SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
How to Organize Chaos with Chris Ronzio, CEO of Trainual
Host Dan Balcauski speaks with Chris Ronzio, the founder and CEO of Trainual. Chris discusses Trainual's rapid growth, his insightful philosophy on chaos in business, and the crucial role of process documentation in scaling a company. He shares compelling stories, including Trainual's marketing collaboration with Montel Jordan and investments from influencers like Damon John. The conversation covers the evolution of Trainual's pricing strategy, the balancing act of process documentation, and the importance of aligning business operations with growth opportunities while maintaining flexibility. Chris also discusses the importance of personal discipline and fitness to his professional success, influenced by his varied career from video production to SaaS entrepreneurship.
01:16 Chris Ronzio's Background and Trainual's Origin
05:42 Organize Chaos: The Philosophy
07:14 Scaling and Documenting Processes
18:59 Challenges and Lessons in SaaS Growth
23:35 Identifying Retention and Churn Issues
24:05 Scaling Strategies for SaaS Businesses
25:00 Adjusting Pricing and Customer Segmentation
27:31 Marketing and Customer Acquisition Channels
33:30 Influencer Partnerships in B2B Marketing
39:09 Personal Insights and Rapid Fire Questions
Guest Links
It's like a small business anthem. And so we produce the song, we produce the music video, and now I'd say we're the SaaS company with the most listens on Spotify. Chaos in a business is a really good thing. Anybody that's listening, if you feel like your life is chaotic and your business is chaotic, think of the alternative. chaos is great. It means that the raw material is mixing things up. There's exciting opportunity, and then you just have to figure out, all right, what do we do? And in what order to. Create leverage and to create profit and to reinvest that into the business. So what I learned is that the price has such a big impact in who it attracts. It's like how bait attracts the right fish. Your price is bait that you're putting out into the world to tell the world who you're for.
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories to the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to speak with Chris Ronzio. I. Chris is the founder and CEO of Trainual, leading SaaS platform, transforming how small businesses onboard, train, and scale teams. Chris has LED Trainual's rapid growth since founding it in 2018. He hosts the Organized Chaos Podcast as a two time entrepreneur of the Year Award finalist, and is the author of The Business Playbook, how to Document and Delegate What You Do so Your Company Can Grow beyond You. Let's dive in. Welcome Chris to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Chris Ronzio:Hey Dan, how's it going?
Dan Balcauski:How's going? I am very excited for our conversation today. It's going very well. I'm excited to have the opportunity to talk to you about something that I have surprisingly been geeking out about a lot, which is documentation that goes beyond and maybe I need to talk to my therapist about why I'm excited about that. But we'll leave that to the listener to see if they could intuit between the lines, why it's so interesting to me right now. Before we get into that, though. Your team sent over a couple of bullet points, and I gotta say one of them jumped out in your background. You had the opportunity to do project with Montel Jordan
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:of the, this is how we do it, fame.
Chris Ronzio:Yes, sir. Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:the heck that is?
Chris Ronzio:Sure. Yeah. So seven years ago or so when we started, the company Trainual is a, training product, a documentation product. And so for businesses to describe, this is how we do it inside their companies. We used to play Monte's song at. Every, all hands meeting at all of our just hype customer events. And so we always had this dream that we would work with him. And so one day we reached out to Montel first on Cameo, if you've heard of that service. And we got on a Zoom call with him and just kind of his fans told him our story. And toward the end of the Zoom call, we pitched him, Hey, Montel here's what our business does. We gotta find a way to work together. Zoom cuts us off or can, or cameo cuts us off and so there's no soliciting, like they don't want you to pitch. 10 minutes later we get a message from Montel on Twitter and he's Hey, I love your company. I love the idea. Let's figure out how to work together. And so over the next couple months we brainstormed with Montel and we came up with a. Remix to his song called This is How You Do It, and it's all about delegation. It's like a small business anthem. And so we produce the song, we produce the music video, and now I'd say we're the SaaS company with the most listens on Spotify. If you search for Trainual
Dan Balcauski:that is so fun and cheesy. I love it. And it feels like cameo is missing out on some additional revenue that they could have maybe helped to bridge that gap. But, we'll leave if they had, if they need some pricing help I'm happy
Chris Ronzio:Send'em my way. I, they may have something like that. Now, this was like super early days of cameo.
Dan Balcauski:Oh man. Too good. Too good. So, I gave a little bit of intro at the beginning. I guess how do you end up creating Trainual? Like kind of give us the early days of your run up to your time in SaaS and now, leading Trainual for the last seven years.
