Blue and welcome back to check in Chicago. I'm Callin Keely and interview Chicago. Stop founders and investors on the show. So today we have a great episode for you guys. We have Dave Bowen. Dave is the CEO of Purchasing Platform, which is an online marketplace for real estate developers to buy products for the properties. Before purchasing platform, Dave was the founder of Market Maker for which was an e sourcing tech startup, which he bootstrapped and eventually sold for $22 million back in 2016. So Dave is taking a different approach instead of bootstrapping, this one he recently just raised a series a soul dive into that. Today's episode and many future episodes are sponsored by Starting Line, a new venture capital firm based right here in Chicago, is founded by Ezra Galston, who, you may remember,

is one of the early podcast guests on the show episodes. Awesome, highly recommend going back and checking it out. He has been a huge support of the podcast from the start and champion of Chicago Tech in general. I know from personal experience that he and the tire starting my team are high integrity and trusted partners of many of the hottest startups in Chicago and beyond. Checker With the doing, It's starting line dot BC once again that starting line dot BC they their quarterly notes up there in many block posts have really fun read, highly recommended and huge thanks again toe as we really appreciate it. Without further ado. Here's Dave today. Thanks so much for joining me today. It's

my pleasure to be here. Thanks for

having me. For the people that haven't heard of purchasing platform, could you give a little intro?

Sure. Person platform is a one stop shop for manufactured housing and related real estate property management firms to find everything they need to operate for their business. So all of the different properties that they own, they buy lots and lots of different things from lots and lots of different vendors. And up until we came along, they were going to the store every day to buy those things. And now they come through a single portal on perching platform, provides them that, uh,

that one stop shop environment. So we'll do a deep dive on the business in a second. But I like to keep like a narrative format. Just so you. What's your background? How'd you come to

this? So I am a I am a serial entrepreneur. Ah, for whatever sins I committed in a former life, I've always been in procurement technology. Anyone who's in procurement knows what that means. But we tend to deal with the toughest personnel within an organisation. A chief procurement officer tends to be that the hardest not to crack

so always in How do you get into it?

So I joined a company called the ubid dot com out of college back before the original bubble burst on. And I was a kind of a merchandising support analyst at a junior buyer at you bet buying product to help get up on their B two c auction site. And we would sell that product via an auction format. Kind of like eBay. But the business was buying it, and I would help merchandise it, price it and ensure that it was in a price where we'd be able to get enough activity on the site to actually make a profit on most of the stuff that we sold s. It was a very early stage. I started as an editor at you bid And that lasted with my English degree, my English major background. And that lasted about a month and 1/2 when my boss came to me and said, We're not gonna need editors very often, but we definitely need junior buyers. Do you want to learn a new skill there? Waas.

So So how did you come to market maker for?

So I I went from uBid. I'd actually went to London with you, but to help start their UK business when that kind of took a turn in Europe for, uh, less that they had to shut the business down because the bubble burst. So I was a victim, per se of, that I don't consider myself a victim. It actually led me to my next gig. I worked for an amazing entrepreneur in ah in the UK for a few years and helped him and his amazing team build out a reverse logistics concept. That company was called PST on. I was kind of the American face of this massive European enterprise, helping them by up excess inventory and sell it into new markets. So if Hewlett Packard found ah whole bunch of old scanners or digital cameras or camcorders of things like this. Many of these products are now obsolete. PST would help them find homes in quiet destinations that wouldn't cloud their channel for the new product they were bringing to market. Okay,

and when I met my wife, I came back to Chicago because she's Greek and there was no relocating the only Greek daughter in the family. And so as a result, I landed in Chicago and I met a guy named Torok Sha, who was the original founder of Trading Partners. He and I built trading partners. I was one of the first team members of an e sourcing slash consulting business in Chicago. We built that over six years to 110 people for offices, some really nice top line and a healthy bottom line. But when we started to deviate in terms of our vision versus perhaps the original investors in that business, he and I decided to start market maker for and MM for was effectively a a SAS based procurement technology solution that helped empower procurement professionals to be more productive and to generate greater visibility with their vendors or suppliers on how they negotiated their products or whatever it is they were sourcing. And again we had an amazing team from top to bottom. We built it globally. We never even raised money. We actually bootstrapped it. And from kind of 2010 to 2013 we built a significant,

