How Evotix CEO Matthew Elson grew Evotix to $47M revenue and 450 customers in 2024.

guys evotics.com they've grown from called a 10 15 million dollar run rate a year ago to now over 17 million so call it 50 year year growth they've only added 10 extra people so that's efficient growth they've got plenty of cash in the bank burning somewhere netburn wise called 100 200 Grand per month with a clear path to profitability or break even Midway through 2020 2023 here it's the definition of controlled growth not irresponsible all-out growth burning Millions per month controlled growth hey folks my guest today is Matthew Ellison he's a CEO of evotex he's transforming how companies manage health safety and risk and engage with their employees delivering safe nurturing and compliant workplaces Matthew you ready to take us to the top uh yes I am Nathan you were one of our top uh top episodes last year and I think it's because you told the story of how you effectively bought software for like a dollar and then grew it to 14 million dollars in Revenue that is that is evotix um walk us through if folks missed that episode walk us through what customers you serve and how they use you yeah so we uh we serve uh mid-sized businesses we think of it as organizations of between 250 and 10 000 employees and we help them to to meet their health and safety needs so if you're responsible for health and safety you need to be cool to investigate your accidents you need to uh uh unto your risks and mitigations your people to change your assets to inspected your contracts as a competence lots of our Target customers are still doing that with pen and paper and Excel spreadsheets obviously that's inefficient it's difficult to demonstrate your compliance and you can't really learn anything from your data so customers are using our solution to capture store organize their information uh workflows to demonstrate compliance and Powerful bi uh to slice and dice their data and then where the Improvement opportunities are but that's the key thing I was gonna say Nathan first the key thing is about engaging employees because you only get so far with health and safety uh with rules and procedures right so it's all about engaging your employees so we're mobile first very user friendly we look to get our app in every employee's hands and embed safety at the heart of core operations glaxo Smith Klein New Balance you've got great customers I also love it looks like you're onboarding new customers and marketing with your own podcast called two bald guys talking safety is that now launched in live yeah yeah that's been a great marketing initiative um a little bit a little bit of Huber a little bit as as you do with with successful podcasts but a serious message as well and it's getting a great followership well that's good to hear now the reason I invited you back on is because we always do a survey of the fastest growing SAS companies of the prior year and you responded with some impressive growth so help us understand what did growth look like over the past 12 months yeah so we will end our financial year on about 15 million of uh Sterling of AMR uh and five million of 15. one by 15 million yes and uh so that'll be 40 growth for us so that's up from I mean call that what you were doing about 10 million and run right about a year ago yeah just over 10. 10 a year ago okay very good now what drove a lot of that growth was it expanding in the current accounts or brand new customers altogether uh mostly brand new customers uh so we've got pretty good uh net retention numbers so we're at 110 115 net retention so we're expanding existing customers but the call for us is new logo acquisition pull back that onion for me 110 net dollar retention is made up by looking at obviously gross turn annually plus expansion what was gross churn before adding back expansion yeah so we're churning uh about five percent uh and so expansion then uh is is 15 plus oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and help you oriented your expansion team are there a team of customer success reps with an expansion quota or how do you get that performance yeah we we restructured our customer success so for us the customer success is is purely customer success right so it's about helping customers to get the maximum value from their relationship with us and using the solution uh we then have separately a customer development manager role which is about driving that expansion Revenue uh and provost's expansions come from additional seats they come from uh new functionality because we're a modular solution and they come from expansions where we've got into a division or a geography and we're able to go kind of company-wide um so just to be clear your success team has no responsibility for driving upsells the customer management team does well everybody who's in part of the wider customer success family of course has evolved in making customers happy and happy customers buy more so in that sense yes all of our customer success teams have a role to play but in terms of the actual commercials and driving the commercials it's with the customer development managers who sit within the new business team okay how many customer developer managers do you have uh we've got three three today and how big is it and then we've got a couple of sort of bdr equivalent roles and how big is the full customer success team today uh customer success team is about I'm gonna say 35 probably and then what's Total Team size everybody within that yeah but within within customer success I'm including customer success managers support team implementations Consultants Solutions Consultants 160. 160. okay so you've hired about 10 people since we last chatted back in July um you told me back then Revenue was about 14 million so we've added about a million bucks of Runway run rate is that accurate yeah I think July may have been 14 million dollars I'm now saying 15 million pounds so okay sorry when you told me you're finishing with 15 million this fiscal year that was pounds or or US Dollars 15 million pounds ah okay so that would be what 7 17 million something yeah something like that at the current exchange rate yeah yeah okay interesting so 17 uh 17 million in ARR 160 folks on the team 10 new hires you've got the Cs raw cranking talk to me you mentioned one of your key things in terms of upselling is obviously you know they're buying new features right uh or new functions is what you said what are what are some new features you've built over the past six months that is enabling you to drive and sell into new functions well I mean partly it's the the initial purchase tends to be a more limited set of functionality so instant risk Audits and then we have other modules like people and training asset contractor that people buy um but a lot of our upsellers being driven by a a solution which we we call learn and that's about embedding Rich content uh in day-to-day activity so uh your classic kind of LMS is is uh is a classroom experience right you you go and you study it and you maybe you do some some quizzes and you demonstrate that you you've done your studying um we're embedding micro video in day-to-day workflows uh so that uh imagine this use case right...