Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after Sony?

Jason Wells: That leads me to where we are today – Convirza and a few other company names in between that process. My brother-in-law Jeremiah Wilson started a company back in 2001 called Contact Point. He was the typical entrepreneur. He just went ahead and did it. He started a professional services company that recorded phone calls and provided sales training and coaching. We were talking one day in my office about business. An entrepreneur is always asking questions and just trying to learn and understand the business economics. He had this problem of being able to grow the business beyond a certain point. Having spent time in the telecom and the mobile marketing space, I was very intrigued. We talked through some ideas on how he might automate things like listening to calls or providing coaching. 

Then there are questions about if there is somebody who’s spending money on marketing and driving the phone calls. That was my space. I saw the amount of money being spent on marketing where people didn’t know the effectiveness of their marketing. At Wharton, we used to make fun of marketers because they didn’t know how to do math. Now, the marketers are the most data-heavy people in the company.

In 2005 to 2008, it was still new. How do I use data to better understand my attribution? I couldn’t stop thinking about it, to be honest. I actually built a business plan and sent it to him. He was back in Utah. We talked over the next months and worked through a plan. I decided that it’s time to get back into the entrepreneurial game. I’ve been in the corporate space, working through the politics there. I just loved the idea and its challenges. Frankly, I’d been building for corporate for quite a while. They get some really nice payouts while I just get my salary. There was that piece of me that said, “I need to build this for myself.”

I left Sony and went to a startup where there were two employees in the office with Jeremiah Wilson. He had bootstrapped it. He had mortgaged his home. He had done all the things that so many entrepreneurs do. I have to hand it to him and to so many entrepreneurs who bootstrap in the beginning.

My first endeavor was pure bootstrapped and I decided that I didn’t want to do it that way. I wanted to go raise some money. I moved my family from London to Utah. It was a bit of a culture shock for them. They survived it. We got started in 2008 in potentially building up a business plan, which was really a pivot from his original business.

Sramana Mitra: You were actually going to work with Jeremiah and take his bootstrapped business and get it funded?

Jason Wells: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Jeremiah was based in Utah?

Jason Wells: Yes, he’s based in Utah.

Sramana Mitra: What was the status of Jeremiah’s business at that point? What was he doing? What was the business? What were the numbers?

Jason Wells: There were a handful of employees at that time. He had about 20 clients overall. The business was primarily training and coaching. Jeremiah started the business when he worked for a training company. They were training people on phone skills. The way they did it at the company that he was with is they would do mystery shopping calls. He said, “There’s got to be a better way than this because when we do a mystery shopping call, it’s fake. It wastes people’s time.” He created this patented technology to record phone calls. This was back in 2001.

He used these recorded phone calls. Twice a month, they would call the employee, play the recorded call, and they would score it. The primary business model was fly out, do a training, then do follow-up telephone calls for coaching. It was a very labor-intensive business. The risk in the business is there were a small number of clients and a couple of them were paying large amounts of money for training. At that time, he was interested in growing it and making it more scalable. That’s what I got into with my tech background. I came in and bought half the business.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells
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