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(B) How To Go From Mom’s Basement to 9 Figures with Saud Juman

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In this episode, we share the story of how our guest went from teetering on the edge of virtual bankruptcy to transforming his company into a high growth startup with a massive exit seemingly overnight with our guest Saud Juman.

Saud Juman is the founder of PolicyMedical Inc., a healthcare software company. Over the following years, Saud grew the company to serve more than 3,000 hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide, growing it to serve millions of patients, clinicians, and community members daily. He is also sharing his business expertise by coaching others with his “Energy For Entrepreneurs” program, to help business leaders fully re-align with their energy to heal and grow their business.

  • Saud did not start his company to make money, he stared it to create a positive impact in the world. 

  • His company, PolicyMedical managed all the non-clinical data in hospitals

  • 17+ year journey

  • Starting out in his mom’s basement it took 9 months to land his first customers. 

  • What enabled them to sell into such big institutions?

    • Good market timing

    • The chutzpah to do it

  • It’s not just about the time - it’s about the journey

  • In the first 11-12 years, the company was a lifestyle company... small clients.. a small handful of employees... Making a bit of money, but not really going anywhere. 

  • Then it became a high growth, high impact company, and blew up over 6-7 years. 

  • From teetering on virtual bankruptcy to becoming a high growth startup with an almost 9 figure exit 

  • What enabled Saud’s business to shift from being a sleepy lifestyle company to being a high growth startup?

    • Focused more on innovation

    • Reconnected to the “why” of the business 

    • “Relaunching the business from scratch"

  • The 4 phases of moving into “Growth Mode"

    • Phase one: Product relaunch/restart. 

      • Mentors. Growth was brought to light by Saud’s mentors. Saud started looking for mentors to push himself. 

      • His mentors told him his product sucked.

      • 18 months - 2 years to rebuild the product.

      • Migrate clients to the new billing model

    • Phase two: Embarking on a “Client Success Journey."

      • Go out and try to sell the business to the market. 

      • Turn clients into FANS. 

      • Put in the processes and people to deliver a consistent experience and turn them into fans.

      • Study the connection point between marketing, sales, and customer success and bundle them up under “Revenue Generation.”

      • Client success needs to be able to upsell

      • Sales needs to be compassionate enough to plug into customers. 

      • Marketing needs to create high-value educational content to serve clients and prospects. 

      • Zendesk, customer portal, creating customer competitions to speak on stage, to host webinars, write white papers. 

      • The “Daily 5” - everyone in Revenue Team gets 5 random clients to call.

        • Call random clients, have a few key talking points. 

          • New Features

          • We are going to a conference

          • Just calling to check-in. 

        • Help move customer to trust the BRAND 

      • Took 18-24 months to implement 

    • Phase three: “Becoming the Wikipedia of our space"

      • The way to sell has fundamentally changed.

      • Sales happens throughs inbound content marketing and producing premium, high value, educational content

      • Building out the entire content process - took another 12-18 months

      • Required hired the right content and marketing team 

      • Creating content - leveraging the employees to generate the content and their knowledge. 

    • Phase four: Integration

      • Integration of sales/marketing/client success teams FULLY 

      • Saud had to learn to function as a CEO, not as an entrepreneur. He was not able to create the most value for the company being an entrepreneur, he needed to be a CEO. 

  • An entrepreneur is not a CEO - Saud had to learn to become a CEO. 

    • Walking across the bridge from entrepreneur to CEO.

    • Running the company with less emotion, more data

    • Trusting and recruiting in an executive team to collaborate with

    • Running the company with the right structure 

  • Funding a company completely off organic growth and bootstrapping. 

    • Instead of focusing on raising capital, he would focus on selling more and building sales. 

  • Building up inbound and content marketing dramatically reduced the sales cycle and increased the win ratio from 20% to 70%. 

  • How do you ensure that your content strategy actually creates value for your clients?

    • Client advisory group.

    • Run ideas by customers.

      • product

      • marketing

      • customers

    • Use your clients with you to create content. Make them a part of the content. 

    • Their content was so high quality that it actually got certified as continuing education. 

    • In his speeches he wouldn’t speak about his software, he would speak as a thought leader in the healthcare industry

  • What are the key things that most entrepreneurs and executives miss?

    • Entrepreneurs fundamentally misunderstand themselves. “I’m not a 9-5er”

    • Entrepreneurs are artists and creative people - the problem is that the canvas that they’re painting on is a business, for that painting to work you need people that are not like you to make the thing happen. 

    • To be a successful entrepreneur you have to journey inside yourself. 

    • Listen to what your inner voice is telling you, and don’t be attached to what comes out. 

  • You need a continual practice of stepping back, self-discovery, and contemplative routines on a daily and weekly basis.

  • The “day cycle” - it doesn’t need to be every day, it needs to be every few days, and it needs to flow organically and naturally. 

  • Specific activities and contemplative routines

    • Gratitude journaling (but didn’t resonate as much with Saud)

    • Freeflow journaling to clear your mind and write whatever comes out, writing a page at a time

    • Meditation - helps you get rid of the voices from the past that are shaping your thinking. 

