Don’t Wait To Hire Great People Around You
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.
Join Tim Fitzpatrick and Chris Carter for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
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Don’t Wait To Hire Great People Around You
Tim Fitzpatrick
Welome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, bad and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth and marketing shouldn't be difficult. I am super excited to have with me today Chris Carter from Approyo. Chris, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Chris Carter
Tim, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me this week.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, I enjoyed our conversation last time around, and I'm sure today is going to be no exception. Before we dig into your journey and some of the things we're going to talk about today, I want to ask you some rapid fire questions. Are you ready to jump in?
Chris Carter
I've been ready, Tim. Let's go.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. Very quickly, what do you do and how long have you been doing it?
Chris Carter
CEO and I have the vision for the company.
Tim Fitzpatrick
How long have you guys been in business?
Chris Carter
Since 2011.
Tim Fitzpatrick
2011. What's the most important lesson you've learned in running a business?
Chris Carter
Hire great people around you. You cannot do it all.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. Yeah. We, unfortunately, we're not great at everything, are we?
Chris Carter
No, I am not. No, I am not. None of us are.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, and I know since you've been running your business long enough, there have been ups, there have been downs. When you hit those tough times, do you have a mantra or a motivational saying that you share with yourself, your team, to help push through those times?
Chris Carter
I do. It's the speech that Rocky gave his son outside of the restaurant. I think it's Rocky 4 or Rocky 5, where the world is not rainbows and sunshine. It's going to beat you to your knees. But if you're strong enough to get back up that next time, keep moving forward, keep punching forward, keep going forward to be successful. And I actually have the sign up on my wall here in my office. And when things go awry or something, I look to that and I just think, keep moving forward.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. One of my mentors said to me one time, and I can't remember where he heard it, but it was like, Just focus on the next measurable step. I always found that to be something just to help push through because sometimes we don't know what five or 10 steps ahead looks like, but we sure as heck know what the next measurable step is. And once you take that first step, it's so much easier to take the next one and the one after that.
Chris Carter
Oh, absolutely, Tim. Absolutely.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So at Approyo, you guys specialize in end to end support for SAP systems, which is... I mean, you're pretty niched. How do you think this focus and specialty has helped you grow?
Chris Carter
That's a great question that nobody's asked me before, but it's internal to me. I know that, but I can't be everything to everybody. I can't be a PeopleSoft, an Oracle, a SQL. I can't be all these other pieces. So we took SAP from selling the licenses, to putting it on an infrastructure as a CSP, to implementing the software, to managing the software. That piece we do exceptional. Our team, I have great people. I'm very blessed on that. Why step out of something that we are so darn good at, and all of a sudden then try to become a people source, or try to be a functional, or a web developer? We wouldn't be able to do that until we hired and trained and did everything. That would take us another 12 years to be able to do that. We do what we do exceptionally, and we stay focused on that. And that's what customers appreciate from us.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So it does help you close business that you might have a more difficult time closing.
Chris Carter
Oh, yes. Because if we go up against one of the big boys, the top fives, or somebody offshore, they literally have a website that you have to crawl through or some type of pamphlet that's got 50 pages of different things that they work on. We do SAP excellently. We provide the services, the licenses, the hosting, the cloud, and we work with our partners. They know exactly what we do. We don't step on their toes. We work with our customers. They know exactly what we do, so we can provide the support and activities just for them. Works out well for everybody.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, and do you also find that even within the SAP environment, not everybody that uses SAP is a great fit for you either, are they?
Chris Carter
If they want us to do functional consultative work, no, we are not their organization. If they want us to focus on the technical, from licenses to hosting as a CSP for Microsoft and also a provider for Amazon, then the implementation of the technical and the management and running of that system, we do all that excellent. I'm not going to bring in Fico Consultants or SD Consultants to implement the functionality of that system from a business standpoint. Definitely not going to train you on it. We don't hire trainers. We hire help desk and support to be able to maintain an organization to be up 24 by 7.
Tim Fitzpatrick
And do the companies you work with, do they tend to fall on a certain size range?
Chris Carter
We're really good in the middle midmarket, but we have customers that are multibillion dollars up here. We have companies that are... I've got a client that's $20 million in revenue. But really, the midmarket, if you say about $1.5 billion and below, that tends to be our sweet spot. Greg Patreus of SAP calls them the midmarket Mavericks. That midmarket, we're excellent at.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So midmarket, SAP, you know exactly what lane you live in. It gives you focus and you can close. Your message just resonates more with people when you're in that space.