Chris Ronzio:Looking back, it's always kind of easier to draw the dotted line, but at the time I had no idea I'd end up in SaaS. So my first company was a video production company. We did live youth sporting events, so like cheerleading and figure skating and all star dance. It was like the best job as a high school kid. But we did these events, we sold these videos. We sold DVDs and Blu-ray discs and live streaming, and as I grew the company across the US we started doing events in all 50 states. And so we would hire crews. Across the United States and we'd have to remotely train them on how to show up at an event, how to set up, how to sell the videos, how to ship'em back to our fulfillment centers, how to get them, labeled correctly and how to just represent the brand. And so it was all remote. Training. I didn't realize that at the time, but that was really something I learned inside my business. So when I sold that company, I started helping other businesses, consulting on their training on their systems, their processes, their onboarding, their operations manuals. And I saw so many companies have a way that they work, a way that they do what they do and it's not captured in one place. And they needed help with that. And that was really the idea for tra.
Dan Balcauski:Got it. And so. Look one thing really stuck out to me was your previous company for Tray New, as well as your current podcast, are both called Organized Chaos.
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:love that name. Where did that come from?
Chris Ronzio:So after I did my first couple consulting projects, I had sold my first business. I was helping a few friends and I asked them, what is it that I do for you? What value am I providing for you? And a couple of them independently say, you come in here and you organize all of the chaos and things are better when you leave. And so I thought Organized chaos, that's the best name. And I found the domain was available, organize. Chaos. Not with a D but I told people like, that's what I do. It's not organized until I get there. So organized chaos became the name of the company and on the back of my business card it said I organize chaos and get things done so you have more time to do what you love. I. That was like the ethos of my business is that everybody gets into business not to run the administrative processes of the pieces of business. It's they get into it so that they create something of value so that they build a team, a community, they can put food on the table for employees. They can make an impact for customers. They maybe have some noble cause or some impact that they're trying to make, and they really just want the business to be the vehicle. Frees them up to make the most impact, and creating a business creates a lot of chaos. And so I thought if I can come in and organize that and make your operations run seamlessly, then I'm helping you do a better job for your customers. And I just love doing it.
Dan Balcauski:Running and Scaling a SaaS company can certainly mean that you are dealing with plenty of chaos and constantly bombarded with a million things to do. I'm curious how that concept of organized chaos has kind of influenced you as you have now grown and scaled Trainual. Like, how has that helped you? With managing priorities and making your decisions as a leader.
Chris Ronzio:Absolutely. Chaos in a business is a really good thing. Anybody that's listening, if you feel like your life is chaotic and your business is chaotic, think of the alternative. If you, if the phones weren't ringing, if the emails weren't coming in, you'd have no opportunity in your business. And so chaos is great. It means that the raw material is mixing things up. There's exciting opportunity, and then you just have to figure out, all right, what do we do? And in what order to. Create leverage and to create profit and to reinvest that into the business. And so what I used to do in organized chaos with consulting is I would help businesses understand all of the things that were going on that were creating the chaos. And so it could be the issues with your employees, the customer complaints, the ideas that you don't have time to get around to, and then we'd take all that chaos. And we decide what is the most important thing I can do right now that has the biggest impact for my business. And so in many ways, that's what our product is enabling people to do. Because when you put your systems into Trainual, when you document a process, when you delegate it and hand it off to someone else, it's like you're putting one brick into the foundation of your business. Something is gonna run consistently because you've offloaded it and you've documented the best way to do it, and then you get to focus your time and attention on all the things that are a mess on all the chaos until it is ready for you to document and delegate. I have this thing this process I trademarked called Do it, document it, delegate it. And it's basically the idea that in a company, first you have to do things and learn how to do them consistently. At the beginning, everything's inconsistent. It's an experiment. You're trying to figure it out, but then one day you wake up and you realize, oh, this thing, I know how to do it. And I do it the same way every time I do it. And it's at that moment that you can then finally document it. You can write down the instructions or the recipe and you can hand it off to someone else. You can delegate it to that person so that they start to do this thing in your business. And I think scaling a business is just really that repeatable pattern of experimenting and innovating to create something consistent and then writing down the recipe and handing it off to someone else. That's how businesses grow.
Dan Balcauski:I, a lot of founders. companies because, they feel like, I, I couldn't move inside a larger organization. It was too process driven, too bureaucratic. And so, a lot of, founders that I've spoken to kind of feel like hey, like we, don't want to do those big company things. This sounds very big
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:That sounds too, formal, too time consuming. I guess, do you ru, I imagine you run into that, maybe even for yourself, is there validity there? How do you think about getting past that resistance?