I guess, track record across the world. When we were opening in Shanghai, my wife started Ask me, Are we ever going to see anything out of this because we had bootstrap it. So Chirac and I were probably the 10th or 11th highest paid employees in the business, which we were fine with, but we ended up looking to raise some capital in one of the firm's called exchanging that we look to raise capital from ended up actually procuring the business. We ended up being able to reach a ah reach of price that we just couldn't say no to and frankly, we think everybody one out of the transaction. So it was a great, great

outcome. What was the thought process there? Why I sell instead of you continue to grow. So

there were a couple of things I had to think about the team that we were building. We had an amazing team. Many of those individuals have gone on to start businesses there now, directors and vice presidents. We had some amazing talent, but I had to think about the security of, ah, businesses around of personnel that I really cared for that had taken some risk with me, and I wanted to make sure they had a win on their resume. I also personally, that was an opportunity for me to take a little bit of risk off the table along with my co founders s Oh, that was a consideration. But we also felt as though we could make one and one make three with our ultimate acquirer. The firm that bought us was a truly global top three business process outsourcing firm that needed technology. We were a rapidly growing start up with a bit of a global footprint, but not 69 offices in 58 countries and so forth. And so we really tried to make one on one make three. We thought that everybody would have more opportunity as a result, and I can safely say I think we were right as

a result. And then after the acquisition, what was

next for you. So I had an earn out. Ah, it was very important to me that we demonstrated stability and that we committed to the acquiring party that this would be a great outcome for them. Ah, along with all the key personnel in our business. We stuck around and we continue to run the business. We started to integrate it. It took at least a year and 1/2 to really get it integrated into exchanging, being publicly traded based in London, not Chicago. Kind of other political headwinds. When you're publicly traded and you have three distinct business units, other business units that aren't tied to the procurement, one that we set in could alter the way the wind blows. And so, as a result,

we learned a lot of great lessons about how to operate within publicly traded organizations, much larder. There were tens of thousands of employees there. The other key reason I stayed, though not just to ensure a successful outcome for those that require, but also to ensure that the people that helped me build it were properly rewarded and so well, the founders certainly took a turn out. The key players in the business also had an earn out component. We want to make sure that everybody got their rightful slice of the pie. We also want to make sure that the people that were going to run the business in the long term got to run the business. So there was, ah, woman named July Vance's who is still the CEO today. Who was my Cielo? Of course, she's taken it to bigger and better heights than I ever could.

So everyone asks why it took me so long to get out the way. But like I said, I surround myself with really smart people and it tends to work out. But I want to make sure that she was set with her management team and I was forced enough to stick around and watch that kind of progression on right. At the end of my turnout, I landed

in purchasing platform. So you you are not the founder of purchasing platform, right? You came in. That's correct. Later on. Yeah. So how did you think about that? Versus starting in their business, jumping in tow, establish

one. So there are a lot of their a lot of differences more than I anticipated. To be blunt, when you're founding a business, you can see you can establish a culture from the get go right. You can establish a communication structure you can establish kind of a way of doing things right. And what the original founder, his name's Peter Hepner, had done very well as he had built some amazing technology for person platform. He also really understood his core focus area, which happened to be manufactured housing. He had come from that space. It's almost like as a subject matter expert, he had decided he was going to build something that he knew his industry needed, which I thought was Adam were one. He and I knew each other for a number of years before I got involved. But when you're doing it on your own and you don't necessarily have a very robust team of people or the appropriate numbers of people to support this kind of organization,

things fall through the cracks. Things slip. Technology gets develop. That may not necessarily be necessary just yet. I think we all suffer sometimes from being a little bit of a perfectionist. I know ideo Ah, and so when you look at when you compare that with when you're burning money, when you're kind of when you're not making a profit and you're generating a negative cash situation? A. Some point you're at risk of investors kind of changing the way they feel about the long term prospects of the business. And I was contacted right at the kind of apex of that conversation. I was thrilled because I knew I knew Peter. I knew that he had built a great product. It took me very little time to look at the product on really kind of have a comfortable comfort with the stack itself with the work that had gone into it. What I think if I can use a rudimentary analogy there, it was an amazing mousetrap.