Chris Carter
It really does. And that's a great point. It resonates with them because if we were to go, and again, we do have some multi billion dollar firms that we work with. When we talk to them, we have to talk to them rather than talking with them. Because the midmarket folks, there are people. We're in that multi million dollar organization in that structure. If we're going upwards, I've never run a billion dollar company before. I'm now talking to them rather than with them.
How to Be Consistent with Your Marketing
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, got it. So when let's talk about marketing a little bit. When it comes to marketing, what's your single biggest problem or challenge that you're dealing with?
Chris Carter
Oh, geez. Being consistent with it, getting it out there to those organizations. We know the 486,000 companies that are out there in the SAP ecosystem. So getting the consistent message of who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how we help them is really the tough part.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You are not on an island by yourself here. There's plenty of companies that struggle with that consistency. I think part of it, too, what I found with consistency is, one, having a plan where you know where your priorities are certainly helps. But I think, two, because there's so many different marketing channels today, it is very easy to just get overwhelmed. There's information overload. It's like, where do we need to be? And having this feeling of, we need to be all these places. But the reality is, for most businesses, you don't need to be everywhere. You need to find those two, three channels that make the most sense for you and go deep. So go narrow, go deep, rather than wide and shallow. And what I found is when people do that, it becomes much easier to be consistent because you can eliminate the distraction You know what I'm saying? Great.
Chris Carter
Because if you don't have... There are all distractions around you and the whole...
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Because we have distraction... It's not just marketing either. It's like everything within our businesses, we have distractions all over the place. And if we don't have... If we don't have our priorities outlined and clarity on where we need to focus, it is so easy to be a squirrel chasing a nut and just be like, Oh, I like that one. And, No, I like this one. And so what I found when we work with clients is when there's challenges with consistency, those are some of the things that we focus on to help people push through it. Any channel, any tactic can work. That's why there's no one size fits all plan either. We've got to figure out, hey, based on where you are, where you want to go, your particular situation, what's going to work best? Because there's also too much one size fits all marketing advice out there. And I just don't think that serves most business owners well.
Chris Carter
Very much agree.
Tim Fitzpatrick
And when you run into, it's like, oh, well, we did that and it didn't work. Well, there's probably some elements that were missing. Some of the key ingredients, the way I always look at it is the strategy is the fuel. So in a lot of cases, companies have the vehicles, but they don't have the right fuel or they don't have fuel at all. So you were not alone in consistency being a challenge with marketing.
Chris Carter
Thank goodness.
What You Need to Know About Hyper Aggressive Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, one of the things you mentioned to me, Chris, when we connected for the pre interview was you are focused on hyper aggressive growth. You said to me, Hey, I'm at this age. I don't want to be doing this X years from now. Yeah. Is that your little note?
Chris Carter
It's a little note that sticks on my computer. It says hyper aggressive.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, I love it. So hyper aggressive growth. What roadblocks stand in your way and what are you trying to do about those right now?
Chris Carter
So what stands in our way is get our name out to all of the organizations that are in the SAP ecosystem, funneling our names to the SAP account executives, getting our names to the right partners who can give us a warm introduction to prospects who are out there. Once an organization talks to us, they understand who we are, they see what we do, they get the message. They love us. We have a great win rate. Our biggest loser is, no, not at this time. But I want to come back to you, Chris, or I want to come back with you, Roryl. We don't have this at the moment. And we do. We have customers that we've gotten because they've just come back to us after they finally got a budget. It's getting them first. And we have a great relationship with partners, and they bring us in all the time, and you get that warm and fuzzy from them right away. And then you move forward from there. But it's getting them to know who we are, first and foremost, is the most difficult.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So a lot of the roadblocks are really on the front end. It doesn't sound like right now you have any issues on the back end, right? Sometimes with marketing and sales, it's like, Hey, we can bring the leads in, but dang, once they come in, the wheels are coming off, right? You can't feel.
Chris Carter
Ours is the opposite. The wheels are off before we even get them to us. Once they get them to us, we have a pit crew that can put those wheels on there and get them going and really move them forward. And then once we get those tires on them and we're moving forward with them, our team puts in a brand new Chevy LS engine like a Corvette, and it is reving at full speed because then once they come in, we got upgrades going on, we got new modules going in, we've got new cloud pieces going in. Companies want to then work with us and they just layer into us. But it's getting the ability to put those tires on first and foremost.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So it sounds like you guys really have your back end systems and processes pretty dialed in. I've got to think that because you specialize in SAP, again, that's another example of why specializing really helps the business overall because it's so much... You're not reinventing the wheel every time. It's like, we need to do this for this particular SAP client? Well, here's the SOP and here's how we do it.