Chris Ronzio:It really depends for the entrepreneur on the type of company they want to build. If someone wants to just experiment and. Innovate all the time. They're basically a one person artisan. In a one person shop, you can do a different job every time. You can take a different type of client, every time it stays interesting for you and maybe you maximize your productivity or your bill rate or your income or whatever it is by serving a higher and higher. Clientele that's willing to pay a little bit more, but you stay a one person shop. But at some point there may be things that you do that are regular and repeatable. And so even if you're just a one person shop, maybe you have to send out invoices at the end of every project. I. Maybe you have to take some sort of information at the beginning in an intake process, and there's these repeatable things that you start to say, oh if I had a virtual assistant or if I had a right hand man or woman or somebody to do that piece, it would create this extra leverage for me. To use for that high billable hour kind of time that I'm doing. And so people understand and appreciate offloading those administrative tasks. Now, if you wanna build a business that has 10 people, instead of two people, you're gonna figure out other repetitive things that you do. Like maybe I. There's things that you do to create leads for the business. Maybe you're doing marketing content and by hiring somebody on the marketing side, you can say, Hey, every week I used to write this letter. I used to record these podcasts. I guess I could offload that and have somebody that's even better at that thing. I. Or maybe I'm doing sales calls every day and I could hire a sales rep or someone to take those calls for me. So businesses grow from two people to 10 people to a hundred people based on formalizing those different roles, to spread out who does what in a business and kind of raise the tide of what your revenue and your profit could be. But this is different for every entrepreneur. Some people just want to be a one or two person shop and they wanna stay as far away from process as possible. And other people wanna build a company with 25 people, or a company that can produce a certain revenue size.
Dan Balcauski:I guess, have you ever run into situations where, you've ever, I guess, felt sort of bogged down by, documentation or like the rigidness of these sort of processes? I guess, how would you recommend sort of folks kinda keep things light while still having it written down? I can imagine this is a bit of a, it could be a bit of a balance. Yeah,
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, for sure. So one of our core values is no red tape, which may sound crazy as a process documentation company, right? But no red tape is meant to remind people that if they're ever going through a process that feels bureaucratic or it feels cumbersome, or it feels process is superseding logic, then it's up to them to raise their hand and tell someone and help tear down that process. Because sometimes we put processes in place to solve problems. Imagine if a something happened in your business where, somebody said something or did something. There's this example in my book that I always tell. Where in our first office people would bring in glass soda bottles from Mexico. If you've ever seen those,
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Chris Ronzio:you know the pur cane sugar, they're like, they're great. They're very popular here in Arizona. So they would have these glass bottles and a couple times we'd swing open the refrigerator door and those glass bottles would roll out and break onto the floor. And so we put a policy in place that was no glass bottles in the refrigerator. And a year later people are like, why don't we allow the good soda here? Like, why is that not allowed? And because it didn't, they didn't connect the dots and we realized we could solve that problem and remove the bureaucracy by having a thing, a, a bottle. Catching mechanism inside the refrigerator and we were solving the wrong problem. We put process and policy in place to solve the problem. And so I think the reminder here for people is processes get put in place for a reason, but you need to be as willing to strip them away and remove them as your business grows if they're not doing the intended, providing the intended value anymore.
Dan Balcauski:Th that makes sense. So you've gotta sort of make sure you tend the garden,
Chris Ronzio:Yes, exactly.
Dan Balcauski:it overgrow with vines and all those vines are now tying you down and that analogy breaks down somewhere in there. But, so I guess, what do you, I guess, is there, are there rituals or dare I say, processes you have for managing your processes?
Chris Ronzio:Processes to manage processes. Yeah. Yeah. So of course our software enables this a little bit. The people that own certain processes get auto reminded when things are stale to review things, verify them, make sure they're still accurate within the business. And so if you've got a software tool like ours, you may have that mechanism built in. But what I would recommend is just for. Any manager, any owner of any area of the business to set a recurring task for themselves every 30 days or 90 days to just scan through. Is this still the way that we do all of these things? Do all of these policies and processes make sense? And as long as you've got that standard interval as just a check, maybe it's on a time basis or maybe it's when you hire every new person, you do a quick scan through the training manual you're about to send them. And it's a really simple way to keep things. From getting overgrown.
