus Khaitan: 25:05

totally agree with that and, and keep it something that you could change and not. Pay any amount of effort in managing it. That's the

Isar Meitis: 25:14

key. Yep. And, and, and a hundred percent agree with that as well. Again, personal bad example, so I get a good, good example. Bad example. When we became that huge corporation that I talked about before, you know, 7,000 employees, whatever, it's obviously running on Salesforce and we couldn't do anything because there's a Salesforce implementation team, one. And we went through this huge merger. So they're in charge of implementing every Salesforce change across whatever 50 departments and three different companies are integrating. And it was impossible to do anything because you have to have an implementation team that has a backlog of a year and a half to be able to Wow. Run the day to day the way you wanna run it. And it's like, this is ridiculous. I, I just can't use Salesforce, period. So now you start having different groups within the organization. Rigging their own little solutions because they can't wait for the real solution to come in. And then the whole thing is obviously worthless because now everybody has their own little solutions. So I, I think all the, all the tips you gave are priceless. Let's continue in our journey. So now you said the idea was, was building a town? Right. Figuring out the infrastructure, failing around, you know, a, a mayor and, and the guy who runs construction in, it's like there's a lot of other stuff that's going on, right. So I'll let you continue the story.

Indus Khaitan: 26:35

I think you know, first you have explorers, which is the entrepreneurs starting the company. Second is the settlers. People wanna work with you. These are, again, you know, very much like you as a pioneer, but you know, they need help. So you, they come together and as the business is ready to scale, you wanna build a town. You need town planners, people who are expert in putting electricity and putting planning code and zoning and all of that. And. The folks are town planners because they have done it many times over. They may not be as good as figuring out where the goal is or what the ideas are or where the customers are, but they are operationally very savvy. They're gonna do what, what you functionally assign them to do. And if you look at a business, this is very similar. See, when you started, you were product and sales two founder. And then you got a few more people, little bit finance, little bit of engineering, little bit of a, you know, some more product developers. Account planning is, you need hr, you need seven people. Team. You need finance. Somebody to look at the books. You need facilities, you need legal. You need a marketing team, which is fully built out beyond the four or five people that you have. And this town planning now tells other people, other towns that. We can go do business with this town rather than do business with the two guys and a dog. So you become very legend. You have media talking about it, you have press covering you, and that is a scale of between 50 to 500 people, I would say as, as a business, as a growth in that journey.

Isar Meitis: 28:17

Yep. And, and like you said, that means you know, now you have. Facility and an IT infrastructure and, and, and a CFO probably, and like all the, all the other stuff that makes a bigger company, a company, right? The, there's the, all the infrastructure with all the overhead and the complexities that come with it, but that then make scale. Possible, and I think that's the key, right? You do this not because you want to do this, you do this because that makes scale possible. If you don't have proper financial reporting and you don't have a cfo, nobody's gonna write you a hundred million dollar investment check and you need that check in order to bring the. Two to 500 people that you mentioned, because in the beginning, the product that you have, the goal that you found is not gonna be enough to pay for all of them, in most cases. In some cases might be, but in most cases you won't. So all these things are, we can call them necessary evils, but they enable scale. What's the next step?

Indus Khaitan: 29:19

Next step is easy. You build a town, very successful, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. How do you create more towns? How do you repeat the process? How do you preserve the town so that people do not defraud you off the revenue that you already have? So you bring politicians, you bring diplomats on board. They will make sure that the town survives forever. We can create new towns based on the recipe that the two guys and the dogs started. And we have hygiene and compliance. You don't run afoul with the laws of the land. All of that is, is in progress, you know, beyond the town planning and, and the politicians and the diplomats. Make sure that you do it. Of course the key point there is, of course, politician as a word, is used very delegatory in our, you know, general purpose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what, what we mean, and that's why I use the word diplomat because slightly more savvy and, slightly more uptight. And the reason we wanna do that because, and you could look at the growth of a company, let's say, let's look at Apple as an analogy, right? Steve Jobs, Steve Wasniak, and probably another recorder. To now Tim Cook running a 2 trillion enterprise. That's the scale of, a diplomat, not calling him a politician, but in a diplomat scale. It's almost like a country. There are multiple towns inside in multiple towns, meaning multiple lines of revenue, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and all of that. And. The good part is early settlers, people who have ideas are still inside the company and churning out these new towns and new products. This is so great.