    • Exercise - super important to Saud 

    • The most powerful form is to slip into a flow state shooting hoops - find a way to plug into flow states and lose track of time, clear your head. 

    • Ask yourself: What did you do when you were 12 that brought you joy and allowed you to lose track of time?

  • The other side that every person has that most people don’t want to admit - the secret side that you don’t want to admit to - your shadow, your darker side. Acknowledging your shadow helps transmute that energy into healthy and productive energy and activity. 

  • Use your natural shadow or dark side, own it, acknowledge it, and don’t let it 

  • Homework: Do something for 1-5 mins a day that has nothing to do with anyone else that allows you to turn inward and hear your own inner voice? 

  • Your inner voice has all the directions, strategy, and strategic plans that you need. 

  • Instead of doing a retreat, find a way to reconnect with your own inner voice. 

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.1] MB: Hey, it’s Matt. I’m here in the studio with Austin. We’re excited to bring you another business episode of the Science of Success. We just launched Season 2 of our business episodes. If you want to learn more about what these are and why we're doing them, be sure to check out the Season 2 teaser that we recently released. With that, Austin, tell us a little bit about how these episodes are different than our traditional Science of Success episode.

[0:00:36.0] AF: Yeah. It's important to note that you're still going to get all the great contents you've come to know and love from the Science of Success every Thursday. These are bonus episodes with added value, specifically centered around business. We've interviewed some true titans of business and multiple industries from multiple walks of life and what we're going to focus on are the habits, routines and mindsets that made them successful titans that they are today.

That said, these are lessons, routines, stories, best practices that anyone can learn from and apply to their life. You don't have to be a business owner. You can be an employee. You can be a student, or you can of course be a business owner. Come check them out. You're going to come away with a ton of valuable takeaways, but we do have a bit of a business focus on these specific business episodes in Season 2.

[0:01:19.3] MB: With that, let's get into the episode.

[0:01:22.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we share the story of how our guest went from teetering on the edge of virtual bankruptcy, to transforming his company into a high-growth startup with a massive exit seemingly overnight, with our guest Saud Juman.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we interviewed Carey Lohrenz, the first female F-14 Tomcat fighter pilot. It was an incredible conversation with some great stories and some fantastic lessons.

Now for our interview with Saud.

[0:02:48.2] Saud Juman is the founder of PolicyMedical Inc., a healthcare software company. Over the last few years, Saud grew his company to serve more than 3,000 hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide, growing it to serve millions of patients, clinicians and community members daily. He also shares his business expertise by coaching others with his energy for entrepreneurs program. Saud, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:13.5] SJ: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[0:03:15.5] MB: Well, we're really excited to have you on the show today. You have such a fascinating journey and there's some amazing lessons that can come out for executives and entrepreneurs that are going to be really valuable.

I’d love to start out with just the beginning of your journey, or actually even before we dig into that, give me a very high-level sense of the business that you built and the trajectory that it took and then I want to dig into some of the pieces from the journey and some of the lessons from that.

[0:03:44.6] SJ: Sure. The business that I built was in the healthcare sector. That's fundamental, because when I started the company, I did not start it to be an entrepreneur. I started it because I wanted to have a really positive impact in the world and I selected healthcare. That manifested itself into a healthcare SaaS B2B company.

The company, what it actually did, the flagship products, it managed all of the non-clinical data within the hospital setting. Our primary clients were hospitals and chains of hospitals and health systems across the United States. That journey for me, it was 17 and a half years.

[0:04:24.9] MB: That's amazing. You started the company and I know you've since exited it. You built it up over 17 and a half years. Give me a sense at the time of exit, how many employees did the company have? How many customers were you serving, that thing?

[0:04:39.1] SJ: Yeah. What was cool about that company is the employee count. We kept it pretty low for a company our size. We were at approximately 37 full-time employees. We had a series of contractors all over the place, but we were mainly a product company. What allowed us to keep the headcount pretty low as we scaled were some technological decisions we made when it came to customer service and client success. When I sold the company, or when we sold a company, we had approximately 3,000 hospitals across the United States that were using our applications.

[0:05:16.1] MB: That's incredible that you were able to scale such a large organization with essentially, 40 employees.

[0:05:23.8] SJ: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my mindset has always been pretty traditional and old-school when it comes to business. I never understood why needless headcount in some cases, not all cases. In some cases, was a badge of honor among CEOs and entrepreneurs. I always thought the least amount of people you have, the better.

[0:05:41.1] MB: Yeah, that's a great perspective and I’m sure that in many ways informed why the company was so successful. I’d love to zoom all the way back now to the beginnings of the company. You started it in a basement, essentially. Is that correct?

[0:05:57.2] SJ: Yup. My mom's basement in a suburb of Toronto. Not the fanciest part of Toronto. It's known as a Scarborough. It's one of the I guess, the underprivileged areas of Toronto, but that's where it started and that was before, if anybody's familiar with the Toronto tech scene, which we have a pretty burgeoning and vibrant tech scene now. This was before any of that even materialized.

