Aron Clymer of Data Clymer on starting his own services firm and getting it noticed in just 6 years
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Aron Clymer is a data expert and an entrepreneur. In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about how he built Data Clymer from a startup to an enterprise of 50 people and a visible market leader â all in less than six years.
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The Story Behind Data Clymer
Data Clymer is a services firm specialising in professional data services. They help implement data systems and warehouses for mid-size clients.
Aron considers himself fortunate, for he felt like building a business wasn't as hard as he thought it would be. And though he wished he had started it earlier, he knew that his experience really helped.
He has been in corporate America for the past 20 years. He learned a lot about everything â from management and creating a team to internally promoting his team and himself and building methodologies.
Heâs been in the data space for a while and spent about a decade just thinking through creating a services firm. When he was transitioning between jobs, he had the opportunity and realised that it could finally be the right time to do it.
So he talked to a vendor he had previously worked with in his corporate job. He told that person that he wanted to be a consultant. He wanted to learn much faster than he had. He wanted to see 50 implementations of a data system in the next couple of years â not just two in the last 10 years, as he had.
He wanted to work with that vendor because he knew they had some clients needing help in that area. Within three weeks, he had his first client.
The Challenges of Scaling Data Clymer
As Aron has bootstrapped the whole thing, the biggest challenge in scaling his business is this balance of capacity to meet demand.
He didnât want to get over his skis too much and land a client that was too large because he didnât have the team to support it. Yet, he didn't want to have small clients that only needed a quarter or half of a personâs time. It was about that balance of finding the right clients.
On top of that, it was challenging because he wasn't in full control over which clients he was targeting. All of his leads were coming through his partners. He had to take whatever he was given and make it work.
The challenge for him was to ensure he had enough people at the right time for the project.
Maintaining Partnerships
For Aron, itâs important to keep his brand at the top of the minds of his partners, especially Salesforce. Theyâre the type of company that would really sell their product to a customer and understand if their customer needs help. And when that happens, they will remember to call Aron or Data Clymer. Itâs why he needs to do things right so he can get in front of Salesforce.
He would call partners and see if he could speak at their quarterly business review or annual meeting â anything he could do to tell his companyâs and joint customer stories.
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In most cases, Data Clymer is able to keep their own brand and simply be a partner. It was possible because many of the partners they had were software vendors, Software as a Service (or SaaS) applications, and business intelligence or data warehouse companies â and their business plan was not to get into the business of professional services.
They didnât want a large professional services team. And Data Clymer wasnât competing with them. They were happy just to introduce Aron and his business as a separate company and let him take it from there.
One of his partners did have a subcontracting program where Data Clymer would come under the umbrella of their brand. Though he always thought that it would be a great lead generation channel because there were a lot of small projects, it ended up not panning out that way. The rates were lower, and they didnât get brand awareness on their own.
Delegation is Key, And so is Leveraging Opportunities
In retrospect, Aron is happy with the evolution that his business has taken. It didnât move too fast or too slow. It just continually grew.
He didn't try to control everything for too long, and that was the trick for him. At some point, he realised that delegation was the key. He had to delegate everything because he couldnât manage anymore. He needed to be a strategic thinker.
At first, he was the delivery person. Then, he also became the one who mostly managed sales and marketing. He went through a lot of circuitous paths, and just this year, he finally hired a full-time marketing and sales team so he could fully transition into being the face of his company.
Image from Pexels
One of the lessons he learned as he grew his company was to take advantage of opportunities. See the opportunities as much as you can at the moment.
When he thought he needed to hire a sales representative to help him generate their own leads and let them have more control over their pipeline, the opportunity presented itself.
A sales representative that worked for one of his partners had just left and had been unemployed for a few months. He was trying to figure out his next move. They connected, and Aron realised that he was a perfect fit. He's already in the industry. He essentially knows their business. He's young in his career, and so Aron could afford to pay him a not-as-huge salary. It all worked out, and he did jump on board.
With that personâs experience in sales, they were able to build up a decent sales pipeline within a year. He also had to wear all the hats: He did marketing. He helped with their website. He did all sorts of other things heâd never done before and learned more along the way.