Dan Balcauski:So I, I'm curious, obviously I'm assuming that you guys sort of dog food Trainual inside,
Chris Ronzio:Totally. Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:Right. So I guess when it comes to writing things down training, I. Is a big part about scaling a company. what's your philosophy? Do you have a specific approach? So somebody sitting there like at a blank sheet of paper is there, how do you think about it? Sort of fitting into sort of the standard day-to-day I imagine, right? Okay, this is the third time in a month that the Coke bottle has shattered on the floor. Maybe that's the trigger, but I guess, how do you think about what is the trigger to, and then like, how do you go about sort of figuring out what to put in those in that document?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so first it's continuous improvement. If the business has this culture of wanting to improve and wanting to get better, and it's something that you talk about all the time with your employees and your managers and it's something that you celebrate and you're all hands meetings and you talk about how we got better in this certain area that, that's encouraging people to. Build processes or to write processes whenever they have a good idea. I, another thing that happens in business is just when there's inconsistencies. Imagine if you've got three people and they do something a little bit different, and you've got a difference in performance between those three people. When we first started hiring sales reps, we had three reps that were doing demos with our customers, and we'd look back after a month and say why did one of those reps close? 30% of the deals and the other rep closed 18% of the deals and the other one closed 14%. There's gotta be something that they're doing differently. And so then you analyze how is everyone doing demos? What are those three different processes? Let's now take the commonalities, or let's take the best practices and make them our standard practices. And so you take the. Best practices of your best performers, and you document them and then you train your other people on those best practices and now that becomes the company way. And so it's a little bit of noticing the inconsistencies or the problems, and it's a little bit of desiring the continuous improvement that makes this happen in your business.
Dan Balcauski:So finding hey there's a variation in performance, and then looking at the distinction of what are the best people doing? So what does it kind of, starting with the outcome, working backwards, into what they're already doing today to document.
Chris Ronzio:Exactly, and it's also important for people to realize like processes already exist in your business. If you are doing things, if you're in business, you're already, do you have processes, right? Like people can look at a blank sheet and become paralyzed and say, oh, I don't think in terms of operations, and I don't know how to write an SOP. It's you're already doing these things. So it's really more about capturing your processes than it is about. Creating your processes. And so it's as simple as just record your screen while you're doing something and then use, the AI tools or our tools or whatever, and break down what you did after you did it so that another person can watch it and recreate your results. So just capture the processes, don't create them.
Dan Balcauski:This is called SaaS Scaling Secrets, and so every, CEO faces challenges along the way. Is there a challenge that Trainual has faced during its growth that was particularly difficult to overcome? Maybe a crucible moment that has kind of made you what you are today?
Chris Ronzio:Which area of the business do you wanna go into? I mean, there's been so many product and engineering challenges and design challenges and hiring challenges and through covid and like, where do you wanna focus? I.
Dan Balcauski:It really up to you, but I you potentially around areas are if there's been some evolutions in your your marketing, your go to market positioning, your sort of, your leadership capabilities and systems any of those areas are ripe or if you wanna pick something else, it's deal's choice.
Chris Ronzio:Sure. So my, for a while I had this thought that, when people start documenting their processes, it's sort of like a. Crawl, walk, run approach, where at the beginning you're trying to just figure things out and organize your company, and then you start to get good at it and you bring other people in to help you, and now you're just firing on all cylinders and your whole business is documented. And so we had that. Theory and we shifted our pricing to create this really small price, like$49 a month for your whole business to get a handful of people in there and build out your processes. And what we didn't anticipate was that we would attract a. Much smaller company is that we're not a fit for our product, but we're intrigued by the$49 price point. So what I learned is that the price has such a big impact in who it attracts. It's like how bait attracts the right fish. Your price is bait that you're putting out into the world to tell the world who you're for. And for a while we priced way too low, and the companies that were attracted to us were not mature enough. They didn't have formalized processes, they didn't have enough employees to really need a training solution, and so we learned a lot through that.
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to Dance Couch. You've stumbled on a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Let's talk about this. So what, I guess, okay, so you attract some immature customers. So what, what, why was that a problem?
Chris Ronzio:So when the immature customers, I guess we'll call'em, or the smaller customers come in. It is a very aspirational need. They see our product. Maybe they've read a book and they think, I really want a dialed in operations manual. What I believe they're doing is they're procrastinating, figuring out how to do marketing and sales by spending all their time dialing in their operations. And maybe that's a, a. P pain point or something, or maybe I'm pushing buttons for anybody in the audience there. But I truly believe that operations are not a big problem until you're so overrun with marketing and sales and demand that you then have to figure your operations out. The way to build a business is to create a product that people want so much that they're knocking down your door and you can't possibly fulfill all the demand and then. You go ahead and build the operations to efficiently fulfill the demand. But a lot of people start by just, playing around with the product and playing with the operations and toiling around and then they can never sell it. And that's the problem when they go out of business. And so Trainual is for a business that has figured out the sales and marketing and needs to scale their operations, and we are attracting the wrong type of customer.
Dan Balcauski:So I, so you're saying when you start a business, the most important thing is not what your business cards look like or your logo design.
Chris Ronzio:Right.
