Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many people were in the company in 2018? How many full-timers and contractors did you have?

Matt Anderson: I’m an avid user of Upwork. 

Sramana Mitra: So are we. We are big users of Upwork. I am very familiar with this model and we run One Million by One Million in the same model, so we are very familiar with the virtual company model. 

Matt Anderson: It’s hard to pin a number on it because I was just constantly hiring people on Upwork. If they work out, then I gave them more work. I am always hiring people for small projects. We tried to delegate as much as possible and also find people to be future members of the company as it grows, so it’s hard to pin a number.

There were some core people, though. I have an office manager and finance leader. Those people joined in late 2017. The finance person started from Upwork on a small project. Then in the second half of the year, the office manager joined. They became W-2s in 2018.

Sramana Mitra: Your company was, by and large, a virtual company. 

Matt Anderson: Yes, it was and it still is. It came in handy with COVID. There were no two people in the same location. The closest that we got was one of the first engineers that helped build a version of the MVP was an undergrad from Georgia Tech. He now works for Google and he still helps a little with the technology team. The technology was 100% outsourced. We are starting to bring it in now.  

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get to 2019. What kind of revenue levels did you do? How many people were involved? Just talk a little bit about the trajectory of the company and then we’ll talk about what happened in the COVID era.

Matt Anderson: A lot of the $10 million number was capped in 2017 through the big hurricane season. Irma and Harvey was when the industry was extremely packed. We were able to come in to provide a solution that was better than the incumbent because of our platform. That was in 2017.

In 2018, we added new clients. It was not a big hurricane year. It was a mild year, but there were hurricanes that generated a decent amount of volume and doubled again.

In 2019, there were no hurricanes. Dorian was a close call but it didn’t do anything. We did $10 million again, but even though it was just $10 million and it looks flat on an y-o-y basis, we doubled our non-catastrophe revenue. That was the focus of 2019.

We don’t want to be a company that depends only on catastrophic events. It’s a way to get our foot on a door. We relieve a big pain point and that is in the catastrophe sector. That is a rainfall of revenue, but we don’t want to be ultra dependent on that. We doubled our revenue associated with catastrophes. 

Sramana Mitra: What you mean is you are not dependent on these big catastrophic events and that you want insurance adjusting in more regular events. 

Matt Anderson: Yes, more predictable events. We didn’t want to depend on the big catastrophic events for our business. We always were a solution for all of it, but we didn’t want our revenue to be heavily weighted on just weather. We made an effort to do that and it’s a good thing that we did, otherwise our revenues would have probably dropped.

We ended up doubling our revenue from non-catastrophic events. Our revenue was ultimately flat, but the success story there was the doubling of non-catastrophic revenue. We also kept adding more members to the team. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson
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