[0:06:21.6] MB: I want to hit on one or two of the really big moments in the growth of the company. You started out in your mom's basement. Then how long did it take you to acquire your first customer?

[0:06:34.4] SJ: We acquired our first customer within the first nine months. When we started the company, and I say we, it was my co-founder who I subsequently bought out years later. My co-founder, Josh and I, when we started the company, we left another company, because we came up with the idea there, went to my mom's basement. He was in charge of coding, programming, the engineering work, I was in charge of trying to find customers and selling.

As soon as we got something that was demo-ready, we could demo it. We just couldn't ship it yet. I started to demo and sell it. Within the first nine months, we picked up our first two clients. Our first client was in upstate New York. The reason upstate New York is because we needed to find clients that we could physically drive to. Because back then, there was no cloud, there was no Amazon Web Services, any of that. You sold software, you had to physically go, in our case, to the hospital. Go to their air-conditioned server room with a bunch of CDs, install the application, train them and then drive home.

We didn't have enough money to even fly anywhere and get reimbursed and fly back. That worked really well for our first customer. Our second customer, it didn't work so well, because they were in Nashville, Tennessee. We drove from Toronto to Nashville, slept in the minivan, installed it and then drove right back to Toronto.

[0:08:02.6] MB: That's amazing. Nashville getting a little bit of love.

[0:08:05.1] SJ: Yup.

[0:08:05.9] MB: Obviously, Nashville is a big healthcare city, so that makes total sense. I’m curious, what enabled you to really land – I mean, I know hospitals are huge institutions that are quite difficult to sell into with a two-person team, some scrappy founders in a basement, what enabled you to build the credibility, or the rapport to actually close a sale and get customers onboard in the early days?

[0:08:31.1] SJ: It was a bit of naivety. We didn't know that we weren't on paper, supposed to be selling to large US hospitals from my mother's basement in Canada. We just figured that why not? If somebody's going to do it, why not us? Our original plan was actually selling to Canadian hospitals in Toronto, but that didn't work. We figured that out within the first month of trying to sell to Canadian hospitals that it just wasn't going to work, because healthcare is so different here.

It was a bit of ignorance just going for it. Also, I think timing had a lot to do with it. Because at the time we started the company, a lot of key underpinnings within the US healthcare system around regulatory, compliance and accreditation in healthcare in the United States was being solidified, if you will. Hospitals were actively looking for our type of niche product around that time. I also think it was good timing at that.

[0:09:32.5] MB: Interesting. Yeah, that makes total sense. There are so many success stories, where it's just – not knowing that you can't do it is such a key ingredient, some instances of actually doing it.

[0:09:44.4] SJ: Yeah. I mean, if you look at – If you study history and you see and I’m by no means anybody that invented the lightbulb or anything like that. If you look at these amazing inventions throughout history, you'll always see the main inventor that gets all the credit. If you keep on studying and digging, you'll see this second or third person somewhere else randomly in the world that was also coming up with a similar invention at the same time.

I believe that that's also something that exists. If I look back within our little sector, when I started this company in Toronto and to the other competitors that I ended up having later on, I recently realized that they started around the same time as well, because we've all exited our companies. I’ve actually reached out to the rest of them now that we've all moved on and I’ve just had conversations with them to say, “Hey, so when did you start? Why did you start? How did you start that?”

We didn't know each other. I didn't know one guy that was in Idaho. I didn't know the other guy that was in Indiana, but we all started within a year or so of each other, because I think the market was changing, the climate was changing and we were bubbling up with similar ideas independently.

[0:11:02.1] MB: So fascinating. Yeah, the stat about inventors is really interesting and I’ve heard that anecdote before. I’m curious, coming back to looking at the journey, I love that as you said, it was a 17-year journey, because you hear these stories, you hear about people exiting businesses for huge multiples and you think that it's always a quick journey. It's always overnight success and the unicorn in 18 months type of thing. I love the fact that it took a long time to really get traction, to hit scale and to get to the end result that you ultimately achieved.

[0:11:40.5] SJ: Yeah, it's not just the length. It's not just a long time. It's also what the journey develops inside of you as well. Because if you look at our journey at PolicyMedical, there were two chapters, if you will, and they're not equally divided in time. For the first 11, 12 years, the company was really a lifestyle company. It was a small number of clients. It was just a small handful of people. Somewhere in that time, my co-founder had left. I had the company all to myself and it was a lifestyle company in the sense that it was making some money enough for the few employees and myself, but it wasn't really going anywhere.

Then there's the second chapter, where it became this high-growth, high-impact company, where we were able to get the impact that we wanted within healthcare and subsequently, get the value we wanted out of it.

[0:12:38.7] MB: That's so interesting. I really want to dig into that in a number of ways. Let's start with your own mindset, your own internal orientation to the business. What changed after that 11 or 12-year mark that led you to wanting to put the business into growth mode, if that makes sense?

