Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This relationship came along early in your evolution and that basically financed your bootstrapping.

Brock Berry: It did. That and a few other similarly large relationships. Because we had some wind underneath our wings, we didn’t have another sweat equity deal with anyone, but we did have very good partners that helped us with our business.

Sramana Mitra: With the same model?

Brock Berry: That’s correct. Our distribution model is kind of like a channel sales strategy where we contract with those companies to either sell our services to their local customers and/or represent and leverage our platform.

Sramana Mitra: How many small businesses are using your software today?

Brock Berry: Tens of thousands.

Sramana Mitra: How many media companies do you have relationships with today?

Brock Berry: We work with 103 media companies.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what it takes for you to close a media company deal.

Brock Berry: It’s gotten a lot easier. It wasn’t easy in the beginning. The way that we do it now versus the way that we did it in the beginning is very different. In the beginning, it was purely hard work and getting in front of as many decision makers as possible.

As you would imagine, these are large companies that have hundreds of years of experience. Getting their trust when you’re a year old is really difficult, especially when you don’t have a lot of case studies to give them. In the beginning, a lot of it was due to relationships. These were people giving us a chance – maybe a small part of their business to see if we can execute what we were committing to. That built.

As we continued to deliver high-quality service and high-quality products, we were able to build our stable of media company partners. Today, we’re very dominant in this particular industry where we have specialized relationships with a lot of the associations.

We are considered to be a preferred vendor by a lot of their collaborative buying groups. As a company, we are a premiere partner of Google. It’s a fairly easy conversation. The question is whether or not the way we operate is the best fit for that media company today.

Sramana Mitra: The media industry is going through a tremendous existential crisis. The fact that you are coming in with a value proposition of leveraging their assets and opening up a significant revenue stream for them must be very appealing.

Shelby Carlson: Absolutely.

Brock Berry: It is the way we get in there. Shelby’s story and the case study of driving a seven-figure revenue stream that didn’t previously is what they’re looking for. You need seven-figure answers; not six-figure answers. We can come in and show them case study after case study of driving seven-figure business models. We are favorably viewed because of that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping to $10M from Colorado: AdCellerant Co-Founders Brock Berry and Shelby Carlson
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