In this insightful episode of "The Business Owner’s Journey," Nick Berry interviews Matt Goebel, CEO of Woven, about his entrepreneurial experiences and the lessons he's learned along the way. They discuss Matt's journey from a failed startup to successfully bootstrapping Woven, a SaaS platform for multi-unit businesses and franchises. Key topics include navigating the balance between growth and product development, the challenges of evolving as a founder, and identifying the ideal customer for Woven. This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, especially those in the service industry and SaaS space.
Matt shares insights on the different requirements for succeeding in consumer tech versus B2B SaaS, highlighting how the lessons from this venture shaped his future approach. He reflects on his early venture, Plan the Day, a wedding planning SaaS platform. He believes the primary issue wasn't the product itself but the lack of scale and substantial funding. Although the market was underserved, the challenges of raising sufficient capital and achieving the necessary scale made it unsustainable at the time.
Initially, Matt bootstrapped Woven to maintain control and avoid early dilution of equity. By funding the company himself, he was able to de-risk the business and achieve sustainable growth. However, as Woven matured and the need for faster growth became apparent, he decided to raise external capital. This decision was driven not only by the need for capital infusion but also by the desire for strategic partnerships that could help scale the business and prepare for a potential exit.
Matt discusses the ongoing challenge of balancing product development with growth initiatives. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong product focus, especially in a B2B SaaS company, while also investing in growth strategies to expand the customer base. For Woven, this balance has been crucial in ensuring they continue to innovate and meet customer needs, while also scaling the business sustainably.
Transitioning from being the key driver of all business functions to recognizing oneself as a bottleneck is a humbling experience. Matt candidly shares his journey of stepping back and empowering his team, finding smarter individuals to lead different functions, and avoiding micromanagement. He mentions his CMO Dana Farber, who happens to also be a guest on The Business Owner's Journey.
This shift has been essential for Woven's growth, allowing the company to scale beyond what Matt could achieve on his own.
Woven is designed for multi-unit businesses, specifically within the service industry, such as franchises. Matt highlights that Woven serves businesses with at least 20 locations, where managing operations becomes complex and fragmented. The platform aims to streamline these processes, offering a comprehensive solution for franchisors, franchisees, and their employees. Despite this focus, Matt expresses a continued desire to find a model that can also support smaller 'mom and pop' franchisees effectively.
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Nick (00:00)
readers digest it for us. The Matt Goebel business ownership, entrepreneurial background.
Matt Goebel (00:08)
Yeah, for sure. So coming out of college and graduating Purdue, I got my first job as in consulting. But from a very young age, there's this itch that only an entrepreneur will understand. It's in your brain where it's just like you just are unsatisfied working for somebody for no bad reason other than just your drive, your desire, whatever that is for you.
I don't know how to explain it. There was always that itch there from a very young And so coming out of Purdue, I got my first job was in it for four years. Great company, great mentors, great people. But honestly, just again, had that itch. And in 2009, sorry, yeah, at the peak or whatever, like Lehman Brothers just collapsed. It was like the financial crisis and I had this nice cushy job. And I told my parents and I was like,
I'm quitting. Like I'm resigning and I have this six week contract to do some consulting work and I'm gonna go out on my own and hang my own shingle. And so I did and turn that six week contract into an 18 month contract when honestly, I spent that 18 months just figuring out how to run a business because I didn't I know how to deliver work. I knew I knew my skill, my profession, my trade, right? I had no idea how to run a business. So
Nick (01:27)
Was that Lumarc or was that a different business at that time?
Matt Goebel (01:30)
Yeah, it was the consulting company. It was under a different name at the time that morphed into Lumarc Solutions. But yeah, it essentially was Lumarc Solutions, just not a name. But from there, grew, went through a transaction where I merged that first consulting company. I'd grown it to about three people, small, merged with another small firm here in Indianapolis, was in that partnership for about three years.
learned a lot through that partnership process, learned a whole other angle of business, which is about having partners and the different ways that that can be good and bad. Exited that in 2015. That's when Lumarc Solutions was reborn. I basically took my consulting practice back out of that other ran and technically it still exists running it through today. Things changed again though in 2016 because...
My wife and I became multi -unit franchisees. So my, actually before that, we actually had a failed startup. So you'll always remember about these failed ones, but we actually had a failed startup in a business to consumer B2C SaaS play for wedding planning called plantheday .com. We actually helped about 900 people plan their weddings using our software at the low, low price of probably like a million dollar investment. So that was a...
Again, a very deep, painful learning experience. But it upped my and my software consulting, my whole development team really upped our game because we had been building a lot of business software up until that point, like line of business software for employees within a company and to build software for consumer and in consumer, totally different game. So we learned a lot.