[0:12:55.6] SJ: Yeah. No, that totally makes sense. I had to do a bit of soul-searching. After my business partner had moved on and I had bought him out, it was just myself. After about a year or two, it just wasn't fun anymore. That was one thing. I started to dig and ask myself why it isn't fun anymore. I saw that we did not innovate the product at all for several years, so that was one reason. The other thing is I got disconnected to the why behind the business. I had a very clear why when I started the business, which was to impact people's health and make a positive impact.

After the 11 years or so, it became transactional, trying to find new hospitals, doing demos, but I disconnected from the why. I had to ask myself at that point, do I still want to do this? Because right around that point, I mean, it was not a healthy company. The company was teetering on virtual bankruptcy, if you will, at that particular point. When I went back inside myself and realized that, “Yeah, you know what? I still really want to do this business. It's still a calling. I still want to have this impact in the world and try to make it through this business.” That was the internal reconnection point of saying, “Okay. Let me relaunch, let me restart the business from scratch.”

[0:14:18.9] MB: What did that relaunching look like?

[0:14:22.1] SJ: It was a six-year process. In retrospect, it was about four different phases. The first phase was brought to me, brought to light by my mentors. Right around that first phase, that's when I actively started looking for mentorship and mentors. I have a very specific mentorship formula that I followed that actually worked for me. I can't believe that so many entrepreneurs don't have mentors and I can't believe that I did not have mentor, or mentors until that 11-year mark.

My mentors actually called me out in it and pretty much said, “Your product sucks. Your product is crap. That's all you do? This is all the product does?” Because it had become antiquated and they really started challenging me on that. The first phase was an entire product relaunch, or restart. I thought I was just refactoring the code and patching up the product and releasing a new version, but it wasn't that at all. It was rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

Not only that, but we also once the product was done, which took about eight 18 months to almost two years to rebuild, we actually had to migrate all of our clients to the new product, but there's a business component to migration as well that usually puts a lot of businesses out of business, which is you have to migrate the contracts as well.

We were essentially going to our clients, our existing clients to say, “Hey, you know what? We've got this cool new version, this cool new product. You're going to benefit from it.” They were excited, but we also said, “Oh, by the way. We're going to need to charge you more money per year than we were charging you.” Because one of the things that had hurt the company along the way was we were on a very old software pricing model, which was outdated, which essentially led to a very small amount of recurring revenue. We were migrating people to this higher revenue tier, if you will. I can go into the other things. Unless, you have some other questions about that phase.

[0:16:19.7] MB: No, that was great. I mean, this to me is such an interesting topic, the inflection point between average company, lifestyle business and high-growth, high-impact startup. I really want to break down the whole journey. Phase one, learn from your mentors, reinvent the product, that's 18-month to two years. What happens in phase two?

[0:16:41.7] SJ: Phase two, we're now not only migrating existing clients, we’re going out to try to sell the new product essentially to the market. The new clients are asking us for references, because healthcare is very collegial. They essentially only buy when they know that their colleagues are actually buying as well.

We had no references at all. We only have three references out of all the clients. At that point, we had several hundred clients. The next phase was really embarking on a client success journey, which was turning our clients into fans. That took another 18 months or so. That was not just a thing that we said. Michael was actually to put in the processes, put in the systems, hire the people, so we can deliver a consistent experience to our clients that made them fans.

[0:17:45.7] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:17:47.6] SJ: That one was really, really tough. I mean, because we didn't have all of the staff we needed. I essentially had to study how our customer service team was functioning at that particular point to see where the gaps were. I also realized that I had to study the connection points with marketing and sales, because marketing and sales and customer service, they were so divided in all these different silos.

Then I came up with this framework that I wanted all three of those teams, sales, marketing and customer service which has now become client success in most companies, I wanted them to become a revenue generation team, where they each had their own functions, but they had our deep respect and understanding of what each of the other teams did, so they can work together.

For example, my client success people that are taking care of customers, they needed to be sales savvy enough to look for upsell opportunities. The sales people that were selling to new customers, they needed to be compassionate enough to stay plugged into the customers that they were selling to and not abandon them after the sale. Then the marketing people, they needed to essentially create really high value educational content that would be able to serve both the clients and the new prospects.

It was this trifecta of all of these teams working cohesively together. That involved putting in systems, like a Zendesk, building out a customer portal, creating cool competitions where customers started to compete and towards the ending of the company, the last few years, we had customers competing to see who would come on stage with us to speak at conferences, who would host webinars for us, who would win a contest so they would have the privilege to write a white paper for us?

A lot of this came about, because I studied client success and I studied how to build it out. We even put in our own little processes that had nothing to do with technology as well. We had something called the daily 5, where everyone in sales marketing client and client success, every day that we’d get this these randomized 5 clients and their phone numbers to call. They would be given two to three talking points when they made those calls. Essentially, a call with would go according to something like this, they would call and even if they got a voice-mail they'd say, “Hey, this is Saud calling from PolicyMedical in this case. I wanted to reach out to let you know about this new feature, to let you know that we're going to be at this conference next month, if you're going to be there. I’m just calling to check in to see how things are going.” Essentially, the reason we did the daily 5 was to move the customers from trusting just me and a few other people, to trusting the brand overall.