Chris Carter
Exactly. It's very standard processes. Once they're in, we got a very standard help desk procedure for organizations to work with, our team members, where they are. We follow the sun with them. We're doing activities with them. But again, you're right. Once we get them in, how do we bring them to us? How do we can showcase who we are to be able to move them forward with our organization.
Hiring Great People the Right Way
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So looking back at your experience with Approyo so far, what are the top three to five things that instantly stand out for you?
Chris Carter
So I didn't hire fast enough with quality people that I could surround myself with. That was a negative. I tried to bring it all on myself. Two, once I brought those quality people in, we just expanded the quality of our capabilities and our people. So that was a benefit. Three, we became a CSP of cloud service provider for the SAP ecosystem. I wish I would have done that a couple of years earlier, but we were balancing how the cloud was going to work, how SAP was going to work with the cloud, how they were going to do public versus private clouds. And so we watched from a hand distance. And then as soon as they started making their decisions, then we jumped in. It worked out very well for everybody, clients and us alike.
Tim Fitzpatrick
How many people are on your team at this point?
Chris Carter
173 globally. We've got staff and Brazil, we got staff in India, we got in the UK, all throughout the United States. A lot of US based labor, first and foremost. And then we decided to bring some folks in and we actually created our own company in India. We did not want to outsource to India. We find that if you outsource, you don't own and control their actions. We also found that people were trying to skirt the system in regards to paying their taxes, having three different jobs. It was a mess. So we wanted to control that narrative. So we created our own company. We work with a training company. We hire those individuals just like in the US. You have one role, that's with us. If you need a part time job, we need to have a conversation. If you have two and three jobs over there in India or wherever. There's going to be another conversation that's going to be involved with HR.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, interesting. So they're full time employees?
Chris Carter
Yes.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.
Chris Carter
Yeah. That's the whole reason why we created the entity in India, to make them our full time employees, not a consulting company's. Third, second, third, fourth role. They are one to one. They are Apparoyo private, limited employees.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Interesting. If it's okay, I want to dig into this a little bit because I think this is an area where there are a ton of opportunities for growing businesses. I mean, we have a client right now who just can't expand because she does not have the capacity. And we've had multiple conversations about this in different ways that she might be able to expand capacity. I think a lot of people make missteps hiring overseas. And what I've seen... Now, look, I have a small team. I do not have employees. They are all freelancers that work for me. But early on, one of the pieces of advice that I was given was, look, you have to hire and pay these people full time because they just... Who the hell wants a part time job and then figure out how the hell they're going to find the other job? And so whether that's relevant or not, it made sense to me. And so I always hired full time. The other thing that somebody said to me was, look, treat these people like their employees. Most of... I shouldn't say most. I have heard horror stories about business owners treating outsourced freelancers like dirt. I can just test this out, and if it doesn't work, then it's fine. They're just disposable. And it's like, look, this is their livelihood here, for crying out loud. I think those two things are really big mistakes that people make. I also think that they don't have the systems or processes in place to effectively manage people remotely. Those are just some of the top things that come to my mind. What's coming to your mind based on your experience? Because it sounds like you guys didn't start by having your own company in India.
Chris Carter
No, we actually had the third party companies.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Recommended by LinkedIn
Okay.