The next venture after that with my wife and I was a franchise concept called Massage Heights here in Indianapolis. We have three locations. We opened up between 2017 and 2019. And it was that moment where having been in the consulting field for a long time, built a lot of software, just happened to be in the franchising space, got niched into it along the way through referrals. And then...
did some work with franchisors at a strategy consulting level, kind of fractional CIO work, became a multi -unit franchisee. So in the franchising world specifically, I'd kind of seen it from the supplier side, the franchisor side, the franchisee operation side. And that was the catalyst for creating Woven. So then in 2017, we laid the first bit of code in early January for Woven. And that is the B2B.
a SaaS product software system that is deployed in a number of different brands. It is an operations workforce management platform specifically built for franchising multi -unit operations. So it helps franchisors connect to franchisees and franchisees down to their frontline employees in a way that isn't fragmented or fractured covering all of their people operations and facility management in one place.
So you don't have like six different logins and a dozen different PDF and Google Sheets floating around that you have to keep track of. It's just a single point to run your day -to -day operations, no matter if you're at the ZOR level, the franchisee level, or the frontline employee level. So we've been doing that since 2017. It's been growing, going strong. And here we are. So.
Nick (05:14)
And now that's the thing.
Matt Goebel (05:14)
That's probably the longer Reader's Digest version, but it's been a journey. It's been a learning journey along the way.
Nick (05:22)
Yeah. Now, looking back, can you see what all makes sense? This is what it was all done with this in mind.
Matt Goebel (05:29)
Yeah, it's perfectly planned, right? Like I knew I needed all these experiences in this specific order in order to achieve where I'm at now in order to get to the next step, which I'm perfectly aware of. No, I, you know, it's business ownership like life is all about rolling with the opportunities, the failures, the everything that comes your way, trying to seek and figure out what you can take from it and learn from it and just move forward because there's.
Nick (05:31)
I'm out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matt Goebel (05:59)
There's no point any other way, right? You can't go change your past. So.
Nick (06:02)
Exactly. If you're trying to get somewhere, that's really the only way you can approach it. So you kind of for anybody listening. So Matt is, we met, I believe it may have been late 2016 or it was in 2017, but Matt was referred to us by someone who is a really reliable referrer. Like if he says this person's good,
Matt Goebel (06:10)
Yeah, for sure.
Nick (06:32)
I know they're good. So I called Matt and we were looking for somebody. We needed our own custom software platform built and had just had an awful time finding someone who does that, who could communicate with us. And admittedly, like some of that, a lot of that probably is on us, but they needed to elicit the information they needed in a way that they could put it to use and create what we needed. And Matt was able to do that and it was...
a great experience. Like I learned a lot watching him, how he handled us, how he problem solved, how he delivered his product. And it was also really refreshing to meet someone in that space who was just as advertised and as reliable. And so I got to see Matt go through his startup with Massage Hype.
and getting woven off the ground and dealing with us as a customer, who he managed to make very happy. So like that's, that's a testament one to who he is as a business owner and as a leader. But like I've seen firsthand what he's talking about the ability to take every experience in and gain what you can gain from it and use whatever it'll give you to move.
closer to your goal. And now, I mean, he'll we'll talk more about woven, but like, he's I know he's got to kill their product because one of the things that I learned about him is he is a hell of a problem solver. I think I'm a good problem solver. But good. Now I realize it's good in a way that like, like, I'm really good at ping pong. If you're a recreational ping pong player, like I can take care of business. But I've played with people who are professional ping pong players. And that's another level of
But like they don't play ping pong, they play table tennis. So I think I'm a good problem solver. And then to see Matt, the way that he diagnosed what was going, what we were looking for, when we were trying to get our heads around it like there's another level of like problem solver person out there. So that was impressive to see, but it also is why it's not an accident that he delivered the product that he delivered. Like he made sure he knew exactly what the problem we were trying to solve was. And he tacked.
didn't give a shit how what we thought it should be solved he's telling you you don't want to do it that way you want to do it this way right and that's probably something that you learn to do over time as a consultant I got to see him go through all this stuff right so it's been he is that guy so now that I've built you up let's go back to plan the day
Matt Goebel (09:14)
Yeah.
Nick (09:26)
Could you make Plan the Day work now?
Matt Goebel (09:30)
Tear me down a little bit, bring back the day.
Nick (09:32)
Yeah.
Matt Goebel (09:35)
Yeah, yes, yeah, no, probably not. And again, all in hindsight, right. I think one of my key takeaways and learnings from the Plan the Day adventure was around the fact that there are different types of businesses that require different types of activities to drive them to success. And in the case,
just to cut to the core of it, right? In the case of a B2C company, when you need, in the tech space at least, I'll at least preface this in the tech space, it probably does apply outside of just the tech space as well, but when you need to gain awareness and market penetration in the consumer marketplace, especially when that's super competitive, like say the wedding industry, where there's like this one little event of time when that bride is in this mode and then she's gone, she's...
you know, well, like 50 % of them come back, but they don't do the same thing. But they, the, the issue, right, is scale, right? It is, if you're a startup, it is raising a boatload of money and going as wide and as deep as you possibly can in terms of marketing, market penetration, branding, being everywhere, right? Like it is, it is a game of scale that you have to go play.
