104: When is the right time to become an entrepreneur with Marc Summe (Part 1)
When is a good time to finally find your purpose if you haven’t found it yet? And what do you need to do to go about finding it? And if you haven’t found it yet, do you just keep plugging? Is there something to do? We talk a lot about that today. We also talk about the path to purchasing an existing business, if you’ve got that entrepreneurship bug but you are not the creative business type. We also discuss some amazing online marketing strategies, we focus on how you use it for software but these can be applied to any business. Dive in you do not want to miss this.
My Guest: Marc Summe
Marc is the CEO of Minute7, which does time and expense tracking for professional service businesses. Minute7 helps professionals service businesses get paid faster from their customers. The company is bootstrapped, has thousands of users and doubled its revenue last year. Prior to Minute7 Marc worked in finance and private equity. He met a lot of successful entrepreneurs along the way before deciding to make the leap himself. He walks to the office everyday and loves the autonomy that comes with running your own business. In his younger days Marc had ambitions for comedy and completed training at Second City in Chicago. Now he lives in the suburbs and has 3 kids under the age of 5. He sleeps sometimes.
Pivotal Moments:
· Marc started out working in a bank; however it did not feel fulfilling.
· During weekends and evenings, he worked on figuring out what his next step would be, and eventually landed on software and tech start ups.
· His first job was an online marketing analyst at a tech start up in Chicago. He did the job until he felt he knew enough and that was when he took the leap.
· From that first start up Marc got the bug and felt this was the right decision.
· He then focused on Software As a Service (SAS) Software services that service businesses.
· He found Minute 7 on an online market place. Marc made a deal with the owner that Marc owns some of the business but not the majority of it.
· He has 7000 users that use his product every day, engineering companies, architecture firms, law firms, consultants.
· Minute 7 is for customers who are trying to track time to a customer or a job, and then get that data into QuickBooks for billing purposes. Minute 7 makes that process super easy for them.
· They wanted to get new customers, so they had to rebuild a few things. They rebuilt the front end of the product. Launched a new mobile app. Did more Marketing.
Current Struggle
It is all about growth. In the last 3 years we have tripled the business. We need to get marketing and sales to triple again.
The Breakthrough
Estie asks what it was that caused the business to triple in the first 3 years? Marc answers 3 main points:
1. The product changes we made.
2. Increased the price.
3. Marketing generated more traffic.
Estie advises Marc to get onto a public blog, or an article on how Minute 7 solves people’s problems. They need to get quality content that directly addresses customer’s problems onto a reputable site.
Quote:
Keep going, because you will get there.
Resources & Links:
- Marc’s Business: www.minute7.com
- Find Marc on social: Twitter
- Email Marc: marc@minute7.com
- Join us on the Show: www.estierand.com/breakthrough
Part 2 of this episode where you hear more go to estierand.com/104-2
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About the author, Estie Rand
I love turning ideas into money, and helping others do the same. I help small business owners with everything from marketing to fiscal management, business plans to staffing, database architecture to work/life balance coaching and I love it all! What do you need help with today?