Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2020 when COVID hit? 

Matt Anderson: Up until 2020, I did a lot of sales. I had a part-time account manager that was doing some sales. We hired our first salesperson. I think it was 2019 when we hired a COO, which is a very big hire. He has been with us for a year.

I was able to offload the job to him because I was super involved with everything up until I hired a COO. That frees up my time to sell more. Our limitation became how quickly I can get onboard clients and how many people I can get to. I hired the first business development person in January of this year and we also hired a marketing leader.

We had just started getting inbound interest. A conference was scheduled and meetings were lined up, and then COVID happened. The first conference that we were going to got canceled as some of us were heading to the airport. These meetings are major opportunities and they just stopped.

These companies that we were going to do deals with said they couldn’t have a conversation with us right now. We’re trying to figure out how to enable 2,000 people to work from their homes.

The new business died off. Some predicted that the claim volume would go up because more people are at home and there are more opportunities to do silly things. The claim volume across the industry went down about 30%.

We started sharing our virtual adjustment solution, which we’d built into our platform from the very beginning. We knew there would be interest in a self-service type of model where they virtually interact with their adjustor. We built this virtual system into our platform.

It’s something that we have been mentioning and sharing with our clients for a long time. They like it, but they are not ready to do it. The policyholders are also not eager to do it. With COVID, as we were sharing that story and sharing what our platform can do – that it is able to match the adjustor to each of those claims virtually – it started getting traction.

It was June when we started adding people. We just got on a tear where we started adding a new client every week. Some of them are the ones we have been talking to before. They decided that now is the time to join even though they are working from home. They realized that they needed a better, more modern solution.

It hurt our revenue for the first half of the year. Even if we don’t see it this year, we are going to end up seeing a net benefit next year because policyholders and insurance carriers are more eager for a modern solution. They don’t have the resources for this technology on their own.

We are the easy option to offer their policyholder or agents these modern solutions. It’s not just virtual adjustments but also the automated messaging, in fact everything up on our platform, that you would expect a modern-age claims process to look like.

In many companies, they don’t have the technology budget and resources to do that type of thing and offer the solutions that we are able to without changing how they built their business. It’s just a different process and technology that is used to determine the outcome and settle the claims. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $10 Million from Atlanta: Field Pros Direct CEO Matt Anderson
1 2 3 4 5 6