Dan Balcauski:that stuff is,
Chris Ronzio:that stuff's fun. Yeah, that's the hobby. I think, we we have Damon John from Shark Tank is one of our investors and partners and he will often him and the other sharks talk about entrepreneurs. It's like people that want to be an entrepreneur so bad. And when you're like masquerading as an entrepreneur, you spend all of your time playing with logos and domains and business cards and t-shirts, and like all of the stuff that indicates that you own a business is where you spend all of your time instead of actually driving demand for your product.
Dan Balcauski:I love it. So, man it, Jordan and Damon John. Man we could have a whole sub component of this episode just talking about like your influencer network. I'll put a pin in that. Come back to so, so you know how you said you, okay, so I imagine, right these smaller customers, maybe customers that were not quite, super flush with so many growth opportunities that maybe they were spending time thinking they had an operations problem and really they needed to spend time on sales and marketing. So you're attracting them, realizing, and then maybe, it sounds like there was probably a retention or churn issue that, that was being caused. Which just knowing a business, my, my sense is that. Maybe impacted your your CAC and LTV numbers or other unit economics in ways that were not, super effective. I guess how did you get into that situation and I guess like you realized then you have this problem and what do you do after that? I guess, because you had some thesis of hey, we create this low end offer. What was the theory before you, you ended up seeing this reality from the marketplace?
Chris Ronzio:So it depends on the stage of the business. And I know this is called SaaS Scaling Secrets, and so I think at the beginning, the secret to scaling the SaaS is to actually scale it regardless of who the customer is. It's can you attract customers? Can you sell more of this? And so in our first year we got to a thousand businesses. I. On our platform, and we prove that there is this demand in the market for what we do. Now, a ton of those businesses were churning out, but we got smarter as we went. And with volume comes knowledge. So as you have more people go through your funnel, you decide who is the right type of customer for this business and what do they value in the product, and which ones stick around and which ones don't. And you learn from the people quitting when they give their cancellation reasons. And so in some ways, in the first stage of business. The scale is more important, I think, than the perfect customer because you need volume to learn. Now in the next phase, you wanna start to build around who that ideal customer is. And so from our scaling early phase, we thought that the way to approach this customer is the, crawl, walk, run. And we wanted to give them an easy in to the tool so that they could find some early success. And then expanding the product. And through the pricing lessons there that we talked about, we saw we were attracting the wrong type of customer. And so for us it was really about just. Lifting the initial number of seats that someone gets to 25 seats and setting a price that's consummate with that type of business so that we're attracting companies that are at least a little bit more mature, that don't think they're overpaying for 25 seats because they have 20 or 25 people. And that sort of fixed the bottom of the funnel there.
Dan Balcauski:So there was there was a theory that hey, there's a I guess you even calling it mid-size businesses at 25 employees. That's not quite, it's still pretty in the s and b category, but you were trying to solve a adoption friction. issue by introducing this low end tier. But what that ended up bringing in was companies that were much DA much different segment aspirational as you, you used before or mature not quite ready to, fully get the value. And then those folks, just they had other business problems and then you ended up with these churn issues. And then the idea then is okay, seeing that to fix it, we instead. Realize that, okay if we are able to put in a viable minimum, we're able to create a differentiation that helps us, helps create an on ramp for people who are in the right segment. And it sounds like there's a lot of learning of who your customer profile was. In real time as you're sort of going through this as well, right? Is it like startups tend to not to be static things where you have a sort of perfect plan. I'm sure you were sort of learning who this customer was to the best of your ability. Is that, did I capture that? Generally,
Chris Ronzio:I wish I could have played this for myself in a time capsule like five years ago. This would've been immensely valuable. So you, that was a good summary right there.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. This is why we do this. It is because we want people to go and make all different mistakes, don't make the same mistakes we
Chris Ronzio:Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:And this problem of trying to figure out and iterate. I mean, it's difficult, right? Like you. At the beginning, you do only have a hypothesis of who you think the customers are, and you need to, you do need to go through some of this learning process. But I love how, that kind of, that full arc happens. And so I guess, just to fill in just the final piece of that so it sounds like, you were able to put in some limit Split the difference between those two groups because it sounded like there was adoption friction. So can you just kind of paint that a little bit starker for me? So,'cause'cause you went all the way down to 49, you were trying to solve this friction adoption problem. Was there like a halfway point between what you guys were offering in that 49 point that ended up being the crucial decision.