We had just forgotten the mice and the cheese. So as much as I mean the mice that were living in the mouse trap and operating, the customers loved it. The members that were a part of the organization that we're using it every day. They loved it. When I talked to them, they said, Oh my goodness, if you could just add more cheese if you could have more vendors a bit more functionality, a little bit more. We'll use it even more, and that's borne out. So there was a runway question that perhaps there was an elongated runway at the front end when we took the business over and recapitalize it. We wanted to make sure that it had the proper runway, but that we would run it on a little bit more fiscally aggressive stance on, and so that that required a significant change in culture almost overnight, which was, which

was an undertaking for sure? Yeah, How did you approach that? How do you change the culture? So we

we met with everyone on the team on. Like I said, I thought, I think that the original leadership had done a great job assembling some really great team members. Everyone we met, we were impressed by. We just couldn't afford all of them a to burn rate. So we chose certain individuals that we felt were critical that the business but also could help us reform the culture. And so our cto Gabby, who is still here had she not agreed to say yes, there's no way I would have ever gotten involved in this Ah, Mike Van Loon in bizarre Cielo had been a senior member of the team, kind of a CFO slash director of operations. Hey, agreed to work part time for a significant period of time to help us kind of get back on our feet. He's now a full time Cielo and has been rewarded appropriately for that. For that sacrifice,

we also had a great guy named Ansel Burch, who leads our customer success. You really understood the culture of what our customers deal with day in, day out and with those three core team members, because that was kind of it. Along with one great developer who stayed with us, he's remote, but he's certainly ah ah, key member of the team as well. His name is Constantine. That was kind of my core team reforming the business, and we've kind of complemented the the culture from there with a host of different kind of story lines and ah, but a common attitude around ambition and

optimism. So this place in a pretty unique space, I'm not sure many people know much about it. Can you talk a little bit about the revolution of mobile home communities and manufactured housing. Yeah, we'll jump another

for sure. And I taken any chance I can to help support and and spread information about this This industry, because I generally believe it is a solution to our affordable housing crisis in America, or at least one of the main solutions. Um, the men and women I work with in this industry are the salt of the earth. They are good, hardworking Americans that are frankly, they're entrepreneurs just like I am. They've taken a risk. They've bought a property or a a group of properties of portfolio, if you will, on they have built out a very sustainable business, while at the same time improving the quality of life for the people that live in the communities that they own. And the thing that's excited me the most is that there are 44,000 of these communities in America. If you had asked me growing up in a bit more of an urban environment how maney manufactured housing communities there were in America, I would have said maybe 5000.

Maybe I'm just a I lived in a bubble. Ah, and I have, you know, I've driven all over the U. S. And I still would say 5000 just by seeing what I see from the highway, right? But the great part about this is there is a significant portion of our population that lives in these communities.

They are communities. They're not trailer parks. So what do they look like? They

have available have paved streets. They have street signs. They have amenities like playgrounds. Some have golf courses. Some have Marina's. There's one great one that I just visited. A client of ours in Elkhart, Indiana, that has a 24 hour fitness facility on the premise. They tend tohave incentives for them, the ah tenants to keep their lots clean. Everyone has a has a lawn. Everybody has. In most cases there's some sort of carport or driveway. But there are bus stops. There are golf carts. There is a wide variety of different amenities and kind of support materials that are required to operate these air like small towns,

Right? You know, a community that has 300 lots, which is what we call or pads the industry calls them. That's 300 homes. OK, the average home will have call it 3 to 4 people in it. That's a small town drive around rural Ohio. They'll be just as many people in a manufactured housing communities there on the town down the street. So it is a you know, the community manager that that operates that particular village is kind of the mayor, kind of a handyman or handy woman. They collect rent, but they also make sure that the the tenants are given a voice, are surveyed regularly on what they'd like to see the the property do next. And when they use technology like they use ours.