Isar Meitis: 31:08

I love, you know, it's the second time we're doing this. I absolutely love this story and how well it fits, real companies. You know, to me, one of the biggest challenges that company encounter, and now, now, now go back a little bit in your story. Many, many, many companies get stuck in the now. I won't talk people, I'll talk numbers get stuck around the 20 million, 20 to 30 million range because the next level of scale takes a whole different set of things that they just don't have. And so, and there's nothing wrong with it. By the way, running a 20 to 30 million company is amazing, but if you do wanna do the next level over, it's exactly that stage where you. Much better infrastructure where you need people who know how to run bigger companies. And now going to the next level of scale that you're talking about, and I I, the word I would pull out of the diplomat and that you've used is, is governance. Governance. Right. Because, because if you, if you now let's say, wanna open another facility, so you have an office, I'll take me. We had offices in Tel Aviv and we wanted to office open offices in Orlando. They have to work the same way. They have to follow the same rules. They all, or not exactly the same rules, but they have to be similar things in these two things for this company to work effectively. And that those things fall under governance. How do we hire, what's the company culture? How do we pay benefits? what's the core values that we all agree to operate by? How do we raise. How do we talk to clients? Because if the US office is gonna talk to the same clients in a different way than the Israeli office, well they're gonna say, what the hell's going on here? So there are so many different things you gotta start putting in place as you grow, in order to have governance on the inside and consistency to the outside world. So when they look at you, I don't care if I talk to Lisa or John, and I don't care if I talk to the Japan office or to the Germany office or to the US office. I'm gonna get the same results in the same amount of time, in the same format that fits the process that the other people already told me. Cause otherwise, It's not going to work. And, and that takes a whole different level of skills. An organization that if you just even, you know, a company of 50 people, like you say, doing 25, 30 million, which is awesome, don't need the same level of governance and consistency.

Indus Khaitan: 33:41

Totally agree. I think governance is the word because, you know, you could run. Whatever you wanna do with five people team. But if you have 5,000 processes, infrastructure, compliance and governance has to be in place a hundred percent.

Isar Meitis: 33:57

Awesome. I think it's, again, I love the way you tell the story. I think it's a great way to think of business, and it's a great way to figure out which step you're in and to figure out what you're missing for the next step, I wanna spend a few minutes talking about what your company does, because I find it so needed, and I will let you explain in a way to what you guys do, but I think it's, it became a lot more deed in this past year when the endless amount of money that got poured into businesses, I wouldn't say stopped, but there's definitely a much, much smaller stream of money coming in and it's a lot harder to raise money. And if raising money was like, well, we kind of growing from last year to this year, and yes, we lost 20 million or 200 million, but we're growing. Oh yeah, I'll give you a billion dollars valuation and$200 million to spend. I think that's over. So finding ways to save money and become more efficient within your current operation is critical because for the survival of the business. And what I really like about your business does is you do this without actually cutting anything. So now can you tell in a few words what your company does, and then we can talk a little bit how can people do this internally? as far as a mindset and

Indus Khaitan: 35:18

process? Yeah, absolutely. So what happened in the last five, seven years? the money flow became easy. It became cheap. Companies were stuffed in with hundreds of million dollars of free cash and zero interest rate. And as a result, bad habits started coming in. So when everybody has money, guess what happened? Everybody was buying everybody else's products. If you just look at the SaaS business, there are 10,000 SaaS software for marketing and sales. Wow. Now, if you have those many products, the systems and processes made it easier to sell, and hence me as a buyer. I am stuck with these hundreds of different tools and, and licenses and utilization. What did not happen? There were no tools for buyers to manage this onslaught of SaaS. I was using spreadsheets and emails to manage it. So with the money now being tight, the CFOs are being told by the board saying, Hey, cost cutting time. Put hygiene in compliance in place. Remove the risk of security and, and, you know, attack vector. How can you do that quickly? So one area is what people usually do without thinking, Hey, I'm gonna reduce 10% of my staff, which is mindless in my opinion, because you don't, didn't think about it. But what they could alternatively do is what we propose is go look at your software and your cloud expenses. You'll be surprised, you can save 40, 50% of the total expenses right there. If you are an organization of let's say, 500 employee, You are easily spending 10 to 15 million on software and cloud, and our bet is out of that four to 5 million can easily be captured back to the bottom line. That is like profit, hard, hard revenue. You could prevent 25 people from getting laid off with that number and conservatively you could actually do like fi, you know, 50 people in other c. And this is what we do. We come in as the buyer's friend to help optimize software that you bought, cancel licenses that have not been used. And if your renewals are coming up, we help negotiate and get you better rates. Net net 30 to 40% savings added back to your bottom