Chris Ronzio:We could continue to iterate on this and have a multi-hour podcast about our pricing strategies. Oh, I mean, over the last four years we've been iterating. Every couple of months. And so, where we are today is a five times higher price point for an initial starting point. And again there's features that are included in that price point. There's implementation that's now included in that price point. And so there's a lot of different ways to find the right customer and make sure you give them the support that's required to get them launched and to get them sticky in the product. But it takes. A lot of testing and so I'm not suggesting that somebody fast forward to where we are today, because I think going through that set of iterations for everyone's business is very useful. Just be willing to test a lot.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. And I applaud you for that because, it's, there's, it's definitely not a set it forget it. And a lot of people take the idea that. I don't know. It's, we don't know what to do, so we'll just not, we'll just kind of focus more on acquiring other customers instead of, trying to figure out what monetization should look like in the as along the way, right. As you're sort of iterating on your acquisition funnel and your retention. Plays, et cetera. Like it's one of the other growth levers that merits attention. So, round of applause from this end of the microphone on making sure that it's something that you're actively experimenting and working on. So, going back to what, we were talking about before. So you were saying that obviously you've iterated on different sort of customers as you've learned more. I imagine that's a very difficult thing for a product like Trainual because it's the kind of product that nearly every business could use. But Chris hasn't paid me to say that. But that's, that that sounds like a good thing. But like I was having, I was doing another episode with another guy who was they were in like the contract lifecycle management space and the same thing. It's like every company has contracts. Like how have you thought through that in terms of, okay, how do we focus, like every business could potentially use process documentation or training. This seems like a great problem. Versus oh, there's only maybe, I dunno, a thousand businesses in the world that could use this. It's like every business could use this. This is
Chris Ronzio:Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:you go out into the world trying to acquire customers and you like, it just, yeah, that's just a pain as well. How have you approached that from a strategic decision making level?
Chris Ronzio:It is a blessing and a curse, Dan. A blessing and a curse. We as a horizontal business, you're right, like a lot of companies can use what we do, and we have examples of every different industry, where there's electricians and. Contractors and construction and medical services and dental offices and car washes and marketing firms and professional service agencies and law firms and all of these different people that get value out of our product. And so the first thing is you look for signals of. Where are we getting the most referral volume or where do we have maybe some partners or consultants that are finding a lot of success standing us up in their industry? And so we saw things like, childcare and law firms and dentists where there's required state compliance that they have to. Go through training. Your employees need to be trained so it is ingrained as a part of your business. And then there's also, in some of these businesses, an element of turnover where this is a job that people, take and bounce from one company to the next, or maybe there's different locations. And so we look for these common use cases and patterns between businesses to find industries that Trainual does the best in. Then we start to spend dollars in those industries by sponsoring their trade shows and customer or conferences by doing integrations with other software providers in those industries by putting a portion of our spend into the biggest podcast in that. Industry. But it's something that we're going through right now. It's like only at this stage of the business, seven years in, are we starting to really verticalize and build templates for different industries and turnkey kind of solutions for the landscaping business or whatever else it is.
Dan Balcauski:So very looking at very specific industries and sort of where's there's pull, I heard the deeper below that is like the industry use cases where there was a training compliance component was sort of driving urgency that maybe wasn't there in other types of businesses. I guess a, as you've grown, I mean, I think a lot of companies run into, Hey, this was really working for us from a client acquisition or marketing channel. And then, it. Hey, this is killing it at first, but then sort of stopped working, Have you guys experienced that at all as you've grown?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, so in the early days when we started in 20 18, 20 19, that was like the heyday for Facebook advertising. And so we were getting really cheap customers on Facebook, like incredible CAC and very fast CAC payback. We spread out to. To Instagram and then to YouTube pre-roll ads and Google. And and now we're focused more on LinkedIn and software review sites and over the top kind of ads on streaming platforms. And I think our mix of marketing has just gotten more intricate as we've grown. We have a larger budget to put across all those things, but, channel for channel, Facebook does not convert like it used to. And so we've had to move away and diversify what we're doing.
Dan Balcauski:I said I would put a pin in it. I think it might be time to bring it back in. So you mentioned, so you got Montel Jordan, you got Dave and John. I'm sure there's other influencer partners you've worked with, like how. W how, like, why this is, this seems like unique in the world of B2B software. I don't usually talk to many founders who have these type of influencer partners. How did you land on that? And did, does that suffer from these sort of ebbs and flows of yeah, it really works well for, these kinds of businesses and these others these partnership influencers don't work at all. What lessons have you learned there?