And we're certainly not the only technology that benefits these organizations. They tend to save money against their capital and operating budgets, and what they do with that money is what excites us the most is they tend to put that money back to work in the community. So there, by picnic tables and park benches, they'll buy a new playground. They'll buy a dog park set up. Lots

of things are one of the most popular products that

people have purchased those air those air From a community perspective, those are some of the most popular. We also do a lot. Most of these communities have pools on and really nice pools. They have clubhouses, so they'll be clubhouse amenities, nice chairs, a television, you know, place to meet and greet on the community. There are, ah for the homes themselves. Ah, lot of skirting to beautify the exterior of the home. That's kind of a sighting that goes on the side of the home. Improving the H back include improving the appliances, the plumbing,

those air kind of the most important. And then, of course, just giving them new paint jobs once in a while is just like you would your apartment or your single family house. You know, just a little bit of upkeep goes a long way in terms of satisfaction from these tenants, as well as for

the community as a whole. Are other homes built by the same people or do you purchase your individual home and put

it there? So there a lot of the it goes both ways. So I would say a significant portion of the customers that use us that have portfolios have a combination of park owned homes, meaning they've either purchased the home in some way or they've taken over the home when a tenant has left and decided to procure that home itself. So call it. 50% are park owned where people are living them in them with rent, just as you wouldn't apartment the equivalent just obviously, the average cost of a manufactured home in the community is typically 708 $100 a month, whereas if you're living in downtown Chicago, I don't even want to know what two bedroom apartment my cost you these days. On the flip side, though, there are plenty of homes in those 44,000 communities that are owned by the tenants themselves, and the same sort of incentives go out to those tenants. Those tenants are looking for a sighting. They're looking for appliances. They're looking for,

ah, variety of different things to to manage or upkeep there. Ah, particular dwelling. And that goes a long way. You can always tell if you look at the 11 million are Forgive me. I don't know the exact number, but there's something like 11.5 1,000,000 manufactured homes in America. About 5.5 of them are park owned, and the remainder

are individually owned. Okay, so, uh, so it's Ah, it's a marketplace. Always find market places interesting. How you approaching building supply.

So it's a it's Ah, chicken and egg, I asked. Is the most simplistic way to put it let me go a little bit deeper, though many of the vendors that are suppliers on our site had no idea, ah that the manufactured housing industry was worth going after they didn't realize that the total addressable market, the total value of products operating and capital that that these communities by is north of $6 billion. That's a pretty healthy, total addressable market for any vendor. But there's no coordinated strategy from these vendors for this market because they're just learning about it now. In what some examples of vendors, anything from Home Depot toe lows to Sherwin Williams to bear Teoh, Office Depot and Staples. Okay, uh, Cushman Golf carts and easy oh, golf cards play core playgrounds.

I mean, you name it. There are a lot of variety of different appliance vendors. There's also some wonderful industry specific vendors like Style, Crest, Blevins, Sunrise Westland and a number of others that are regionally based that provide outstanding customer service but don't necessarily ship completely across the country. So a conduit like ours if you've got a national footprint of portfolio in your portfolio, if you've got communities in 35 states, using us ensures that you only have to pay one vendor. I eat perching platform as opposed to 20 different manufactured housing vendors in its own in their own right. If that makes sense, in addition to all the other vendors that complement our space, we're in about 50 55 vendors

today and you handle any of the logistics,

so that's on them. So thankfully, the the vendors handle the shipping, but we handle all of the the ordering, the order Remittance. So when a what? Someone logs into our site right, and you have to be a member to log in to pursing platform. It's B two B, so the vendors love that because their pricing is protected. You can't search for our pricing on Ah, you know, on a appliance from Home Depot on our website on, chances are, we'll have a lower price than they could buy it themselves because we're aggregating 2000 plus communities. They're not there, maybe 10 communities.

