Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2005, you were at about $1.2 million in revenue. In 2009, you were already on Inc. 5000. What was the revenue ramp?

Ernie Bray: In 2009, we went to $8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Ernie Bray: We’re pushing towards $15 million. We also made Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. We made that four years in a row.

Sramana Mitra: I’m more interested in the mechanics of how you did all this. In that period of 2009 to 2015, what are some of the other strategic moves and inflection points in the business?

Ernie Bray: The biggest challenge for our business was transitioning from a cohesive small team of maybe seven to eight employees to finally making that step to becoming more corporate and actually having to institute more policies and procedures. When you’re a small company, there’s a very close family type of culture. As you start to transition, the biggest challenge was to put in place building out different departments to handle customer service, to handle quality assurance, etc. We started building a lot of different infrastructures.

Right now, we have 40 employees. During that time, building those different segmented departments was the challenge. When we were smaller, we hired people we knew. Once we reached about 15 people, we started to go out in the market and learn the interview process to be able to vet candidates better. We started to go beyond our friends and family network. That’s where we started to grow the business. We started to grow our sales and marketing team. We started to build our true identity since then.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have?

Ernie Bray: 40.

Sramana Mitra: All of them are in Arizona?

Ernie Bray: We have about 20 people in San Diego. We use a virtual workforce model except we have a headquarters where 12 people work. Everybody else works virtually.

Sramana Mitra: How does that work? I run a virtual company as well. We’ve done several case studies of companies that have a very decent job of scaling using virtual workforces. What would you say are the pros and cons in your experience?

Ernie Bray: The pros of a virtual workforce is I have more motivated employees. I think they understand that we put trust in them to work remotely. They don’t have to commute. They don’t have to spend on gas. They don’t have to buy clothes for the office. They save money. A lot of those different things are great benefits that they enjoy. I think it creates better motivated employees.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to $15 Million: Ernie Bray, CEO of ACD
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