And to be perfectly honest, and this is back in 20.
gosh, 2023, no sorry, 2013, 2014, we were building Plan Today. So in that day, right, all the solutions, the technology, the offerings to help plan a wedding were just atrocious. And so we thought, well, we can build a better widget, we can build something better. And to be perfectly honest, I think we did. Like even in hindsight, I do believe that we had a better product. The problem is that we were too small.
And it required to play a game where you go raise a hunt of money and be everywhere all the time. And you have to go big and just risk it all to like try to hit a grand slam and anything less, right? You're just cheating yourself. And so that's what we learned and took away from it. And to be perfectly honest, also learned that like that type of business isn't for me. There's a lot of people out there that have done it. There's even more people out there that have tried that and failed.
Right. But the point is, is that that that kind of just raise a ton of money on a promise, take a bunch of money and like hope for the best kind of model doesn't align with my core. Right. I struggle with the raising money or taking money when I don't have a more definitive kind of line to the result. So we have since raised
Nick (12:35)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Goebel (12:37)
money with So much as the scale at which you have to do it and how quickly you have to do it on so little data and like crazy made up J projection charts of our revenue growth. It's just I learned that that wasn't for me. So in hindsight, can we go build?
an even better product than what's out there. I don't know what's out there today. I've been in the wedding game for a long time now, thankfully. I'm sure we could build product, but honestly, it's not the product. We could have had a subpar product and if we had the marketing behind us, we would have done better if we had the dollars. And so learn really the finance and scale and fundraising side of a startup through that venture.
Also learned a lot about building software for consumers, as I mentioned earlier, which we were able to carry that experience directly forward into other things we did. But yeah, I don't, yeah.
Nick (13:33)
So you mentioned you didn't have that clear path, that vision for, this is what we're going to get to. But now with Woven, you do, because this is where you have raised some money. Tell me, what is that clear path? What does it look like for Woven? In comparison to when you used it in a scenario when you didn't have it, now you do.
Matt Goebel (14:00)
the real generic contrast was that with Plan the Day, we were making what I would call hobbyist money. Yeah, we had some paying customers. We planned several hundred weddings. There was like 900 around last year or so. However, when they're only like 10 bucks or whatever it was, $4 a month or something like that, I forget, I even forget the price model, but it doesn't add up to a lot.
right, it's hobbyist money, and you have to go to large scale to make it work. with Woven, you know, we were, I was fortunate enough that, you know, I had already,
spent a good portion of a decade at that point building a consulting practice. And so in a roundabout way, I spent a decade first preparing for Woven. And if we're going to joke about the perfectly laid out plan, I was fortunate enough that I had a good set of clients that had built up over time. You guys, I was working with you at the time and essentially was able to bootstrap, what's called bootstrap.
in the tech space world where you essentially don't raise any money and you live out of your own revenue. You live out of your own personal, the founders own personal finances. So I basically funded Woven for the first five years. That taught us a lot of lessons as well as constrained our growth, but I think in a healthy way to the point where we were building a business. And I, this is my personal opinion, but I do believe that a lot of the...
The tech ecosystem for startups is very different than every other startup ecosystem out there that I've been around and been part of, right? Specifically work a lot with like franchise or is that are starting there. That's a startup, right? An emerging franchise or franchisee starting their business. That's a startup, although be it slightly different, but I've had friends that have started businesses that were not in the tech space. And there's something odd about the tech space, which is about like,
raising a boatload of money, diluting yourself down, and then you basically build this like sales and marketing organization that you hope to sell enough, quickly enough before you run out of money and then worry about the product and the support later. It's a very broad generalization that any tech person listening to this could probably argue with and pick apart, but in short, that's my sarcastic summation of the stereotypes on our industry.
And again, like I had mentioned, that wasn't for me, that I didn't have a desire to dilute myself and have other people tell me how to serve this industry that I'd already been serving for 10 years. Right. And again, Woven came out of this 10 year journey of building software in the space and then living, right? Like we were, we were our own users. We were our first users of Woven. And so, you know, for us, it made more sense to bootstrap grow. And by the time we actually,
raised money, we had a proven model. I forget exactly where we were. We were north of a million dollars a year in recurring annual revenue. We were living, we were a sustainable business. We were a real business, meaning that woven was never going to go away. We had sustainability. We were supporting ourselves and growing on our own revenue. We had year over year growth.
We had expansion growth within our customers. We had very low churn rates. We were taking care of our customers. We were getting referrals. We had product market fit. We had dialed in all these things. And so two things, one, as just a, again, everybody's different and everybody has different tolerances for different things. For me to go out and ask somebody to write me a $100 ,000 check, I needed to sleep well at night.
right? And for me to sleep well, I had to go out and make that ask knowing that I wasn't going to lose that money. I may not 20 exit or be some unicorn story, but I'm not going to lose their money, right? And so
Nick (18:05)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, you had enough velocity that the risk was way different than the typical. Yeah.