Chris Ronzio:We've always approached marketing more in a consumer kind of way than a B2B sort of way, because at the end of the day, it's people at businesses that are making decisions. And so if you can attract someone's attention to your brand using some kind of pop culture or using some sort of celebrity. They may not have known about you otherwise or found out about you. And so we've done ads, like I mentioned, with the sharks. We've done ads with characters from the office. Things that like, as you're scrolling through social media, it stops you in your tracks, it stops you in the feed and you're like, oh, I know that person. I know that thing. In the very, very early days of Trainual. My favorite book, my, the first business book I ever read was The E Myth Revisited by Michael e Gerber. You ever read that? Yeah. So, so a lot of people recognize the book. It's like a blue and white book. It's got a big E on it. And so I used to do these posts with me holding the book up in the frame, and as you're scrolling through your social feed, you'd stop and be like, oh, I know that book, right? So I'm borrowing the authority of something that, you know, to kind of catch your attention so that now you're interested. And what's the connection between me? And that book. And so Michael e Gerber, he wrote the forward to my book. He was an advisor of the company. He was involved in the early days. And so being able to stop your attention on something, to connect the dots to something you don't know works really well to get people at the top of funnel. And so when we work with influencers or celebrities or anything like that, that's exactly what we're doing, is we're trying to improve our conversion rate at the very top of the funnel, where you're gonna stop, you're gonna watch for a few extra seconds, you're gonna click through to our website, and we get more people into the top of the funnel because of those brands and because of that celebrity and their influence. They bring a reputation with them that catches your interest so that you are willing to click through and check us out. That's really what it does, is it just increases the top of funnel because once you get to our product, our website still has to have a strong call to action. It still has to prove to you that it's valuable. You have to do a demo or do the trial and think, yeah, I need this, I have this problem. And so all those conversion issues downstream are still on us as a business, but working with. With those celebrities upstream can make the economics that much better. For some companies.
Dan Balcauski:It's interesting because, I do remember, it's funny you were talking about I was the, your previous answer you were talking about is the height of Facebook. I remember, I think it was monday.com had a big, got a lot of press early on because they were one of the first B2B SaaS companies to use like Facebook and Instagram ads.'cause it was like, oh Facebook, Instagram, that's only for consumers, right? But then they were like, people get off work and they're on these social companies. So, I, you go walk through an airport and there's, Barracuda Networks or an IBM ads on every wall, right? I mean, I guess, they, you've got executives going on getting on planes. I'm sure they're checking their Facebook or Twitter at some point as well. I, I don't see that one talk about much anymore. And then two, I don't really see other B2B SaaS companies kind of doing these influencer type partnerships. So maybe I'm just blind to it. Maybe it is, does exist, I guess. why do you have a sense of for, of why that is? And I guess if folks wanted to sort of do this, is there anything they should kind of understand, like best practices or pitfalls they should watch out for?
Chris Ronzio:I think, I don't know exactly why some would do it and some wouldn't do it other than just maybe a. A cool brand that would attract the interest of those people. Like we're not hiring athletes and people that have zero connection to the world of business. We're talking to business authors and Shark Tank and a business TV show in the office. There is a connection to what we do. And so that's why I think consumer products can use any sort of. Reality TV influencer or movie star or athlete or whatever it is, because the whole world is a potential customer for whatever they're selling. With a business a B2B product, you've just gotta get a little bit smarter on who is the audience for what I'm selling, and what are the maybe one click away, one derivative away pop culture adjacencies, because those people could make incredible influencers for your brand.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. The only, I, the only thing that's even remotely sticking in my memory around this is, you got Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson and the Salesforce commercials where for some reason McConaughey is stuck in the rain and the other people aren't. And you're like, I don't know what this has to do with CRM software, but I guess, okay.
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, I mean, those brands are big enough that they can kind of, get anyone on board. But I do. I do think though, even in the world of random verticalized SaaS software, there is like someone in the industry that. Has the big podcast or that had a big exit in their company and within that industry, they're kind of a mini celebrity. And if you can get that person on board with your company to have the right economics or the right kind of like stock options or the right revenue share deal, like there is a way to incentivize people to wanna work and promote your brand.
Dan Balcauski:Chris, I could talk to you all day, but I do note that we are running up on time. So I do wanna kind of start closing this out with a few rapid fire, lightning round questions. Are you up for
Chris Ronzio:Let's do it.
Dan Balcauski:All right. So look, I am believer that we all have these moments in our lives that chain our mindset, our perspective, the way we view the world. I sometimes refer to it as a superhero transformation moment. Your Peter Parker normal high school student. You get bit by a radioactive spider. The next day you wake up your Spider-Man. What moment has that been for you in your life?
Chris Ronzio:Gosh, on the personal side, one moment that really stands out to me is I remember being in the car with my dad and he was on a heated. Call, like a work call. He's like yelling and screaming and whatever, and he's mad about something. And then he goes, hold on one second. And he looks at the phone and my younger brother was beeping in and he answers it and he goes hey Jonathan, what's up? And he like, totally changed his mindset. And I loved and appreciated how my dad was able to be like a present father and there and prioritized his family enough to put that business call on hold. And that's always stuck with me.