So there's an economies of scale advantage But on top of that, they can buy an appliance from Home Depot. Some pain from Sherwin Williams, some office supplies from Office Depot and a golf cart from easy go all in a one check out environment, we remit all the orders to all of those vendors. We take care of all the payment, all of those vendors. And then we helped coordinate the shipping. So any customer success related queries like Where's my order? We help them track orders. We ensure that they're given real time issue escalation. They don't ever have to wait on hold for 1 800 lows or something like that ever again. Because the community managers were serving have no time to do that. They have 100 jobs to do every day. Purchasing is one thing.

If we could just make

that one action that much better we're doing, we're doing a good job. If we can save them, taking a needless trip to the store to buy ah coupler and a bathtub, right? The cost of driving to the store might outweigh the actual value of the goods that they buy at the store, which they're paying retail

for right at the same time, it's that kind of nicely leads into the next question of how you focusing on building up demand.

So we are. We're doing it a multipronged approach. We've just closed a Siri's a around. We can get into that in a minute, but the core focus for us up until now has been a network effect. We've gotten referrals from other customers. People move around in this industry just as they do in multi family and single family housing. And frankly, any other industry S o they take us with them. That's been a great referrals. Has been a great initial proofpoint for us that we have a genuine, genuinely attractive business model. Beyond that, however, there's a lot we could do with digital, so we're really expanding a digital program now. We also sponsor a number of conferences and related industry events were doing one here in later this month,

called the NCC. It's a leadership conference for the industry. A lot of the larger portfolios, as well as many of the medium and smaller portfolios air here, learning best practices on everything related to running a community there. Also, as you would expect, a lot of regional regional events. I just attended the Southeast Community Owners Conference in Atlanta, which was fabulous. Um, we're also partnering with channel partners. So there's some great property management software out there that doesn't necessarily have anything on their road map relating to having a marketplace kind of purchasing solution integrated into their system now. So we've just integrated with a firm called Rent Manager, which is one of an example of a great property management firm. They provide technology that helps you collect rents,

manage, manage 10 and feedback in a variety of other core. I guess business objectives. What they were missing was a procurement outlet. And so we're able to tie in seamlessly via maybe I toe help rent manager customers. Do they organize their procurement and all that data feeds back into rent manager

every time it occurs. So what is the business model of the people are members is kind of like Costco,

I guess. Yeah, so it's effectively. You could combine it as a GPO, right? So the clients pay a subscription fee to be a member. There is obviously a significant amount of technology. We provide portfolios large and small, with workflow approval. So if you've got a community manager, that's just started, and you don't necessarily know that he or she is responsible enoughto place orders above a certain amount of money, you can set a limit, and then any order that exceeds that limit will go to someone else for for prior approval. We obviously give them tons of reporting. We also tie all of their chart of accounts all the geo codes to their to the products on our site. So when they go to check out,

everything's already classified. So there are counting teams, which again are typically run pretty lean. We're saving, you know, 234 days a month of an accounting resource for them, eh? So there's a lot of there are a lot of There's a lot of feature rich functionality that we've got that is a draw for the subscription element, and then we generally get some form of rebate based on the total amount of sales from the vendors that we work with. Eso everybody wins are the cost of sale for the vendors is significantly lower cause they're not sending as many sales people out into the field, and those that they do. We certainly don't want to get in the way off. We just want to make sure that the procurement itself can go through the system. So we work hand in hand with a lot of regional sales people to ensure that our clients are getting exactly what they need through the platform. But having that extra level of support in many cases goes a long way, especially if they're buying something like 13 h Vac units for 13 different.

You don't want to make the wrong choice there. You want to make sure you've got all the connective materials that go along with the unit itself, you know, So we do. We do a lot of that. But at the same time person platform is on has continued to collect a significant amount of intellectual property around the space. So we're giving those vendors kind of guidance in terms of what people are looking for, what it is that people are most interested. What if they're searching for that? We don't yet have seasonality interest. We can also give them insight into where they're missing out whether pricing isn't necessarily as competitive as it might need to be to win over some new business. So we're trying to give. Everybody were merely trying to be a conduit to help the communities win by saving money, gaining transparency, getting more and more compliance out of their communities that purchase stuff on the vendor side. We're trying to lower the cost of sale, but also give them some really valuable insights as well, in terms of how they can have more of a positive impact and obviously

