From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of where you started the business. I’d like to understand how you built the company step by step. You said you started the company by actually delivering your own course in the beginning. How, then, did you do that business of delivering your own course? Tell us a little bit of the nuances of building that business first. Then we’ll get to the SaaS business in a minute.

Brad Lea: I just kept going. I didn’t take no for an answer. It took about three to four years to figure out that I wanted to get into software. For three or four years, I was just out knocking on doors, getting behind on my bills, and sacrificing any kind of financial stability for entrepreneurship. Everyone said it wasn’t going to happen. Nobody believed that anyone was going to want to train online versus in person. It was just knocking on a lot of doors and trying to convince people. If I could help an entrepreneur, the help that I would give would be to not give up. More people will give up right before they hit a win.

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to understand how you built this company.

Brad Lea: I built it by knocking on a lot of doors and chasing a lot of people.

Sramana Mitra: To do what?

Brad Lea: Use my training system. I was out training companies. I would knock on their doors and ask them if I could train their sales people to sell more. Most would say no, some would say yes. They would write me a check for $10,000 to be there for two days. I’d get $10,000 and for two days, I would sit in their sales room.

Sramana Mitra: You were selling an in-person training service essentially. How long did you do that business?

Brad Lea: That was about six months.

Sramana Mitra: What timeframe are we talking?

Brad Lea: Right around 1999.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happened?

Brad Lea: I realized that it wasn’t effective. After I left an organization, they weren’t really trained because you can’t train somebody in two days. You need repetition. You also need accountability. So I decided to put my content online. I figured out a way to create my content through video and put it online where it emulated what I did in real life. I wanted to emulate the questions that I would ask and the things that I would say in real life. They were effective but there wasn’t enough repetition. I sought out programmers to build this thing that I was envisioning. Now I could be present in every organization, speak multiple languages, and provide the repetition and the delivery that’s necessary to learn.

Sramana Mitra: How did you finance the software development process?

Brad Lea: I didn’t finance it. I talked a software company into building it for me for a piece of future revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Where was this software company located?

Brad Lea: Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sramana Mitra: How did you convince them to do that for you for future revenue?

Brad Lea: I persuaded them.

Sramana Mitra: Fair enough. Now you have this software and online course. Did you actually sell your own online course for a while?

Brad Lea: Yes, I did that for about a year.

Sramana Mitra: How did you market that and build that business?

Brad Lea: I charged $2,195 to set it up and $1,295 per store to access and use my training system.

Sramana Mitra: We’re talking retail sales? Is that what you were teaching?

Brad Lea: Mainly car dealership. I would pretty much try to sell to anybody. I caught a little bit of traction in car dealerships.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT
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