Then, when they realised they wanted to do more marketing, Aron figured heâd hire a firm to do it because he didn't want to hire a whole team on his behalf. However, it wasnât worth the effort because though they did hold meetings, there werenât many conversions that took place. After a year and a half doing that, he learned that having in-house people do what they needed to do is what always seemed to pay off.
As to why hiring a firm didnât work out for his business, Aron thinks that itâs simply hard for an outside party to understand your business enough and qualify leads the way you need them to. To clarify, he knows it isnât really the firmâs fault because they were doing a good job at what they were trying to do. Aron only had their services for six months, but if heâd given them a year.
At the same time, the timing was off for that relationship because he also found another person. That was when he hired his head of marketing, which was also an opportunistic kind of hire because the opportunity presented itself. That person was available, and they had a good fit, so he made the decision to hire that person and not use the external firm anymore.
When opportunities arise, you have to make decisions quickly and move on.
Working Out the Math
Every business is different regarding when they should hire a full-time headcount than having an often-lower cost agency. It depends on your margin and how youâre funded.
In Data Clymerâs case, the move to hire full-time personnel happened when they were at the $2 to $3 million-revenue mark. That was when it started to make sense to support a marketing and a small sales team.
You have to work out the math and see what you can do. Because, as entrepreneurs, you always worry about cash flows â you want to ensure you have a healthy one. And you will do everything you can to support that. For instance, you would get lines of credit from banks to ensure you have a cushion and fallback.
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When a company hires someone as a marketing manager, they will find that overhead costs donât translate into direct revenues. You also have to consider their expenses for attending trade shows or building a website.
In the services space, the net margins should be at least 15 to 30%. If you can keep your marketing cost down to 3 to 5% and sales 10 or 15% in terms of cost, it works out. You can still maintain those net margins that are still profitable.
Aron wanted to do sales and marketing in parallel because they're so intertwined. You need marketing to support sales with many content and customer stories and vice versa. You need a good, tight relationship there. Both of them were going to feed off each other.
This is why they at Data Clymer invested in both sales and marketing at about the same time. They built up a larger sales team, knowing there was a good chance that they would be able to pay for themselves in a shorter amount of time (Marketing takes longer).
By the time they did it, they were at around $3 million, as stated. They have since doubled in size. The margins are still there, and theyâre able to support the team.
Whatâs Different Then vs Now
Itâs been immensely helpful to have a full-time marketing team because Data Clymerâs brand awareness has really shot through the roof. For instance, the company only had about 300 LinkedIn followers before they hired them. Fast forward to nine months later, theyâre over a thousand followers, and theyâre on the way to 1,200 followers by the end of the year.
When it comes to your brand awareness on LinkedIn, you must be able to churn out content per week and get really active on the platform. Doing webinars and eBooks â things that Aaron didnât have time to do himself before â has also been a huge help for them.
Before, he wasnât as active on LinkedIn as most entrepreneurs are, and this was one of his blind spots. He was too focused on the business.
Looking back, compared to what he used to do before, heâs now leveraging partners more. He would push any kind of webinar and join with a partner or a customer, speak at conferences, and put out blogs (He had his team write one blog a month). It was about trying to distribute the marketing across the team he had, which was mostly engineers.
Image from Data Clymer
What made Aron decide to invest in sales and marketing was the deal flow through partners. He couldnât guarantee what the sales would look like in a year or two. The space heâs in is very crowded: There are many systems integrators and services companies like theirs; new ones pop up all the time.
How the deal flow from partners would be divvied up among all these services companies is very out of his control. And he wanted to have more control over their destiny. He invested in sales and marketing to build out their own sales pipeline and lead funnel. That way, they could predict more accurately what sales would look like down the road.
Pieces of Entrepreneurial Advice
One takeaway that heâd advise entrepreneurs building their brand out and crossing the chasm is to fail fast. Fail fast in everything you do, especially in marketing. Try a lot of different things. Fail and persevere because you will eventually figure it out.
Also, expand your network. Talk to other entrepreneurs. Though he didnât do it early on, Aron is now building a network of his peers because itâs through it that you can learn so much.
To find out more about them, visit www.dataclymer.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by creativeart on Freepik