Matt Goebel (18:18)
So I had deleveraged enough risk through bootstrapping it and getting it to that point where I could sleep with myself or I could live with myself and sleep at night. And at the same time, by deleveraging a lot of that risk out, actually conserved a lot of my equity in the company, right? As a business owner, equity is the most precious and important thing.
You can pay people and you can make money and lose money and do all kinds of stuff, but you can only give equity away once. And there's only 100 % of it, right? And every bit that goes out the door, you really can rarely ever get that back. So for me, it was a combination of I sleep better at night knowing that I wasn't selling some smoke and dreams. I was selling a real business on a real path with real...
results that we were heading towards. Clearly, there's still risk in there because it's a business and anything can happen. But de -leverage that risk as much as I could. And then at the same time, I did not have to dilute myself as much because when you raise on just an idea, you have to give up a lot of the company because those people bringing their money to the table technically have everything, right? They hold all the cards because you're just an idea. And when they're investing in a real business with revenue, it's...
definitely more advantageous for the owner at that point, right? Because less risk.
You have to, you know, you're in a different position, I guess.
Nick (19:57)
So did you, when you went, we're going through this process from day one with the bootstrapping, did you do it with raising money? Did you do all those things with raising money in mind? Or did you look up and say, hey, we've actually primed ourselves for this. It might be a good idea. Let's look at raising some money.
Matt Goebel (20:15)
Yeah, I think a combination. I had been for probably over a year or two at that point entertaining the idea. Again, as we were dialing things in and we were getting more...
our numbers, how to say this, our numbers were becoming more predictable, more reliable, we were growing at a steady rate, we were stabilizing and maturing as a business. The question then became, okay, we don't have to figure stuff out as much as we just need to go faster, right? So it's one thing to try to go buy somebody's fuel and fire starter. It's a whole nother thing to have a fire and then just get more fuel to pour on it, make the fire go bigger.
And that's where we were starting to get in. So yes, it was time to go quicker than we were able to go out of our own revenue. And so that made sense to me. And at the same time, Woven is being built to be sold someday. Worth mentioning, I don't really focus on the consulting company anymore. It's kind of on a sun setting phase. While it was a very lucrative business and it I
Loved it. I was passionate about it. Was decent at it. The end of the day, you can never retire from that. Like, January 1 rolls around and you gotta go sell all the same amount of hours and keep your team busy and support their families and support your own family. And like, there's no stability to it in that sense. There's a whole, there's a lot out there on like feasts and famines of consulting practices, professional services that don't have some kind of base built into them.
So it was kind of twofold in the sense that like Woven and the transition to Woven not only was to solve industry problems that I had seen repeatedly, but it was also a pivot for me as a business owner to something that eventually created equity and something that I could sell, right? Value at the end of the journey, not just value during the journey. And so, yes, raising money was always part of the eventual plan.
maybe not for money for money's sake, but it was for partnership, right? Like having the right partners that have equal stake in a exit outcome is a good thing to have, right? Because those people are going to be able to make introductions and eventually help with that exit.
Nick (22:45)
So if I'm understanding what you're saying there, you're not just raising money, you're kind of attaching yourself to some people in your network, and well, aligning those outcomes together so you can get more out of those people in your network.
Matt Goebel (23:05)
there's many reasons to raise money. I don't think it's always just for the money. I mean, sometimes it is. Sometimes you face a financial cliff and you need to keep the business alive. You got to raise money. I think there's other avenues as well. Could be strategic partnership related, eventual exit partnerships, alignments with other near peers in the industry. There's other reasons. But yeah, for us, it was a combination of growth capital along with
strengthening relationships, I guess, for the eventual exit.
Nick (23:35)
so you're now you're shifting more into growth mode. Am I right? Is that fair statement? But I'm taking that along with what you were saying earlier about, like, I think you do, you seem to be doing a good job of staying balanced between like product and growth.
Matt Goebel (23:42)
Yeah.
Nick (23:52)
Is that intentional or is that just how you're wired? And if it's intentional, how you doing that?
Matt Goebel (23:58)
Yeah, I think as you mentioned earlier, I appreciate the compliments. I mean, if I'm good at anything in this life from like a God given capability, I would put problem solving pretty high up there. I do. It's both this intersection of passion, capability, experience, great mentors coming out of college that just culminated in this particular skill.
