Andrew Kappel (00:03):
All right, welcome to an episode of the How I Started podcast. It's Informal Fridays for, well, the podcast episode comes out on Fridays, so we're good, and we're also recording on a Friday here in end of February, and Brad is down in a much warmer part of the country than I am, and so without further ado, Brad, welcome to How I Started. Let's hear a little bit of background, some of the early days, and go from there.
Brad McClelland (00:28):
Yeah, yeah, good to be here Andrew. Yeah, so early days, I, when I was in college, I met, I was here at College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, and I met the CEO of a company called PeopleMatter. He lived across the street from my friend and I was over at a dinner party and he walked across with his two dogs and it was just this loud guy and we started talking and I ended up joining him for an internship.
It was really special and cool because I got to sit up with the C-level folks and was part of all the executive leadership team meetings and was helping out with due diligence for acquisitions and merger conversations and managing big consulting firms and doing reorganizations of departments when I was like 21 or 22 years old. So it was really cool from that perspective.
And then I ultimately ended up graduating college and then joining the sales team and started building pipeline. And we were one of the first companies using outreach back in whatever that was 2016.
Andrew Kappel (01:49):
15, 16, yeah, yeah, wait, did you go to any of the outreach conferences or any of the meetups?
Brad McClelland (01:49):
No, so we had a sales enablement guy named Tim Dillon, who I ended up working with later at a different consulting firm again, but he was just always kind of on the forefront. And I remember him, you know, kind of bringing in outreach to the team. And it was just such a force multiplier for us, you know, like, I think I added three X of my quota in like six months and I was like, okay, what do I do now? Kind of thing.
But it was just such like a cool early access to seeing all this great tech that's out there and kind of learning about the BDR function. Ultimately that business ended up getting sold. And the CEO actually had a group of franchises that he was a partner in here locally and asked me to come run the sales motion for them.
So I ended up going and leaving that software company to go work at a franchise called CPR cell phone repair, where we were literally fixing people's iPhones and iPads and whatnot. But we had kind of a different structure. We wanted to get to an exit and it was a very B2C business model. It was like a top 20 franchise at the time. And I didn't really have a lot of B2C experience, but what we'd identified is that there's a huge market in like school districts having tens of thousands of devices and you know, like a fifth grader drops his iPad, cracks the screen and then it's not usable.
So we ended up getting like 90,000 devices under contract here in like the Tri County area of Charleston. And you know, literally driving around a little utility van that was wrapped with CPR stuff, picking up iPads. But you know, when I started our EBITDA was around 12% and we got it up to 27% in a year and a half and then we sold that business for a pretty positive exit.
And it was just a really cool experience to manage hourly employees, deal with complaining customers, have to do retailing, have to work with businesses here locally to execute contracts. It was kind of a fun, really significant change of pace for me.
And ultimately from there, after we sold it, I went and joined forces with guy named Doug that I've worked with at PeopleMatter, who was the VP of SalesOps, and had started his own consulting firm. So that was kind of my first foray into the consulting world and was running engagements for RevOps, go to market, building fractional BD teams, working with private equity firms. And that was probably where I got to work with my first 10 to 15 companies in the kind of like SaaS growth, PE scale up world. And that's kind of where I started to love consulting.
Andrew Kappel (05:03):