Isar Meitis: 37:48

line. I think this is amazing and I think I, I saw this firsthand on so many different cases. So the company I was running last minute travel a few years. When I came in, I took over from a very fat organization and they literally, it's people who came from Expedia and they bought all the software that Expedia had, and when I got in, I was a startup mentality guy because I came from a small startup and I started looking what we're spending money on, and there was$40,000 on this and$60,000 on that and 20,000. I'm like, what is this tool? I'm like, oh, it does this and that. I'm like, are we using. Well, not really. Kind of. I'm like, it's$40,000 a year. Yeah, but there's a penalty to get out. I'm like, okay, what's the penalty?$3,000. I'm like, okay, pay them the$3,000 and one out. So in literally my first 30 days in the job, I saved$200,000 by paying like$6,000 worth of penalties for stuff we were not using. Like, it's not that I hurt the business. So that's example number one. Example number two, and and I wanna make it very practical and then I would like you to give a few example cause sure you have a lot. So my second example, we use Click Up in our organization to manage all our tasks and so on. It's a phenomenal task management and team management tool. And you can keep on buying licenses for people for click up. So you add another person, you buy another license. What a lot of people don't know or because. A limited amount of money they didn't care is that every license gives you 10 guests, and those guests can do more or less 95% of what the actual licenses do. So in reality, the vast majority of your employees, I would say 99% of them do not need the full license. They can be on a guest license, a guest license. Is free for every, you get 10 for everyone. So in theory, you could save 90% of your Click Up expense by making 90% of your employees guess, and nothing will change, meaning you don't have to compromise the way you run the business. You're still saving 90% of the expense, and you do that again on a 500 person organization. That's a lot of money. And I would love example like this from you because again, I'm sure you have more examples than I do.

Indus Khaitan: 40:07

We have lot of them. Sometimes I refrain myself naming these as vendors on a public channel. But some, some we have talked about it. It's also widely known. I'll give you an example of a customer that had 550 Zoom licenses, and this is, this is the mindset that is not paying attention to this. So let's say you are in procurement, you wanna buy Zoom. And how do you buy and say, oh, we have 550 employees, we need 550 licenses. You know, pretty straightforward calculations. So you multiply five 50 into, let's say in a hundred dollars per year, which is kind of, you know, mid-level pricing for Zoom for enterprise product. You have what,$150,000 of annual Zoom budget? What was not paid attention is not everybody needs a Zoom license, just like you mentioned about Click Up. Because if you want to consume meetings, you don't need a paid account. Correct. You could, only time you need a paid account is if you're hosting a meeting, which is more than two people in the meeting going beyond 40 minutes. You need a$20 per user per month. And when the customer comes on board, connects the Zoom application to ours, and we do the analysis in 60 day window. Only 40 people created meetings which were worthy of a paid account. Six in such a small window, right? In a one year window. There are roughly 25% of people ever created any meetings which are worthy of a paid account somewhere created like once in a month or whatever. If you're in engineering, give a very special example. You're in engineering, you know, let's say out of 550 you have a, you know, 150 people, product and engineering team. Guess how many engineers will ever create a Zoom meeting? Zero. They will participate in a standup hosted by their boss or hosted by product. Yeah, so technically the company could save. Out$150,000, close to 70 to$80,000. And eventually they did, but not at that level. They still give a lot of people the account, but they saved like roughly$40,000 ish. It was like a give, give and take. And there are many such example. I could name Salesforce, I could name HubSpot. Yep. Millions of dollars worth of annual purchases. People logging in, never, not even once.

Isar Meitis: 42:37

Amazing in us. The conversation was amazing. I think what you're doing is really, really important. Like I said, I think it becomes more important as the faucet that that that ever keeps dollars flowing is shutting down or already shut down depending on who you ask. And so I really, really appreciate you taking the time. I really love the way you share the story about different stages of companies. I think it's brilliant. If people wanna find you, follow you, work with you, what's the best way to connect with you and so on.

Indus Khaitan: 43:12

Google me as Indus, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter, and sometimes do a Zoom call. So feel free to tag me on social, then we'll come on a call.

Isar Meitis: 43:23

Amazing. Thank you so much. This was absolutely great. Thank you. Thank you.

Indus Khaitan: 43:27

All right. Super. Have a great day, Isar nice chatting with you.

Isar Meitis: 43:30

What a great conversation with Indus. This was such a fun conversation and it's such a great prism to look through to identify different stages of business growth through the stages of growth in gold searching. Also, great insights on specifically what to look for and what to do in different companies at different stages and how to save money, and I'm grateful for him sharing that information with me and with you. And if we're talking about business growth in stages, there's a phenomenal episode that talks about a framework for business growth, and it's episode 98. It's called a Proven Business Growth Acceleration Framework shared by a sought after business coach Jerry McNamara. Jerry's an amazing business coach that is helping CEOs in different stages of their career to grow their businesses while making it home for dinner, as he says. So check it out, and until next time, have an amazing week.