Growing a Business with Minimal Capital with Eric Boggs

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Eric Boggs. Eric is the founder and CEO at Rev Boss, a lead gen company focused on outbound prospecting, and he has spent the last 20 years of his career building SaaS companies and advising CEOs. Sounds a lot like me. Eric, it's great to have you on the Daily Bolster.

Eric Boggs: Thanks, Matt. I'm glad to be here.

Matt Blumberg: One of the things I love about your story is that you have grown a business with minimal capital raised. I think you said you've raised about$ 1. 3 million and that's it. You've been profitable, cashflow positive since then, and you and I both spent a lot of time advising CEOs and there are just so many of them that feel like they live round to round to round, and they're not as focused on solving the customer problem as they are thinking about the next big check that has to come in. So I really admire that about the way you've built Rev Boss and would love to just hear maybe a few lessons that you've learned along the way of growing a business like that.

Eric Boggs: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm a solo founder, and so for me, the capital was my co- founder, and I know enough to be dangerous in a lot of areas, but I'm best in sales and operations. And so capital to me was the founding engineering team, and that's kind of how we got started. As far as the three takeaways from having done this for a while, the bootstrap or minimal capital bootstrap approach, it's not any more or less hard than the VC- backed approach. It's just different hard. The cash constraint is good, but it means you can only do a few things really well. It means you don't have any choice but to have extreme financial discipline, and that's hard, and it just makes it so they have to make really hard decisions. And the other side of that coin is that the FOMO is very real. There have been times that I've been so jealous of my friends and customers that are on the BC path with just like... They're awash in cash, they've got big teams, and so many times we'll be trying to solve a problem. It's like, well, if I had a massive balance sheet, I would just hire someone and throw them at the problem, but I can't do that. And I know that's not easier and that those people have other problems that they got to do with, and you nail it on the head with knowing that there's a cliff that they're going to fly off of if they don't get the next round in the door. But yeah, there have definitely been times where I just wish even another 500K. Not a lot, but just a little bit would move the needle. And my last comment here is that it's probably the best approach for a lot of tech founders, particularly over the past couple years, or a couple years ago when the investment cash was so easy to get and these businesses were raising on massive valuations, massive piles of cash, and now they are just locked in a really weird place. We often have to do that, and it's been good having a cozy balance sheet over the past year. The control I feel, and I literally have as the biggest shareholder in controlling board seats is a confidence boost and an accountability boost for me. Less stress, because I know we're not going to run out of money. Less upside too, but that's okay because the hurdle for happiness for me and for our investors and for our shareholders, it's going to be a little bit of an easier hurdle to clear. And so it's no less hard. It's just different hard and there's tradeoffs.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. I mean, look, life is full of trade- offs, but hearing you talk about, let's see, happiness, control, and operating discipline, those are pretty powerful forces.

Eric Boggs: Yeah. Yeah, I know it. I know it. And I'll tell you, I sleep okay. Not knowing that we're going to run out of cash in 90 days or six months or whatever, and that to me, it's worth... It's a good trade- off for me personally. And I know other people play a different game, and that's totally fine. But yeah, I mean, happiness is a core value for us at Rev Boss, and so we optimize for that in the way that we do everything, including sort of our financing strategy.

Matt Blumberg: All right. I think that puts a bow on it. So Eric Boggs, founder and CEO of Rev Boss, thank you for joining me today. Good thought- provoking topic for those of us who are on more of the venture treadmill.