Chris Carter
Unfortunately, I didn't have somebody tell me to treat them as full time employees and hire them as full time employees. We would hire them from an as needed basis. And the problem that we had is we always had these third party companies that we would work with. And what we came to find out is these third party companies would just find a resume, bring it to us, barely vetted them out. We would then go through a process and they would be garbage or they would be okay. And we were never getting great. And so those companies, we just got rid of them all. And then we found out that one of the companies that we were dealing with literally would hire them for us and hire them for maybe a second company, a third company. And they specifically knew that this person wasn't working 40 hours, but he was working 40 hours for three different companies. You can't do this. And I actually wrote a blog piece on this, on how the United States government needs to start tracking and managing this, because it's happening all over India. Individuals are not putting into the governance fund. They're messing with US labor. I've got companies here in the Milwaukee area that I chastise all the time. As a matter of fact, I just did a post about this, and I chastised three companies in Milwaukee area that are they all told us, we're going to go offshore because it's cheaper for us. Okay, well, I know what's going on over there, and I know these activities are happening. We learned that earlier. Why don't you take what we've learned and understand this activity? And you don't have to build a company over there, but you do have to do better.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, there's no doubt about it. Well, the reality is we can all tell the difference when somebody's outsourced overseas and they've done a bad job at it compared to when they've done a good job at it. And I'm not going to call out any names, but I've had some experiences in the last couple of months where it's like, This is unreal. This is so bad. This is not representing your company well, and it's going to impact your business long term. I can understand outsourcing overseas, doing things to be more efficient and save on labor costs. But to me, it's not. I don't know if it's as much anymore about, yes, it can help your bottom line, but I just think it helps you grow more effectively and efficiently.
Chris Carter
Well, what do you want? You want one of three things. You want fast, you want cheap, or you want it done on time. Pick two of them because you're not going to get three of them from overseas with the staff. If you want those things taken care of, no. That's on them.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You got it. Yeah. I love that. Can you say that again? What are the three things?
Chris Carter
Fast, cheap, or on time.
Tim Fitzpatrick
On time. Okay. You can only have two.
Chris Carter
You only get two.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. So you've got the company overseas in India. Are you hiring in any other countries as well?
Chris Carter
We are. We're hiring in the UK, but we only hire direct. We hire direct with individuals. We do not hire direct with a third party company because we want to vet that person with everything and anything. So the perfect example is in the United Kingdom. We go through a company called Deals in order to pay for them, which is an online tool that takes care of all the HR activities. So everything that needs to be validated and audited over in the UK is set up in that organization. We then hire direct, one to one. We mandate in our contracts, we want a full time employee who's going to be full time for us. And we'll work together based upon timing, if it's the United States, if it's the UK time zone, whatever the case may be. But we want that person to have a fantastic wage, get the benefits that they deserve, pay into their insurance and IRSs and those things like that, and then bonuses that we can pay out for them. And so we do that in the UK as well. We have to do that in Brazil.
Tim Fitzpatrick
In Brazil. Yeah. I know there's a lot with outsourcing overseas, you hear about India a lot, the Philippines.
Chris Carter
Vietnam.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Philippines. Yeah, Vietnam. Central and Latin America are starting to become really popular, especially in the US because their time zones coincide with ours, which works really well. I would just say to those business owners that are listening, if this is something that you have thought about, just be open minded about it because I really do think there's a lot of opportunities. And some people have been very closed minded about it, like, oh, I'm never going to do that. And I think you're missing the boat if you don't have an open mind about it.
Chris Carter
I agree. I tell them to go to Just Deals. And I think it's justdeals.com. And it literally has every country they work with. They deal with the HR, they deal with the insurances, they deal with all the taxing regulations and all those. Go there and that service helps you 100 %.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And it sounds like that they help you hire employees, not freelancers.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Correct.
Chris Carter
And they basically take care of...
Chris Carter
you can do both on there, but we only do the full time staff members.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. And they take care of all of the reporting requirements for that particular position.
Chris Carter
Yes, all built into them from a contractual standpoint, templates and everything else with that.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Very cool. I love it. Honestly, I didn't even know that companies like that existed.
Chris Carter
That and Gusto. Gusto does that as well. Gusto does Full HR so you can use those organizations. As a matter of fact, Gusto just got to the point where literally now we're going to be able to transition off of Deals and bring that to Gusto. Gusto is a company out of California.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I've heard of Gusto. That's very interesting. So Just Deals and Gusto. I will also throw a couple of others into the mix that I have used, which are more for freelancers, but onlinejobs.ph specializes in the Philippines. The other one that I've used is Jobrack.eu, which specializes in Eastern Europe. There are some highly qualified people in Eastern Europe, really good people. There's really good people all over. But the Philippines and Eastern Europe are two places that I have some experience with.
Chris Carter
Awesome.
Conclusion: Don't Wait To Hire Great People Around You
Tim Fitzpatrick
Definitely speak to that. This has been a great conversation, Chris. I've really enjoyed this. I want to ask you a couple of other questions just to round things out here. First thing is, what do you believe has been the biggest driver of your growth?
