An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You brought this person on as CEO?

Cameron Weeks: No, I’ve always been the CEO of Fathom. We brought him in a very senior role as a Vice President. He was essentially supposed to come in and run sales and marketing, and control the revenue side of the company, which I agreed to. I’m a product person. I’m not a sales person. He ends up doing some terrible things and really underperforming on the job, and hiring a bunch of people into his sales team who were unaccountable. They ended up fudging some contracts to inflate what sales was doing.

Sramana Mitra: Yikes!

Cameron Weeks: For lots of reasons, we were slow to discover those issues. It took longer than it should, which puts us in a really terrible position. Revenues were inflated by about $2 million above where they should be. We’ve invested money into different resources based on those revenue numbers that we thought were correct. In late 2013 and early 2014, it becomes clear that we have a major issue. Obviously, that guy and all his people are gone. Then we had to look at laying off half of the staff, which we did right around Christmas time. That was a terrible thing to do, but we did it. We spent the next two or three quarters more than doubling the company in every trackable component. It was a really terrible thing to go through, but once we were able to remove that bad person out of the company, things really went crazy.

Sramana Mitra: Your primary source of customer at this point was the channel?

Cameron Weeks: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How many telecom partners do you work with?

Cameron Weeks: Today, we’ve actually modified our sales channel. In early 2015, we announced three new product offerings. We revamped our product offering into three product offerings. From that, we modified our sales strategy away from the sales channel. Today, there are still several hundred partners that are active in our network representing our business. There is also an internal sales team which we rely on heavily for our revenue.

Sramana Mitra: In 2011, you were selling primarily through these telecom partners?

Cameron Weeks: In 2010 and 2011, we were direct. From 2012 to late 2014, we worked with partners. In 2015, we’ve kept the partners, but we’ve relaunched our internal sales team.

Sramana Mitra: When you say internal sales team in 2010 and 2011, that was the local strategy. That’s the sales team that was selling into the local customers?

Cameron Weeks: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How far were you able to get with a local target customer strategy?

Cameron Weeks: I think we were able to grow it to about a half million in revenue. Maybe, a little bit more.

Sramana Mitra: When you brought in the telecom partners channel, what did that do? How did you support the recruitment of that channel and the channel itself to get to the next level?

Cameron Weeks:  We’re not selling a phone service. We’re selling a software and we’re giving your phone service to go on with it. That was the overall strategy and still is today. It’s very relationship based. Whether you’re selling the product directly or selling to a partner who will go on to sell the product, it’s all about the relationship. We were lucky enough to find that one of our long-term friends owned a company that consulted with ComCast, Verizon, and AT&T on how to build and grow a channel strategy for telecom.

This guy literally lived down the road from us and we’re very good friends. We didn’t even know what he does professionally. We just know him and like him. As we’re building this company, it comes out that, “This is what I do. I can introduce you to these people.” He does. We get plugged into the network. There are a couple of terms I hate like old boy’s club of telecom partners. We built some great relationships with these partners. They got excited about what our product can do and how it changes with the market. They jumped on-board.

Sramana Mitra: In 2012, how many partners like this did you recruit and what did that do to the revenue?

Cameron Weeks: In 2012, we had about over 50 to 75 partners by that point.

Sramana Mitra: All of them were producing?

Cameron Weeks: Yes, they all produced at different levels. Any time you have a partner network, everyone performs wildly differently.

Sramana Mitra: You got the 80/20 rule.

Cameron Weeks: Yes. You have these companies that are fully structured companies that have their own goals and their own revenue targets. They really perform. If they have a revenue goal, they’re going to get incredibly close or, if not, hit the revenue goal. But revenue doubles in that period of time. We broke the million-dollar mark. Great things happened.

This segment is part 6 in the series : An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks
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