And so that in a product, so Woven being a product company, right, I'm no longer consulting and hearing all these problems from my clients and then building something to solve it. Woven being a product company, I do still get to do that because we listen to our customers all the time. And that is an immediate like feedback loop that goes back into the product. But then I also have the product to manage.
with all the existing customer base, and there's the whole customer success team and trainings, and there's a lot more to it now than just like, yeah, I can go build you a point solution to do that. Great. So for me, the product and keeping Woven in that, I'll be honest, probably our product gets more attention than any other SaaS company, B2B SaaS company at our stage.
a traditional B2B SaaS company, once they built their product and they're selling it, they don't iterate on it or invest in it to the level we do until they get later on, until they're hitting that like four or $5 million AR run rate. Then you start seeing a heavier product investment. We have never stopped investing in our product from day one. So and I think that's just in part.
due to my DNA, right? Like I've transitioned my entire software company into Woven. We have the team, we have the capabilities, we love solving problems, we love hearing about problems and solving problems. And so it's a, sure, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And then we've gone, you know, mid even enterprise level businesses now. So you have these organizations that are half,
Nick (26:05)
And you're a user, right? I mean, you've got this in your own unit.
Matt Goebel (26:20)
a billion dollar a year orgs that are 200 plus locations. And, you know, they rely on Woven to run their day to day across 26 different states and 3000 hourly frontline employees. And, you know, hearing their problems, which are nothing like the problems I have with like my three locations, and then trying to balance like Woven as a solution that works for both is, it's a good problem. It's a fun problem to try to solve. But it is one that we are.
perpetually adding to in the terms of features and capabilities. And so it's fun. Yeah, I think that balancing the growth and the product, to be perfectly honest, growth is getting a lot more attention this We say only, but we grew by 74 % last year, year over year, which was pretty solid for this B2B SaaS company.
2023, 2023. However, like we had just we came off raising money, we wanted to go faster. So it's still a big focus for us right now. So it's not getting as the balance is probably shifting a little more into the growth favor, right. And by that, probably it's like 50 50 now, not just like 60 70 % product and, you know, 30 % growth mindset. But it's worked out for us, right.
Nick (27:37)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Goebel (27:42)
Year over year since we started, over 90 % of our new sales comes from referrals, which does keep our acquisition costs down. So in a way, it works. But yeah.
Nick (27:56)
for growth now, whatever you're willing to share, like what's the current and future look
Matt Goebel (28:03)
It's evolving. I'll answer the question like no problem. So much as like the one thing I've learned, because I am a technologist, right? I mean, you know, when we work together consulting, I don't write code anymore and I haven't written code in a long, long time. But architecting solutions, hearing out business problems, bringing technology to bear to solve those problems, bring efficiencies, productivity, accountability, blah, blah, blah. That's my skill set. I am comfortable and at home there.
You put me in the marketing world, in the realm of marketing or sales, and it's, you know, I can do a consultative sale because again, I'm just solving problems. I'm helping, right? It's very natural for me, but normal generic type sales or marketing type stuff isn't my strong suit. And so we've definitely, as we've grown and brought in different people to try to run those functions of Woven, you know, we've learned a lot.
Right. Part of the raise we did in late 2022 was to bring in those functions. And we hired for experience. So for the first time in Woven's history, instead of hiring for the culture, value fit, the industry experience of franchising and multi -unit operations, we actually hired for, have you scaled and been part of a rocket ship SaaS company before? Check. Yes, hired.
Nick (29:28)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Goebel (29:28)
And honestly, there's nothing there was nothing wrong with those people that we hired so much as like ultimately not a fit at woven and what we were doing. Right. There was still a very different DNA from going and working at a VC funded splashing a lot of cash around and then a very capital conscious bootstrapped business that just happened to raise money, but isn't going to change its DNA overnight. And so, you know, while we did deploy.
quite a bit in all your traditional digital marketing and did a bunch of learning last year. Ultimately, never really found the thing that was like the repeatable. You know, we had some hits here and there. We had some wins for sure. So much as like still finding like, what is the, what is the formula? What's the repeatable machine that we can reliably put effort, money, resources into?
to get a predictable outcome at the end, if that makes sense. So long story short, again, nothing wrong with the people that we hired so much as just at the end of the day, right? There's a lot to be said about alignment on certain cultural fit things, you know, capitally conscious versus just, you know, having boatloads of money or two different ways to approach problems and other things. But regardless,
That team turned over and we are now rebuilding the team. We have a great fractional CMO. We'd love to, she'll probably listen to this. I'd love to hire her, but she runs her own professional services fractional CMO practice. She does an amazing job at it. So, yeah, no.
Nick (31:13)
Yes, she does. Your shit is good. I'm glad you brought her up because your shit is good.
Matt Goebel (31:20)
Yeah, I know our content's great. So, you know, we started there. We've been working together for six months now and she's really helped us just.
