Sales Transformation

All right, welcome to another episode of Sales Transformation. I'm your

host, Colin Mitchell, and the show's brought to you by Ledium.

Today, I've got Feras Alhlou on. He is the co-founder over

at Startup with Feras, has scaled multiple businesses, exits,

I'm doing great. Thank you so much, Colin. I appreciate being here. Great content

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's

an interesting transition, right? Going from selling these small local

mom and pop businesses to selling these large contracts. And

often I see founders that want to sell

to the enterprise before they're ready.

It's the typical... You got to crawl before you

walk. Absolutely. How

did you know that you guys were ready to start taking down some of these larger

contracts with longer sales cycles and more complex type

Yeah, so like I said, I read, I remember a couple books, one

on, I think it was like the Million Dollar Consulting and a couple other books at the time. This

is maybe 10, 12 years ago. And by

practicing some of the things we read in the books, and also one

thing that I tell entrepreneurs, I still do it, is go out

and meet people in your industry. If you

go to a conference, local conference, regional conference, if you don't have something in

your city, and go and just walk the

exhibit hall. A bunch of the competitors will

have an exhibit hall, exhibit will have a booth.

Go to that booth, ask questions, see how your competitors are pitching. I've

learned a lot from gracious competitors, just chatting with them about just

general industry trends. So seeing how others

are pitching, learning from others, including competition, and

then applying that to you, you don't have to copy everything. 100% blindly,

but take from what other people in your industry in sort

of similar company size selling to similar businesses and

Yeah, yeah. I think being resourceful and realizing

that you don't have to reinvent the wheel here, right?

There's a right way to do this. Many people are

doing it. You just got to surround yourself with the right people to learn

And I think asking, I remember the first lead that we got, we

got listed on the Google partners list and we started to get leads that way.

We invested heavily to become a certified partner

with Google. It's a lot of work. You have to really know this stuff. And

once we got there, leads start to follow through. And the

first lead, like, oh my goodness, what do I do? How

do I, what do I say? So we, we dropped everything and,

and worked on the presentation and how to find logos, like

of all the small mid-sized businesses, like what are the largest, you know, clients that

we can put a logo. So, so, and we did a whole lot of research on,

on the lead, on the business. So we came to that first meeting.

extra prepared, but I think that never hurts. And

then actually we won that very first deal. But then later, we did

struggle a little bit when we got to more sophisticated clients.

But initially, a lot of research, going to those meetings, very

well prepared, and then just present with

confidence and show

your competence. It's hard to do it early on, to your point, you

got to walk before you run. But once you have several projects

under your belt, you've sold and delivered, you know

Yeah. And was

the plan always to sell the business or when

did that kind of become on the horizon for

Yeah. So, I live in Silicon Valley. building and

selling is sort of everybody talks about it. So it is, it was always

in the back of our minds. But then in 2016, that's it, you

know, we want to do it in a couple of years. And that's, you know, we became very profitable

in that one specific business, the analytics business. And we had a

nice recurring revenue stream. And we had some really,

really great logos. And then we decided

the official process was in 2018, we hired an

advisor, financial advisor company, advising company, and then they

helped us in terms of pitching and we

ended up selling in mid-2019. So the whole process took

about a year and a half to sell, but

we had that in the back of our mind kind of

early on. We wanna do the Silicon Valley thing. So yeah, we were

very profitable. We had an amazing team. And

the funny thing is we ended up selling to one of our competitors who

actually were also owned by Dentsu, the global media giant. So

that was another thing is if you have your reputation precede

you in business, so make sure you're professional, including with

Yeah. Interesting. Was

there any learning lessons in that process for people

that are thinking of wanting to do the build

I think build a very viable, very

strong business is at the end of it. This

is really what matters. People buy companies for

different reasons. People sell companies for different reasons. But I think a

common thing is if you have a solid business where you're

showing year-to-year increase in your top line, you're

showing year-to-year increase in your profit in your bottom line, No

one is going to argue with this data. It will be a function of negotiating the

multiplier and how much you want to sell for, but just build a

strong culture, take care of your people, master

your domain, and just be nice to your people, be

good to the customers. just have just

a solid business. And I think people potentially could

come after you to buy as opposed

to you're trying to sell. And you can get a huge difference

Interesting. Yeah. So you know the timing is right when people are

Yeah. And, you know, now you work as an advisor for

many startups and working with founders

and such. So kind of curious, you know, what has kind of

changed? What are some of the things that you're seeing, you know, kind

of new that, you know, people need to be educating themselves

about or that have just kind of generally changed in the startup landscape?