Dan Balcauski:Very nice way to go, dad. Way to set the example. It's I love, I particularly love that example because it's one of those things that, it's not what he said, like it's not a lesson they imparted, but it's like your observation of how they were in that moment. And I feel like we have so many opportunities in life to. Make that impact. But just without being paranoid about it being like you're always on stage and like everyone's looking at you but you always have the opportunity to change someone's life for the better by, by
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:the best version of
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:Love it. What's something you believe most people disagree with?
Chris Ronzio:What do I believe that most people would disagree with? I believe that. I think a lot of people in business disagree with this, and this is sort of a bridge off. The last thing I invest a lot in physical fitness and competitions. I run marathons, I do triathlons. I do, I spend a lot of time just like doing trail running. And I think that's where I have all my best ideas. And so I think a lot of people when they're early in entrepreneurship, think that the time that they're spending at the gym or running or doing whatever. Is stealing from the business. And I actually look at it as like mini strategic planning sessions where I am creating the most value for the business at that time, because that's when my brain is connecting all the ideas and the podcasts I'm listening to. So if you're listening to this and you're out there on the trails right now, kudos to you because I think a lot of people miss that.
Dan Balcauski:Yes highly agree with the importance of physical activity and getting out from our screens. Even if you have to have the earbuds in while you're doing physical activity,
Chris Ronzio:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:think our, we're not we're directly linear people. So, what's a contrarian take you hold about AI's role either in the future of SaaS or in business?
Chris Ronzio:Contrarian. I think that AI summarizing everything and making everything so efficient will actually be bad for business innovation. I think that. Part of innovation requires being in the long form of things like, we need to have time to process, we need to have time to, to think about things. And if everything comes so easily to you and so automated I think it actually could give us less space to really think. And so we'll see how that plays out.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, I've never really understood those. There's those services that take like business books and give you like the one page executive summary and I've just never quite understood that.'cause I was like, first of all, most business books probably aren't worth more than you know that, but I'm sure yours is. I'm not not throwing
Chris Ronzio:The value is in between the words and in between the pages. And like I, I've read the same books often, and when you read'em again five years later, you get an entirely different set of insights and lessons based on where you are. At that time in your life and what's going on in the business at that time, same with listening to different podcast episodes that you've heard in the past. And so I think summaries are probably bad long for if that's all we have in the world.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah I'm trying to do an experiment right now where I try to get a summary to know if I want to invest in the long term version or the long form version of the
Chris Ronzio:Okay.
Dan Balcauski:To but not but definitely not using a summary as a, substitute. Look, when you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with or learn from, is there anyone that just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building or leading companies?
Chris Ronzio:Yeah, one of my mentors, clay Mask, he's the founder and CEO of Infusionsoft and CRM if you know that tool. And he told me early on that I should always be working to be a. The CEO my company needs a year from now. And I thought that was so wise and I've shared that with so many people because I think even in any position in the company, if you are not equipped to be that position still in another year or at another 50% growth or a hundred percent growth of the company like you, you have to be outgrowing your company if you wanna maintain your role and you have to be doing even better than that if you wanna move on up.
Dan Balcauski:Such powerful advice and advice as well. Any, anybody inside the company, whether in a leadership position or in an IC role, right? If those companies are growing fast, you've kind of, you've gotta accelerate your own growth as well to be constantly putting yourself out of a job and documenting along the way so the person behind you knows how to do it. Chris, if you, if I gave you a billboard, you could put any advice on there for other B2B sios trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
Chris Ronzio:Com.
Dan Balcauski:Well done, sir. Played.
Chris Ronzio:Free advertising. Right. Thank you. For the billboard. No. If if it wasn't an ad for my company, what would it be? Let's see. I'd probably say something like, hang around success long enough and you'll catch it. It's success I think comes based on who you surround yourself with, the content you listen to, the friends that you have, the business groups that you're in, and. There's no real overnight successes. I was in peer and mastermind groups for 12 years before I hit my first million in revenue. And that's a lot of time to put in and a lot of people just wanna wake up one day and be successful, but there's so much value in the process.
Dan Balcauski:Oh, love it. Love it. Trainual.com. Everyone train.com. Chris, this has been great. If our listeners want to connect with you, learn more about Trainual mul, how can they do
that? Yeah, so Trainual. Just search Trainual or Trainual.com
Chris Ronzio:for me, Chris Zi. I hang out most on Instagram and LinkedIn, so if you want to connect with me, shoot me a message.
Dan Balcauski:Cool. I will put those links in the show notes for listeners, everyone that wraps up this episode of Sask Scaling Secrets. Thank you to Chris for sharing his journey and insights. For our listeners, you found Chris's insights valuable. Please leave a review and share this episode with your network. Really helps the podcast grow. Thank you so much.