She comes out of industry, out of the franchising industry. She knows the base we talk to and serve. She's a great fit for Woven and who we are. And it's just working, right? And we're incrementally building on that, right? So we're just, I guess all this is saying, we just did recently hire a VP of sales and we're starting to put together that. We hired a brand success manager that has dual functional, like a dual functional role between.
our customer success team and sales within select brands. So yes, this year has been all about rebuilding from what we learned. And we're definitely rebuilding with the knowledge and what we learned out of last year in who we hire, how we hire, and how we're going about rebuilding the sales and marketing. So referrals remain one of our top lead generations. And so it's about right now.
We've been focused heavily on how to bring better systems and processes to formalizing that more versus just, you know, getting lucky and somebody thought of you and, you know, refers you to their friend to try to be more top of mind. But yeah, so we're still running, you know, the usual the usual plays emails and digital marketing stuff, LinkedIn. But like we have evolution still to go in those areas for sure.
Nick (32:39)
Mm -hmm.
Who is your main audience? Like, who are you targeting?
Matt Goebel (33:03)
Yeah.
Nick (33:03)
What size, like number of units really is what I'm looking for.
Matt Goebel (33:07)
Yeah, so I would say our ICP or ideal client profile, ideal customer profile, however you're looking at it, is those businesses, multi -unit businesses that are 20 locations or up.
in the service side of the industry. So gym, fitness, salon, spa, car washes, things like that, retail even. There's a whole niche area. I mean, there's, I don't know how many hundreds of different franchise concepts are out there. It's remarkable every time I turn around and I learn like you can franchise that, like that's awesome. But you can't, you can franchise just about anything. The franchising model itself is wonderful in how it's applied, but.
topic for a later discussion. So there is a lot of underserved segments, industry segments within the franchising space that just don't get any love or attention. And that's kind of where we've niched out and found like our sweet spot at that 20 -ish location count above. So think the larger, small size to midsize and above organizations.
Nick (34:17)
What is it about what changes at that threshold that takes them, moves them into your ICT?
Matt Goebel (34:26)
Yeah, it's such a great question because in various forms we get this question a lot. The answer is probably two or threefold. I first have to say by, we built Woven for ourselves. We are well below that threshold, right? At three locations. We actually, one of my, call it altruistic kind of like things I wanted to do with starting Woven was like, we built all this really cool software.
to help these really big businesses because they can afford it, to bring efficiencies to their already massive scale and efficiency, right? But the mom and pops, they don't have that luxury. They're not gonna go spend a quarter of a million dollars to eke out, right? A little bit more efficiency. They just can't afford it. So one of the things that we were starting at Woven was like, listen, these problems are pretty consistent, right? We should bring a solution to bear that helps all these mom and pops, right? It helps all these people that...
retire from their professional job and they've always wanted to own their own business, but they don't want to be in business by themselves and they love this brand and so they roll over their 401k, they leverage their retirement and they get in business for themselves only to get punched in the face by managing hourly employees and all the other fun that comes with business ownership. And they start scrambling around to try to collect tools and solutions and solve pain points and all of that eventually just leads up to...
more drag on their business and then they can't scale it. They can't get out of it because they got stuff everywhere. Anyways, it's just, it's this spiral. It's a spiral effect, right? And all of a sudden they're not running a business. They own their job, right? And so I saw that repeatedly. And so one of my, I guess, I don't know, it's like feel good motivations was to help the small guy, right? Small person, small lady. There was no,
thought in my mind at that time to go help enterprise level customers again. And so what I learned though quickly, back to the ICP question of why 20 and above, we learned very quickly in the first probably year to two years of Woven when we started monetizing it and selling it was that we were able to attract those small players in droves. I think we had a few hundred of them pretty quickly. And we were getting killed with customer support.
One thing that we, I guess, relearned was that really, really small businesses, there's this odd thing, and it's true in consulting as well, but in every segment I've ever been in professionally, is that bigger businesses typically have less demand on your support. They're typically more mature, established, they know what they want, they're not like...
zigzagging, they're fairly emotions taken out of things. And it's just kind of like, this is what it is. This is what we need to do. This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna do this for probably a couple of years. We might change it, but we'll probably just keep doing what we're gonna do. And that is one level of support versus a small business owner that's literally waking up every day stressing out about how to pay rent or make payroll, right? And like how they thrash around. And again, I've been on both sides.
I can sympathize and at the same time when you're trying to scale a business and you're only making 50 bucks a month off this customer and they're blowing up your support team three times a day, asking questions and wanting advice and more or less consulting them on like how to run their business, it's just not sustainable, right? Like people are like most businesses woven business, business biggest expense. And so we needed to find a way to still.
offer a crazy high level of support, which is one of, again, not to talk about woven, but like, that's the other big tenet of us is coming out of industry. franchisees franchisees are terrible at implementing software. They're really great at getting enamored with it and seeing how sexy it is and buying it. They're great at that. And then they're really, really bad at their organizational change to actually implement the software and get the value from it. And for my consulting practice, I can't tell you the number of times I advised on
software decisions and only to see 12 months later that same customer was going back through a software selection again because well it sucks it didn't work for us and blah blah blah blah and if you really really scratched like barely any in some cases you would find out that like it was just never implemented they just never used it and I think that's I think it's a failure on both parts right software companies are notorious for overselling under delivering where it's like great I got your credit card your 12 -month contract
good luck, and they're out. That guy that was pestering you and you couldn't get away from, now you can't get anybody to respond to you at that company. On the flip side, franchisees, right? In franchisees, they're putting out fires. They're operating their business. They don't have time to implement software. So starting woven, sorry, this is a tangent, but starting woven, right? We.