win in the process as it so as a marketplace. How are you thinking through the take

rate? So from our standpoint there, we have to be very judicious with that because we certainly aren't ever going to get to a point where you're too greedy. This isn't, uh, this isn't some sort of 20% uber related take rate, right? Uh, and so when I was doing my Siri's a the investors that I, I guess really connected with the most were those that had a realistic view on where are take rate, you know, needed to be today and where it could potentially grow as we demonstrate more and more value to our customers into our vendors and there. Certainly there's certainly upside for both, but we need to make sure that we're justifying that with either greater amounts of sales for our thunder community, but also greater functionality for those that use us day in, day out. We want to make sure that they were giving the right solutions to every,

I guess, core focal point in our focal customer in our business. So ah, smaller community or a smaller portfolio of communities won't need all of the different bells and whistles we're building now. But they still could get tons of value out of using person platform. They shouldn't have to pay. The same subscription fee is a larger portfolio that's using us for detailed analytics and mobile application to help with their reef herbs and things

like that. Sure, so I always like to talk about hardship. Eso we touched on culture. You know what other things have been some of the most difficult problems that you've dealt with.

So I'm glad you asked that I because I think this is an important topic that isn't addressed often enough, and I think your your blog's in your podcast are doing a great job of detailing that I read your recent one about bevy on. I think more of these stories need to be told in a thoughtful manner, because entrepreneurs need to understand that it doesn't go up into the right every time. And I don't know many people whose story goes up into the right every time. And I think that I think it's important to share the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur but also leading a startup like this when we re founded the company. And I do consider it that we re founded the company even though I'm not an original founder and inherited something that was kind of the death rattle was there, right there were, there were there wasn't a lot of cash remaining. The original investors didn't really have the patients. That happens, right, and most companies tend to get mothballed as a result. What we were fortunate to do, we found we found a a founder who had a passion for this, and I had known about it, so I kind of followed it for some time.

When he approached me with it, the first thing we had to do was let go of a lot of people, so even though we re founded the company and recapitalized it, it still was painful, right? People lost their jobs, so we we did everything we could to make sure they landed on their feet. I'm very proud to say that everybody landed on their feet that we had to let go. We were able to make some calls and make sure that they were given all the references they needed and so forth. So we did that the right way. But that's never a pleasant experience. We then spent a year, the year of 2017 really trying to just understand our customers better. What were they looking for? What vendors were we missing? What products will be missing?

What functionality were we missing? We have a lot of answers. We have to start being very careful about our road map. Instead of promising everybody everything. In the next quarter, we had to start giving ourselves a bit more of ah, strategic view of how we're gonna roll this out. And during that journey, 2070 was fantastic. We we cut the burned by more than 60% actually closer to 70%. So a business that have been losing a $1,000,000 a year was now losing closer to 300,000 which is phenomenal because our top line grew by two x at the same time. Which means we start to get an understanding of our kind of basic cost kind of our raw, fixed costs that that's required to run the business. And that's what something I would encourage. Every entrepreneur, regardless of whether or not you're planning to raise money,

are not. You should understand what your basic minimum costs are to run this business, because that gives you a first milestone to achieve. Ah, during the early part of 2000 and 18 we had a large customer put us on hold. We were going up into the right. I was certain that we were on our path. We were winning more and more business. We have a healthy size customer, put us on hold. They put us on hold for 2.5 months without any forewarning. It wasn't a personal thing. There was some things going on at that organization, some really exciting things going on in that organization that precipitated some new leadership being brought in new views and ideas and a bit of skepticism around how they have been doing it the old way before and and we were relatively young. We were only six months in, but we were really growing and providing a lot of value.

And we received an email one night, just random email. I was boarding a plane the next day for the industry conference where I was gonna be running up and down the halls like, Listen, we're winning top 10 portfolios in this space. We've got all the momentum in the world. You need to come sign up now get onboard, etcetera. And the night before we were flying off, I got this kind of shot to the gut. Obviously being entrepreneur, I called the CEO and said, Listen, is there something that we've done is there? And the response is no. We just don't know enough about what value bringing.

