Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord (Part 1)

We’re big fans of solo entrepreneurs. Peter validated his business with real paying customers before he raised money; always the best strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Peter Ord: I grew up in San Diego, California. I’m one of five boys. My father was a homebuilder and my mother was a teacher. Our summer jobs involved framing homes for my father. Oddly enough, that’s where some of the ideas came for GuideCX. There is a certain order to an operation that needed to occur that I grew up seeing over and over again.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of an educational path did you follow that led you up to GuideCX?

Peter Ord: I went to college at Brigham Young University. I was majoring in construction management. Being exposed to scheduling software and understanding the importance of holding contractors accountable to timelines was part of the impetus that led to the creation of GuideCX. It took longer than I had expected because I had graduated from college in 2007 when there was a housing crisis. The markets weren’t too great. Every single company I interned with didn’t exist when I graduated.

I decided to work for another software company called DealerSocket. This company built CRM applications for car dealerships. I went to work there because they also aspired to build a CRM application for homebuilders. I felt like this will be applicable. The catch was they were going to grow the car dealership vertical first. The car dealership vertical exploded. The company never got around to building its product for homebuilding.

I remember coming into that company and thinking, “We’re working with car dealerships. They’re low-tech individuals.” Our product wasn’t such that you can just turn it on and have them use it. We had a checklist of about 120 items we had to take them through. There are a variety of responsibilities in that checklist that comprised of what their manufacturer needed to do and what they needed to do. We managed that process internally. We didn’t have any scheduling tools.

I remember going to the COO and saying, “We should use this scheduling tool for our software business because it can manage our dependencies in the generic project management software we were using.” We never ended up doing that. I was with that company for 14 years. Half of my time there was on the account services side implementing the product and traveling around the country.

That latter half of my time was on the sales side. When I jumped to the sales side, the company grew and we started attracting enterprise-level deals. Those implementations got exponentially more complex as there were more locations that we needed to track. I was that sales guy that knew exactly what the product should do.

One common theme happening was that our churn was in direct correlation to how they were implemented. We were winning the renewal of our product in the first 30 days. The first 30 days indicated the long-term trajectory of the partnership. Private equity acquired us and we then bought four other companies in the automotive software space. Now, our implementation got that much more complex.

Sramana Mitra: This is not GuideCX, right?

Peter Ord: This is before GuideCX. They say the greatest companies in the world are built off of founders’ greatest frustrations. The frustration that spawned GuideCX was born at DealerSocket.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstraps First, Raises Money Later in Utah: GuideCX CEO Peter Ord
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