[0:20:36.7] MB: Saud, this stuff is genius. You just put on just in the three or four strategies, or suggestions you just shared, you just put on a masterclass in how to build value, especially as a software company, but really anybody who wants to improve customer success. I mean, the daily 5 is incredible. The idea of having customers compete for speaking opportunities and white papers and so forth, really, really fascinating.

[0:21:01.2] SJ: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[0:21:06.3] AF: What's up, everybody? This is Austin Fable, producer and co-host of the Science of Success. This episode of the Science of Success is brought to you by the mobile app Best Fiends. That's best friends, but without the R. Best Fiends is honestly one of the best mobile games I've ever played. If you're looking for a truly fun and engaging way to pass the time while enjoying a great story, some awesome visuals, Best Fiends is absolutely for you.

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[0:22:48.2] MB: Before we jump in, how long was the client success remapping process? How long did that take to really get that implemented in the culture and the process of the company?

[0:22:57.2] SJ: About 18 months. I mean, there were things that took a long time. We realized that our high-end platinum customers and in that whole process, we also grouped customers. We never had them grouped before. We had platinum, gold and silver. For each tier, we would have different criteria that would drop somebody into that tier. It wasn't just revenue.

For each tier, we would also have the ways that we would be communicating with them on a weekly, a monthly, or an annual basis. For example, the lower tier, the silver customers, they probably did not want to see our faces every quarter. They probably just wanted a touch-base webinar or phone call. The platinum customers, they probably wanted to see our faces physically twice a year. We came up with all of all of those things.

[0:23:46.7] MB: Very interesting. All right, so let's dig into phase three.

[0:23:51.1] SJ: Phase three was we called it becoming the Wikipedia of our space. That was really me acknowledging that sales, the way to sell and get new revenue for a company had fundamentally changed from when I initially started the company. When I initially started the company. I was a software sales guy originally. I was churning out a 100, a 150 phone calls a day via cold calling and that's how we built a bunch of customers in the early years.

I was acknowledging in this third phase that we’re discussing now, that sales doesn't really happen like that anymore. That it happens through inbound content marketing. By essentially producing really premium, high-value educational content. My goal was to become the Wikipedia of our space, whereas our clients would be able to go to our website. Even my competitor’s clients should be able to go to our website to get amazing value and educational content.

It was building out the entire process and that was really, really difficult to do. That took us about another 18 months or so, maybe less, probably like 12 months to actually execute that and that required me hiring the right team, because we did not have a very large marketing team at that point and also creating sources. That was the process of essentially using the employees of the company to generate the content, or the ideas for the content and building a system around that.

Every month, the company would be churning out really high-value content that could be leveraged in the sales process, that could be leveraged in the client success process and even as elevating the brand as a thought leader within the space.

[0:25:38.9] MB: That's so interesting and makes total sense about positioning yourself as a thought leader and a content expert. I want to dig into now, tell me a little bit about the fourth phase of your growth.

[0:25:50.2] SJ: The fourth phase of our growth had two components to it. One was the integration of the sales marketing and client success teams fully. There was still a little bit of work to integrate those teams together. The second part of this final phase had to do with me. I realized that I was still functioning as an entrepreneur and I realized that I was not going to be able to extract the value out of the company, or generate the value for the company, if you will, if I was still operating as an entrepreneur.

I realized that the company was growing up. It went from a child to a teenager. Then by that point, it was a young adult. I realized that it needed a CEO. I had to very rapidly acknowledge that an entrepreneur is not a CEO and I needed to grow into a CEO really fast. I imagine in my mind, I always had this image of me standing on one side of a bridge as an entrepreneur and then the other side of the bridge is the CEO role and I needed to walk across that bridge pretty rapidly to become the CEO. That was a big part of that phase.

Some of the examples of me growing up and running the company as a CEO was really running the company with much less emotion, running the company with more data, trusting and recruiting in an executive team that we would really collaborate together with and running the company with the right corporate governance and structure that a corporation needed.

[0:27:34.4] MB: That's so interesting. I want to unpack the journey to CEO a little bit more, but before we dig into that, I want to come back to these phases of growth. While you were pursuing that journey, were you bootstrapping the company this entire time? Did you raise capital to help build out these teams and integrate these functions? What enabled you to really execute on each of those different phases?

[0:28:03.1] SJ: It was completely bootstrapped. We didn't raise any funds. It was very, very stressful. Because everything was funded off of organic growth. We could only do things once we had the money to do it.

[0:28:19.7] MB: What was your thought process for bootstrapping, as opposed to bringing in some capital to accelerate some of these transitions?