We want to look around the market, make sure that you're the right solution. That's a very reasonable, reasonable statement. I couldn't take offense to that. So we had a choice. We could either kind of grin and bear it and fight for it, or we could give up. Yeah, grinning and bearing it and fighting for it still required us to furlough some employees because we had built up the team. Over time, we had to lay off a couple people full. So we went from a team of 12 to a team of eight. Almost overnight, we had to make a decision. I'm thrilled to say that three of those people are back in the business full time today.

But it was I had people that were telling me they were working half time with us and driving uber the other part. Then there's nothing wrong with driving. Uber don't get me wrong, but it breaks. My heart is an entrepreneur that I'm putting people in that position because you do take that personal ownership right? And so when we won that company back, the feedback we received from them was Dave. We've looked at all the different opportunities in the market. We've looked for other competitors of yours. We've looked at other solutions. Urine were sorry it took us so long to figure it out. But we really want to get back started tomorrow. So just as quickly as they had left us, they came back. Justus quickly again. And now we're building that we're building all those lessons learned so that we can get in front of any sort of were informing our clients of our value.

But there was a blip in our trajectory there of about 1/4. That was very painful that, you know, I'd rather share this on these sorts of podcasts so that people understand that it doesn't always go up in the right. Sometimes you have to make very difficult choices. It was impossible for me to cut my pay because I wasn't making a salary yet anyway. So for those of you that might be thinking about that, you know, real entrepreneurs sometimes have to just grin and bear it for a couple of years before I'd rather higher two people in customer success then pay myself any salary just so we can provide amazing service to complement and the shortfalls we may have in other parts of the system.

I love that, um and so that kind of brings us to funding you. Bootstrap. The 1st 1 You recently raised a series A So congrats on that, You know? How did you approach that? How are you thinking about it.

So let me say this, Colin, You will know this and I think you've said this on numerous episodes here, but anything that you learned from the movies about raising capital is false. So if you watch the social network and you see the guy playing Zuckerberg just show up and they hand him a term sheet for half a 1,000,000 bucks. That never happens. I don't care who you are, in fact, that some great podcasts out there with founders like us that have passed, or investors like us that have passed on Airbnb and on ah, on slack and other amazing entities on flat out past because of whatever skepticism or whatever total addressable market concerns they may have had and what I learned at the end of 2018 we were back on track. We were now heading back up into the right. We had all the momentum in the world, and I was determined to give us plenty of gasoline to put in the tank. But I wanted to do it as responsibly as possible. I I talked with mentors of mind that are in the city. Other fellow multi exit entrepreneurs that have had great success.

Most of us are kind of bootstrap, fiscally conservative, lean people, men and women that just we like running, lean and being in control. We felt as though this this trajectory of growth could continue on its current path. On our current path, we just felt that we could get a whole lot more vertical with a With With venture but Smart venture on DSO In the first quarter of 19 we decided to put together a pack. We put together a slide back. I did a lot of practicing. I tried to home the pitch. I learned the 10 2030 rule where you walk in, get the investors talking about kind of what they're interested in, what they're seeing, what's the best deal they've done lately, what they're most excited about.

You spend the first time it's getting to know them a little bit, getting them to talk. You spend the next 20 minutes pitching, and then the last 30 minutes is Q and A. And if you're not drawing out the one key question, you're probably not going to get a call back to even go through a deep dive. And I had many, many meetings with with great venture capitalists here in the city of Chicago, where I felt walking out, we had an incredibly positive meeting and I was certain that we would get a call back. Never did. Yeah, And that's okay. I don't You can't take it personal, because when I did get a no, especially the first few knows I got some great knows because they would give you such thoughtful feedback in terms of clearly articulating our TAM,

clearly articulating how we could grow the business beyond manufactured housing in time but remaining razor focused to begin with. Um, I got some phenomenal feedback, some, some from some very well respected veces here. Um, I also didn't get a lot of calls back from others, which I think that their motive motive operation is They're worried a little bit worried about passing to say that they passed and I don't know if that's accurate or not. I haven't been in the space long enough. Yeah, What I will say is, when I when I found those that actually gave me term sheets when I was fortunate to meet with those, I kind of knew straight away and they let me know immediately in the first meeting or two that this was something they really want to dig into. And then when they dug in, they ask questions that no one else did. They really got into our business model.