The other thing I wanted to do is not only consolidate software, bring efficiencies, productivity, all that other stuff that the platform and the product does, but I wanted to bring a layer and a level of service, both implementation and ongoing customer success focus that comes from our consulting practice, right? Where we actually listen and we actually figure out like, where's the value in your business to adopt this and how can we get there? And how do we have to retrain your team?
You had turnover to keep positioned, right? Let's retrain that person so they know how to use it and get value from it. And a true commitment to that, that is unseen in any other of our competitors or any honestly SaaS company I've dealt with before.
Nick (40:19)
I think it's something that we saw firsthand too, right? You've learned over time how to gain buy -in from people at levels that you got the hooks in. And I say it like that tongue in cheek, that's how it should be done, right? You are as well as it could be done, the likelihood of a successful use of your product.
Matt Goebel (40:43)
100%. I think the B2B SaaS industry accepts a level of churn that honestly would be unacceptable for us here. I mean, last year we were sub 2 % churn rate for the year. We just, I mean, I'm not going to knock on some wood here, but like, we don't lose customers, right? And it's not like this is some black art voodoo magic, right? It's just a relentless pursuit that your customers are getting value from your product.
and it's just relentless, right? And if you are delivering value.
Surprisingly, businesses keep using you. It's weird. But really, that's what it boils down to. We have relationships. We work hard for our customers. We add value to their business. And that loop just feeds itself. And so that's why we made to move upstream, right? To deliver that level of experience, we need a certain size customer. And so we started having to pivot upstream, mid -market enterprise customers in order to...
balance our books, so to speak. So eventually we'd love to find a way to...
Nick (41:45)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Matt Goebel (41:49)
help everyone in this space because I do believe there's still a lot of value. And we do still have a lot of small customers, legacy customers. So there's still a desire to eventually try to solve that first problem of helping the mom and pops out there. But as of right now, we don't have a model to support that economic.
Nick (42:11)
Yeah. So when you, when you find prospects like that, are you, are you passing them along or just passing on working with them
Matt Goebel (42:20)
We have implemented account minimums, which was our kind of polite way because I didn't feel good talking to somebody knowing that we could solve their problems and then telling them to take a hike that we weren't going to help them. That just seemed incredibly rude. So yeah, the way we solved that was account minimums. So we essentially, we know what our like.
minimum level of revenue for an account needs to be to deliver the level of support we want to deliver. And this actually came out of an evolution as well, because to solve our problem originally was like, we're just going to have two classes of customer. We're going to have the customer we don't support. We're going to have the customer we support a ton based on who's paying us what. That was not only is that like borderline unethical in my opinion, because.
I don't know, I just feel like if you're gonna buy something, you should get the support anyways. But like, on the other side of it, it was hell for my internal team. Because every time somebody would reach out for help, they were like, do I help this person? Like, how far do I help this person? Like, it was, it wasn't worth it, right? So we actually, not only lasted like 30 days, 60 days, and then we immediately reversed all that. And we said, everybody, no matter how big they are, whatever customer, they got through the front door, which was me at the time.
They got through the front door and they're in, they're part of our family. It's the same. I don't care how big or small they are, what they're paying us, they deserve the same level of support from us. So that's where we are now. And we just have to control the front door a little bit tighter.
you're smaller, it's definitely harder to turn away revenue. Once you achieve a certain size, it becomes a little easier. Still not easy, but a little easier.
Nick (44:04)
Yeah. Well, I think what's really cool is getting to hear you talk about the level of level of of that you have that helps you kind of set your boundaries and figure out like, I eye on the when you're talking about bouncing growth or whatnot and your role in doing these things
Matt Goebel's exit can't be fulfilled with Matt Goebel doing sales. Like you know that
sorry.
Matt Goebel (44:30)
No, it's definitely, it's a humbling experience as a business owner when your business, when you achieve, when you achieve success in the business, you start from scratch to where you go from this irreplaceable multiplier for the business. You are this multiplying force that literally the business would die and cease to exist without.
to one day coming to the conclusion or realizing that you're a bottleneck for so many aspects of the business's growth. You know, in coming to that realization and conclusion and admitting it, it's like going through therapy because you're on this entrepreneurial high of just like, I got this, I can do everything, I can wear every hat in the organization and sure, right, like can and...
to a level, right? To a certain degree, and then all of a sudden...