[0:28:26.8] SJ: Every time I thought about bringing in capital, I would think about the amount of capital I would actually need. In my mind, it didn't seem that much. I thought to myself, “Well, I could go through all the stress of trying to find the capital, or I could just try to sell more.” I think, perhaps that's something that probably didn't make me that popular with some of my employees, but I would put this intense pressure to sell and continue to grow and grow the company at 200% to 300% a year. That was the goal.

Because I was a sales person by nature, I think I just understood that a little bit better. I’m like, “You know what? Okay. Well, all we need is a half a million dollars to fund this amount of growth, to hire these employees. Okay, let's just sell more.”

[0:29:15.8] MB: Did the business have a pretty rapid sales cycle that enabled you to really quickly recapture some of the value from your sales efforts?

[0:29:23.4] SJ: Yeah, I would say so. For B2B sales, selling to healthcare and hospitals I mean, our typical sales cycle was three months. We understood the sales cycle really, really well. Yeah. Now that's the mean average sales cycle. I mean, sometimes it could be a few weeks if it was a really large complex deal with a huge chain of hospitals. I mean, maybe it could span into nine, 10 months. On average, it was it was three months.

[0:29:49.0] MB: That's actually much shorter than I would have anticipated.

[0:29:51.6] SJ: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is. What shortened the sales cycle considerably was the inbound content marketing effort. When we eventually built up a large repository of educational content and we learned how to use it and leverage it in the sales cycle, that not only brought down the sales cycle quite a bit, but it increased our win ratio. Our win ratio went from 20% to 70%, when we realized that if we were strategically giving the prospect certain pieces of content throughout their exploratory journey, we would have a much, much higher chance of closing those deals above our competitors.

[0:30:31.9] MB: That's so fascinating. That's a massive jump in the win ratio.

[0:30:35.3] SJ: It is. It is.

[0:30:36.7] MB: How did you make sure that your content actually stood out, was actually differentiated and really created value?

[0:30:45.8] SJ: My answer to that is the same from day one, to when we sold the company, which was our clients. We would run everything by our customers, our key customers. For ideas like this, we had a senior customer advisory group, which was really every 60 days, we would have approximately 20 large customers. Our most respected customers, they would hop on a Webex or a Zoom call with us and I would run different ideas by them. Sometimes it was product ideas, sometimes it was premium content ideas, sometimes it was marketing ideas, to see what their thoughts were. They were very, very honest with us.

The other thing that also helped quite a bit was when we started to use our clients with us to create content, because then we had this collegial respect amongst the other clients to respect the content that we're putting out. Some of the content was so useful. We started hosting webinars and we got some of the webinars approved for what they called continuing education credits. Essentially, people would show up, they would view the webinar. Because they would be an attendee at the webinar, they would get credits from their hospital towards their next professional designation. That's how valuable some of the content was. That actually took our webinar attendees up from we used to struggle to get 30 people to show up to a webinar and some of those webinars would have 500, 600 people in on those webinars.

[0:32:14.6] MB: That's incredible. Was this content specifically – I guess, I’m trying to think about the exact way to phrase this, but was the content super targeted around the product and the problems that you were solving, or was it much more generic really expanding out and covering a wide array of things?

[0:32:33.8] SJ: For webinars, it was very specific. However, for written content and specifically for my keynotes when I would go out and speak at the healthcare conferences that my customers would be at, that strategy was something that I remember my board and some board members really being upset about. For example, my speeches, I would never speak about the software. I would not even mention my company name. The purpose of those speeches, it was really for me to speak about something I was noticing within healthcare, which I could identify with within the entrepreneurial world, which was burnout and identity issues; really superimposing your personal identity with your career identity, which I struggled with in the past. My speeches were around that.

What ended up happening indirectly was I would give a keynote, we would have a booth at the same conference. People would come up afterwards and say, “Hey, you never mention the name of the company. What company do you run?” I would verbally just tell them, “It's this company, but the speech isn't about the company.” I would leave, but they would end up going to the booth and sales related things would end up happening from that.

[0:33:48.1] MB: That's so interesting. That really gets into one of the most fascinating things that I find about your journey and what you speak about and write about is this different perspective on being a successful entrepreneur, being a successful CEO. It really in many ways, turns a lot of conventional wisdom on its head. I’d love to hear what your perspective is on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur and CEO and why that might be different from a lot of people tell you the conventional wisdom is.

[0:34:20.3] SJ: Well, I can tell you some of the things that I believe based on my experience and we can delve in further. One is I think that entrepreneurs fundamentally misunderstand themselves. If we're being honest as entrepreneurs, I think and I hear this a lot at entrepreneur gatherings and conferences, where entrepreneurs say things like, “You know what? I’m not a nine-to-fiver. I can't identify with people that are worker bees that are nine-to-fivers.” There's almost this this indirect message that entrepreneurs are the special breed that only certain special people can be entrepreneurs and everyone else misunderstands us.

I actually think that entrepreneurs misunderstand themselves, because I actually believe that entrepreneurs are artists, they are creatives. They're creative people. When they start out their ventures, they really adopt that creative vibe and energy and lifestyle. The problem with most entrepreneurs is the canvas that they're painting and the painting they're painting on the canvas is a business. For that painting to work, you do need people that are not like you to make the thing happen, which are what we call nine-to-fivers and people that operate on a different rhythm altogether.