Yeah, sure. Yeah. So after we sold the business, I stayed with the Acquire for a couple

of years and then I took a couple of years off to to something I've

been wanting to do forever is to dedicate some time for nonprofits

pro bono. I was fortunate I was able to do that. So,

you know, money is one thing, but money is not everything. And again, I was so

fortunate to be able to do that. And then I said, how do I share my

background, my experience, my co-founder, Eric

and I. So that's what we started, the Startup Affairs, is

to help founders Avoid the

mistakes I made and leverage the frameworks, the

systems that we've seen work over time. And to your point,

in our days, early days, there weren't a whole lot of resources out

there. I think today, in a way, it's more difficult

for people, especially younger founders, I think, there are a lot of resources. But

there's also a lot of distraction. There are personal distractions. We

won't talk about that now. But also, there's so many resources. So

you have to be up to speed in learning. But also, look who you learn

from. Learn from those who have been down the path you

want to go to. And leverage AI. We talked about AI. I

mean, if you're struggling in sending a follow-up email, give

ChatGPT or Google Gemini, give some context and

it'll help you make sure you should not send an email with grammar issues

anymore. You should not send any, you wanna be professional. So

that's just a simple way of using AI, but obviously in terms of scripting, in

terms of like scenarios and personas, you can say, here's

what I'm good at, here's the clients I'm about

to speak and pitch to, give it a lot of deals. It could come back to

you with some ideas to maybe tailor that pitch for that client.

Yeah, yeah. There's so many tools and resources today,

and I think that people

have to learn how to use them to their benefit. It

does require time and tinkering around and building enough

context to get good output, but the AI-powered

seller or the AI-enabled founder can

have an upper hand if you really spend the time to

really figure out how to implement it into your

Absolutely. I mean, if you use Google Slides, I used to go to iStockphoto and

buy some pictures. Now, AI within Google

Slides. You can give it some context and it'll give you a nice image you

can add to your presentation. That's amazing. That

saves you 30 minutes. Again, scrolling is

a distraction. So founders out there, count how

many minutes a day you're scrolling. I'm on a

YouTube fast for, I'm in YouTube, we have a YouTube channel. I'm

in a way a creator and I decided to be on a YouTube fast

for like three weeks because sometimes just too much. I just gotta, I've

learned, I have my long list of things to make my videos better. So

I'm gonna go and work on that for the next three weeks and then I'll go back and learn something

Yeah, absolutely. Feras, it's been awesome having you

on the show. Appreciate it. Any final thoughts as we wrap things up

and then where's the best place for people to get out into

Thank you, Colin. This has been a really, really amazing conversation. One

final thought. I would say passion

is important. Passion is, I would say, is

optional, but skills and sacrifice are

not. work on

something that you're interested in, but there's no passion in

maybe HR or back office or accounting or

legal contract. You gotta do it, you gotta learn the skills, and

you gotta just sacrifice and work hard, I think, to build

and grow your business. You can find passion later, you can find

passion outside of work. So that's just one thing I've been thinking about

a lot lately and wanted to share. But you can check out our, YouTube

channel at Startup with Feras, and Feras, F-E-R-A-S, my

first name. Or you can go to our website, startupwithferas.com. We

have a daily newsletter you can sign up for, and we'd love to hear

back from the audience if they have any questions or they're struggling. We

have a weekly live stream where we answer the questions that come our way

Awesome. We'll drop all the links there in the show notes to make it easy for everybody. If

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