Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did the inbound interest come from? What countries?

Juha Lehtonen: We currently have clients in 17 countries. We get contacts from the Baltics, UK, Switzerland, and the Middle East.

Sramana Mitra: They come to you and you sell through online touchpoints. You don’t have to go visit people.

Juha Lehtonen: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: At that price point, it’s very important to figure out how to sell by phone and online. It’s not profitable to visit these people for that deal size.

Juha Lehtonen: That is correct. Also, one thing that we wanted to mimic from the big American names is online marketing. We wanted to do that in an area that is not very open. They don’t open up information online. We wanted to do that. We wanted to be out there, so it’s more inbound rather than us trying to reach out.

Nowadays, the average deal size is a little bit bigger. It’s somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000. There are clients that may pay $30,000 as well, but those are few. The key to being able to do this profitably is efficiency.

Even before Covid, we were used to meeting with clients online. When Covid hit, it wasn’t a big change for us, but our clients were more open to having business conversations online and signing deals without handshakes. That has helped us as well.

Sramana Mitra: What are the strategic inflection points? Is it more of the same – selling the same product to more customers? Was there any other strategic change?

Juha Lehtonen: In the beginning when you’re developing a system, the key was to listen to each client separately and accommodate their needs to build up the system and be very flexible. We cannot do that if we want to scale. The more tailored solution we provided, the slower it got and the bigger problems we got during the production phase. The maintenance and support is not scaling at all.

What we’ve been doing in the past few years is trying to standardize. What we don’t want to lose is the flexibility that we have in the system. You can configure the system. We wanted to improve the user experience around it as well. It shouldn’t be something that only a handful of our employee consultants can do. This is what we’re pushing forward right now in order for us to scale the business.

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of revenue you’re at right now?

Juha Lehtonen: The total revenue is around €8.5 million. ARR is close to €7.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have?

Juha Lehtonen: We have around 65. We have 40 working in Helsinki, 20 in Stockholm. We have a couple of guys in the UK and Baltics.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a distributed team.

Juha Lehtonen: The main offices are Helsinki and Stockholm. The others are remote.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. Is there anything else you want to share about your journey?

Juha Lehtonen: Maybe just a comment. This whole journey has been learning by doing. You need to be open to learning to do these things. You need to have common sense. You cannot just follow somebody else’s instructions.

Sramana Mitra: But you started in 1999. We are now in 2022. A lot of people like you have done it and experimented. The people who are doing it now can learn a lot of best practices. In 1Mby1M, we have a whole strategic selling using phone and internet methodology. These are just examples of methodologies and best practices that can be taught.

Juha Lehtonen: The is true.

In order for you to do it yourself, you need to hear how somebody else has done it. The more you hear the stories, read books and blogs, then you get the toolsets.

Juha Lehtonen

Sramana Mitra: That is why we do the case studies. We’ve been doing this since 2006. It’s 16 years of doing case studies. It was very nice to meet you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Helsinki: Juha Lehtonen, CEO of FA Solutions
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