Chris Carter
Biggest driver of our growth? Right now is the largest upgrade cycle in SAP history. They're going from ECC to S 4. The only one that was bigger was in the beginning of 1998 when they went from R2 to R 3. And this is bigger because now you've got cloud services involved, there's more customers out there, and SAP has come down in their levels of companies that they're able to support. So I think it's literally double what it was back in that day.
Tim Fitzpatrick
How long is that window?
Chris Carter
You have until 2027 to have that upgrade. And if you don't have it done by the end of 2027, you're not getting an extension of 2030. SAP has already stated, Nope, if you haven't started your upgrade by 2025, you're going to be late and that means you're going to get an extra kick in the old service revenue management that you're going to get until 22. It's going to be '24.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You have a four year wave potentially that you can ride there.
Chris Carter
Problem is there's not that many staff members to be able to do that. The number of people to be able to do a full migration like that is very limited. And companies are already booking out upgrades for next year already.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.
Chris Carter
It's difficult. It's a full year long process.
Tim Fitzpatrick
This is like a cruise ship, not a speed boat.
Chris Carter
Yes, exactly. We like to take the air carrier as well for the military. But yes, cruise ship, air carrier.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. So 11 years doing this, you had 170 something employees. You've grown quite a bit. Knowing what you know now, is there anything you do differently?
Chris Carter
Yes, I would have hired really strong executive staff earlier. I tried to do it all myself, and I made reference to this a little bit earlier in our call here, was I literally tried to do it all myself. I tried to be the cook, the cleaner, the bottle washer, the sweeper, the garbage taker, all that. Well, I can do all those yet, but I couldn't also keep up with taking care of payroll and doing billing and invoicing, marketing and promotion and all the other things that we needed to do. So the fact that I was able to bring in a president, chief operating officer, chief technology officer, chief revenue officer, and give them the tools to make them successful, has been great.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Game changing.
Chris Carter
Tim, I would have had a full head of hair like you're good for the year. set up line, if I would have done that and done it earlier.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, so here's another follow up question to that. What do you think? What was holding you back from actually making that first?
Chris Carter
Oh, that is a great question because I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through this activity. They're afraid to give up the keys. They're afraid to give up that control, afraid to give it to somebody else and say, Okay, it's now on you. And to be honest, I had a little bit of that as well. Before the team that I have in now, I brought in some people, dribs and drops, but I was always micromanaging them. And that's where it started to have... I needed to understand that the people I brought in, and now I'll give an example. My chief operating officer used to run Webex. How can I ever say to him, I think you're wrong there. The guy ran Webex. Fantastic individual agent. So lucky I have him as part of our team. And Sean created the VCE tools and products and created VCE over at Dell. I'm not going to go into his office and say, You know what, Chuck? No, not today. I'm just not smart enough for this one, big guy. I brought in the best and brightest at one point, finally, who I knew I could get to trust that I could literally just sit back here in my office and say, You know what? No, I'm going to make a video today instead because I got some vision and I got some ideas, and I got some thoughts. I'm going to work with marketing. I trust you to do your job. I trust you, Sean, to work on overwatch. Justin, I trust you as our chief revenue officer to take on the test, and I'm not going to interfere with you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So sometimes we have to get out of our own way, don't we?
Chris Carter
Oh, yes.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Once you made the first hire, was it much easier to make the second and the third?
Chris Carter
Yes, because I brought Sean in from Dell and VCE. Once I brought him in, then I brought in AJ, and then I brought in Justin and others. So that was much easier.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. Chris, where can people learn more about you?
Chris Carter
Come to our website, approyo.com.A P P R O Y O. I'm all over social media. I'm all over LinkedIn. You'll find me on LinkedIn. I'm Christopher Carter, I guess. Twitters, Facebooks, we got it all. But the main one, come to our website. Go to approyo.com. If you want to reach me, my stuff is on there as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. I appreciate it. If you reach out to Chris, I will tell you, I've had two conversations with him. He is super approachable and down to Earth, so very easy to talk to, man. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing your journey and hopefully it just keeps going up and up and up.
Chris Carter
It's our hope. Hope for the whole team.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it.
Chris Carter
Appreciate it, Tim.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you. Chris and I have been talking all about revenue growth and the good, the bad, the ugly today. If you want to accelerate growth, you've got to remove your revenue roadblocks. If you want to find out which of the nine roadblocks are slowing down your growth, you can do that at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. You can also always connect with us over at our website at rialtomarketing.com. Until next time, take care.
Connect With Chris Carter
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About the author, Tim Fitzpatrick
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