I think the key for a lot of entrepreneurs is to acknowledge that they’re creatives, acknowledge that they're artists and acknowledge that they need the space and the right practices to continue to journey inside themselves, because in my belief, it's the journey inside yourself, the continual practice to go inside yourself, to listen to your inner voice that leads to the best ventures.

A lot of entrepreneurs, I think they're too preoccupied in their mind as to what the idea is going to be, what the tactic is going to be, what the strategy is going to be. Based on my experience, I’ve always tried to tunnel inside myself, get really quiet and listen to what my inner voice is telling me. I don't really attach myself to what comes out.

PolicyMedical, the 17 and a half year journey, that was a byproduct of me going inside myself for a period of months before the journey started. What came out was a 17 and a half year tech journey.

[0:36:34.9] MB: When you reached that critical inflection point and switched from a slower lifestyle company to a high-growth business, was that the result of another journey of self-discovery?

[0:36:47.8] SJ: It was challenging. I didn't realize how much I needed a continual practice to continue to go inside, because I made the mistake of having several months, or several years of continual execution. Eventually, I adopted a rhythm and different practices, like meditation and other practices of on a daily and weekly basis going back inside and connecting to my inner voice to make sure that I’m moving along in the right way. That's how I knew it was time to sell the company. That's how I knew that there were specific key clients that we needed to focus on. That's how I knew that certain employees were not a good fit anymore and that's how I knew that certain people that we were interviewing were the ones to take certain parts of the company to the next level. It was that inner voice telling me that.

[0:37:36.4] MB: So interesting, because the research talks about this concept of contemplative routines, things like meditation, things like journaling, stepping back and getting some perspective on what you're doing, how you're spending your time, etc., being such a critical component of people who are really, really successful. It's so interesting to see that that seems to be a really critical component of your journey as well. When you reintegrated that and made it a practice, whether it's daily, weekly, etc., it seems like it really had a tremendous impact on both you personally and the growth of the business.

[0:38:13.7] SJ: It did and I’m thankful for that. However, I realized something in the year and a half since I sold the company. After I sold the company, I went through a long period of not really doing anything formally. I still continued those same practices; journaling, meditation, exercise, hiking, all of those types of practices.

However, what I ended up doing post exit was I did it much more naturally organically. For example, when I had my business and I was journaling, I almost felt I need with rigor, I must journal every single day. It's part of my morning ritual and routine. This is what makes me me, which was I realized in retrospect, that was giving me average returns. When I adopted a much more organic intuitive cycle of doing those practices of essentially doing it when I felt like doing it, it became much more beneficial to me.

[0:39:15.0] MB: Explain that a little bit more.

[0:39:17.0] SJ: I’ve got this – maybe it's not my concept. It probably came from somewhere else, but I guess I’ll – For today, I’ll claim it as my own. I’ve got this concept of a day cycle. I used to feel really guilty if I missed one of my morning best practices, one of my morning routines. I would get really down and be like, “Okay. You know what? Okay. I got to get back on the on the horse here and continue journaling every day then,” because I missed two days.

Now the way I look at it is I probably operate on a 48-hour day, whereas and what I mean by that is I don't have the drive and desire to do practices probably for a few days at a time. It doesn't need to be every day. I give myself permission by thinking of it as I don't operate on a 24-hour day. I operate on a 48-hour day for these particular practices. If I don't feel like doing a certain best practice, that's okay. It's not that I’m lazy. I have to discern between laziness and the not needing to do it at that particular time. It's I’ll do it on another day.

[0:40:23.5] MB: That totally makes sense and that contextualizes what you said earlier about having it be more natural and organic, as opposed to rigid and forced.

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[0:42:12.9] MB: I want to come back to the tools and specific strategies that you used for journeying inside of yourself, for self-discovery. We touched on a few of them, but I want to really understand. Give me a give me some concrete sense of what were the actual activities that you were doing when you were doing some of these contemplative routines.

[0:42:37.2] SJ: Journaling, two types of journaling I would do at times. One was almost a gratitude journal, which did not resonate with me as much. I know the science behind gratitude journaling and all of that, but for me it didn't really resonate. What resonated with me was almost, I think what's called free-flow journaling, where you try to clear your mind, put pen to paper and just write whatever comes out.

I would do a page at a time whenever I did that. Initially, the entries would look like nonsense. Then over time, you would actually see some trends of what might be going on in your subconscious. I felt that very freeing to do. From time to time, that was one practice. The other practice over time and that I continued to do is meditation. Essentially getting really quiet, eyes closed and getting in touch with your inner voice. That was really, really important because it led me to a place of getting rid of all of the other voices from the past and the present that are telling me what to do and those voices are things like your past teachers, your parents, advisors, shareholders, all those types of people. Meditation was critical.