Matt's personal abilities only go so high, but the business keeps going. The rest of it's successful. And it's really now, and especially since we raised money in these last year and a half or so, it's been about identifying smarter people, better people than I am and just setting them free. And there's plenty of much smarter, more successful business people than me.
Nick (45:56)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Goebel (46:00)
have talked about and written a ton about this, but like, it's so true, right? It is just about getting out of your people's way, finding the right people that are aligned with your mission, your values, your just getting out of their way, just letting them go, don't micromanage them, just that has been an interesting evolution over the last couple of years to go from this multiplying force to a bottleneck.
Nick (46:25)
That's a tough thing, man. You're the person who loses sleep over this thing for so many years and then to be like grown, to mature enough to be able to do that. It requires some mental reframing, no doubt.
Matt Goebel (46:42)
think with every evolution I've gone through as a business owner, there's the, I always arrive at the intellectual outcome before I arrive at the emotional, and it's always the emotional one holding me back because as the business owner who started this thing, right, it's your proverbial baby, right? Like you.
you want to do everything and control everything and nurture it, right? And then you intellectually arrive at these conclusions to be like, this is not worth my time. There's, you know what I'm saying? Like this, this should be, I should let this go or I need to let this go or like I, this isn't whatever, right? Like I can intellectually arrive at all of these conclusions and then, and then that, that thing comes up, right? And you're just like immediately jump into it even though you shouldn't because you're like,
I can take care of this real quick, right? And it's overcoming that last step, which is the emotional reconciliation of letting it go, right? It's
It's a work in progress.
Nick (47:43)
So what are some of the things like tools, resources, if you don't mind, whatever you don't mind sharing, you mentioned you use a fractional CMO. I think the fractional stuff is really intriguing. It's probably about to get out of control with some of the fractional options that are out there, but fractional marketing, I think is really valuable. We've done that. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, are you using EOS?
Matt Goebel (48:12)
Yeah, yeah, we run EOS. Yep.
Nick (48:14)
Yeah. How long have you been doing that?
Matt Goebel (48:18)
We did a self implementation of EOS because I had rolled it out at other companies in 2018. It's about a year into starting Woven. We did a self implementation of it. And I would say we intentionally did not try to do a full, we're too small. I mean, EOS starts at like a $2 million and above kind of business size. That's even EOS says that's our low point.
Nick (48:47)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Goebel (48:48)
We were too small for it, but I wanted some structure. And so we rolled out like the L10, the rocks, some scorecard stuff. We didn't roll out all their tools, but we did a kind of a self -implementation. And then last year in 2023, we re -rolled it out so the team had grown. We now had department and department heads and we were just hired a bunch of people and we had raised money. And so we did it with an implementer last year.
And that was great. We rolled out, I think, almost all of it. I'm sure there's a tool or two in there. Maybe we did. But like full blown accountability chart, right? All down through, right? And that was great for the team, right? Obviously, transitionary type stuff for a month or two, but the team loves it. Every department holds their L10, and we do executive L10 every week. Like, I love it.
Nick (49:29)
Mm -hmm.
Matt Goebel (49:42)
So we went through a full year with an implementer and then at the end of last year, we opted to the executive team felt comfortable enough carrying it forward without the implementer.
and we still are on track using the tools, we're doing quite well.
Nick (49:54)
Gotcha.
Awesome. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how I think I would hope that it would work is that you can phase out using an implementer. Yeah, so like what else do you have any tools or frameworks or resources that you use?
Matt Goebel (50:13)
Yeah, I mean.
a lot. I don't know where to jump in or start. It all depends on what is the problem being solved or like what's the activity. I would say right up there with EOS in terms of traction and rocket fuel in those books are great reads if you're not familiar with EOS or the whole model, right? Definitely worth the read, definitely worth checking out.
But like the one thing that we probably most reliably augment EOS with is practices from the ideal team player. The hungry mobile people smart, right? Like when we go to hire,
We use a combination of a culture index survey tool to align traits and skills of the to basically make sure that the person is naturally aligned with the type of work they're gonna be doing or the type behavioral traits that they're gonna have to exhibit in order to be successful at that role.
And then we also look for hungry, humble, and people smart. We still look at the GWC for the accountability chart. They still got to sit in a seat. We still do that, but we definitely filter through the culture index. And...
the other aspects before we get there. So if you haven't read The Ideal Team Player, great book, great concepts, simple, basic.
That's one for
Nick Berry is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO, whose track record includes founding and leading numerous companies since 2002.
He is also a mentor and coach to other entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for a trusted (and proven) advisor.
Among peers, colleagues, staff, and clients, Nick has been referred to as both 'The Business Guy' as well as 'The Anti-Guru', due to his pragmatic approach and principled leadership.
He shares his insights and lessons learned, along with those of his expert guests,
on his podcast, 'The Business Owner's Journey'.