They really got into where we could go. They got into the culture, they got into the vendors. They wanted to understand the customer journey, other things that we could do to better support our target market. I mean, they asked questions that were the right questions. And when we when it came time Teoh finalize are finalized our syriza around we were fortunate to be. I think flattered is a better word. Flattered to be a bit oversubscribed. But at the same time, the network and contacts I've made from all those that I met are gonna prove invaluable because I got value from every single one that I

met. Awesome. And so reaching towards end of the podcasts in with all that money, you know, what's the future hold for the company? Where do you see it go in the next 5 to 10 years? So

we feel that we've got a ton of runway Uh, we're right now. We're in that phase of kind of going slow to grow fast. We're trying to make some key hires right now. I want to compliment the amazing team that I have today with a little bit more resource, but also some leadership in certain areas. We're looking for an architect, for example, to complement our fabulous CTO. She's certainly leading that charge with me. Our lead investor is gonna be supporting that charge. We're looking for a director of merchandising toe Help us drive a greater landing experience for our customers. Easier search. Easy to find the most appropriate products. Just making our clients lives easier in any way we can. There's a mobile application we're looking to roll out pretty rapidly. That will help give our customers a little bit more firepower when they're touring a community and they see something that needs to be fixed.

Maybe they're touring a home that's recently been vacated, and it needs a new refrigerator, a new bathtub and a new water heater. They could log onto our mobile requisition app and suggest those it will coat it to that lot and Philip their cart against that. Ah, against that lot. So there a lot of cool things we could be doing. Um, I think strategic hiring is one will do a lot of sales and marketing. We're gonna get to know a lot about a lot more about our industry than way. Think we know a lot now, but I don't I don't think we know nearly enough. Um, if you're not always learning your kind of wasting your time, In my opinion, if you're not enjoying this part of the journey just like you enjoy the the bumps in the road,

then you're kind of what Why'd you become an entrepreneur? You know, eso I'm trying to take it all in. Our first board meeting is Wednesday, so that will be a learning. So yeah, lots, lots, lots to do. That's to

do. And then I was like to end on a high note. What parting advice do you have for any founders or potential founders and maybe listening? I think

the best advice I can give you is in this Sounds corny, but surrounding yourself with the right people is critical for sure. But I think communicating is the most important part. I think when people understand that they're part of an organization. They understand the vision. They understand the goals you build in kind of soft equity. That is immeasurable. And frankly, it's beyond any value, right. It's invaluable to a company's core kind of foundation. And communication to me is the most important thing that I dio is being able to communicate our message with. Our vendors are message with our community. Managers are message with their regional managers and their Ciolos and their owners. I also want to make sure I'm communicating to my team so that they understand why it is. We're doing what we're doing, and we're starting to get there. But I would encourage any founder out there any entrepeneur who is looking to build a business to focus just as much time on how you communicate internally as you do externally, it will pay back in tenfold from anything you do. From a business

standpoint, it has been great, Dave, thanks so much. If we want to learn more about purchasing platform or more about you, where should they go?

So I'm on Lincoln. You can find me on linked in, but more importantly, you go to purchasing platform dot com. There's plenty of information on the site. It will be overhauled in time, but we also have. We're getting into social in a decent way now. And ah, so you can find us on Twitter. You can find us on linked in you find us on Facebook. There are a wide variety of little anecdotes that we're sharing about our customers specific journeys. If you really want to get to know what are how are customers benefit from this? Those are

some great outlets. Very cool. Thanks again.

No, it's my pleasure. Thank

you. All right, that's it for this episode. If you could do me a huge favor real quick and go into your favorite podcasting app often apple podcasts and rate the show five stars that gets the show recommended a more folks. And it also helps us get bigger and better guests for you to listen to. All right, Take care. Bye.