Exercise has always been super-duper important to me. It lifts my mood. I’ve always been athletic and enough throughout my entire life so exercising very rigorously is something that that helped me out quite a bit. Probably the most powerful form of losing track of time and going inside of myself is a very personal thing. At first, I’ll say what it is and it might sound strange. I love to go on my driveway and shoot hoops. I’ll just shoot and shoot and shoot. I literally lose track of time.

Now if anyone's listening to this, I’m not saying that you need to go on your driveway or go to a basketball court and shoot hoops, because that might not be your thing. The reason why that works for me is that's something that I’ve been doing since I was probably in the sixth grade. One tactic for some of the entrepreneurs that I mentor and coach and things that that I always tell them is what did you do when you were 12 years old or in the sixth grade that brought you joy and allowed you to lose track of time?

It's amazing some of the things, some of the people that I’m working with have come up with. Some people, it's randomly riding their bicycle around their neighborhood, other people it's video games. It's so many different activities, but it's that getting lost in time. I find that to be a really powerful form of meditation and going inside yourself.

[0:45:14.8] MB: I think all of those are great suggestions. The term I would use probably to describe, whether it's shooting hoops, getting lost playing video games, whatever it might be would be finding a way to plug into flow states. Because flow states are so powerful and really from a neurological perspective, essentially shut down, or minimize the brain function in the part of the brain that's responsible for self-awareness and you literally lose yourself in the activity that you're doing so it's a really powerful, in some sense, this form of mindfulness.

[0:45:46.3] MB: Yup. Absolutely. If I can mention one other thing that's slightly controversial, but I’ll mention it anyways. It's this other side that I believe every person has that most people don't want to admit. It's that side that might be that secret side to them. I believe every human being has that. I’m not saying it's a side that necessarily succumbs to all of the bad vices out there, but it's a darker side that we all have. I’ve learned that hey, you know what? I’ve got that side to me as well.

When I started to acknowledge that I’ve got that side, those thoughts, those urges, those things that I want to do, I found that transmutation I think is the word, where you take that energy and you transmute it into a more productive activity. I found that to be extremely, extremely helpful in my entrepreneurial journey. I’m not suggesting to take issues, or ideas, or thoughts that you have inside that might be negative and push it down and forget about it. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying use the natural darker side, the secret side that we all have, instead of trying to get rid of it, own it, acknowledge that it's there, but instead of letting it use you, you use it.

[0:47:16.1] MB: Yeah. That aligns with the classical Jungian concept of the shadow and acknowledging the shadow, figuring out what's going on and integrating it into a whole being as opposed to trying to bury it and hide it and pretend like it doesn't exist.

[0:47:33.7] SJ: Yeah. Yeah.

[0:47:34.8] MB: For somebody who's been listening to this conversation and you may have just shared a number of these strategies, but what would be one thing that you would recommend as an action item, or a piece of homework for our listeners to concretely implement that we've talked about today?

[0:47:50.1] SJ: One thing. I would say what's something that you can do for 1 to 5 minutes a day, now a day based on what you've heard earlier, being a cycle that you accept to be your day. It could be every 24 hours, every 48 hours, every 72 hours, etc. What's something you could do for 1 to 5 minutes a day that has nothing to do with anyone else, that allows you to turn inwards and has you hearing your own inner voice? Because I think that inner voice has all the wisdom, all the ideas, all the direction, all the strategic plans that you need.

The reason I feel so strongly about that is I’m surrounded and I’m within entrepreneur communities, where it seems like the most popular thing that has been going on for the last several years are events like retreats. A lot of my friends are constantly going on retreats and I ask why are you going on these retreats. They may go to Thailand for a retreat. They may go to wherever, for an entrepreneurial retreat for three to four days every quarter or sometimes more. They'll say, “Well, you know what? I’m going to get space. I’m going to get ideas. I’m going to do some inner work.”

I beg to differ, because I think a lot of people that are doing these types of retreats are actually retreating away for themselves. They're running away from their regular life. What I’d suggest for anybody listening to this is how could you create a 1 to 5 minute retreat in your own city, in your own home, in your own office where you live a few times a week?

[0:49:32.1] MB: Such a great suggestion and I love the idea of instead of retreating from yourself, find a way that you can reconnect with yourself.

[0:49:39.7] SJ: Yes. Yeah, great way of putting it.

[0:49:42.4] MB: Saud, where can listeners find more information about you, your work and everything that you're doing now?

[0:49:51.1] SJ: I’ve always operated a bit reclusively in the background, but recently I’ve started to step out of my shell a little bit more. I do have a website now, which is www.saudjuman.io and I’ve recently started sharing some of my thoughts, some of my ideas on LinkedIn and Twitter and some of those other social media channels.

[0:50:12.3] MB: Well, we'll be sure to include all of that in our show notes. Saud, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing all this wisdom; some really, really interesting stories about growing your software company and some fascinating insights about really what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur and an executive.

[0:50:32.9] SJ: Thanks so much, Matt. It's been my pleasure. I appreciate it.

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