Having years of experience in-house or in a corporate world where you can observe and learn a lot of things in business, it can gear you and any entrepreneur to make yourself noticed.
And in this episode, Aron Clymer, Founder & CEO of Data Clymer, shares how used his learnings and observations from his corporate life made it easy for him to build his services firm, and how he managed to get himself and his business noticed in just 6 years from a startup to now a firm with 50 people and becoming a market leader.
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Post-production, transcript and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants
The UnNoticed Entrepreneur is hosted & produced by Jim James.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, your host, Jim James. And today we're going to Minneapolis in Minnesota, to meet with Aron Clymer, who's a data expert and entrepreneur. Aron, welcome to the show.
Aaron Clymer:Thank you, Jim. And thanks for having me.
Jim James:Now, a lot of people might think, "Oh, data. This is, you know, going to be numbers." But it's not. We're going to talk about how you've manage to build "Data Clymer" from a startup to 50 people in less than 6 years. So you've managed to cross the chasm from a startup to becoming a visible market leader. Tell us, Aron, a little bit about Data Clymer and then tell us, you know, who you serve as a client base, and then we'll talk about how you've managed to build this business.
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, just quickly, we're a services firm, so a hundred percent professional services in the data space. We help implement data systems, data warehouses for usually mid-size clients. So yeah, that's what we do — specialize in data professional services.
Jim James:Right. And I know you had a background before, you know, in house or working a corporate role, and then you started Data Clymer. Just tell us then, you know, you've built this business from zero. How have you started the business, and what have been some of the obstacles that you faced in the beginning with getting the word out about your new business.
Aaron Clymer:Yeah. You know, I think may have been a little more fortunate actually. It felt like it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. I always think in retrospect. I wish I'd done it even earlier, but at the same time, my experience really helped. So I was in corporate America for 15, 20 years, and you know, really learned a lot about everything from management to building a team to internally promoting my team and myself, building methodologies, all of that. And I'd been in data quite heavily for a while and had just been thinking about creating a services firm for a long time, probably a decade of just kind of thinking through it, percolating it, you know. And I finally just found myself with the opportunity, was my sort of in transition between jobs, and I thought, you know, "Maybe the time is finally right." And I went and talked to a vendor that I already had worked with as part of my corporate job, and I said, "You know, I want to be a consultant. I want to learn much faster than I have. I want to see 50 implementations of a data system in the next couple years, not just two in the last 10 years, as I had. And I want to work with you, so you know, I'm sure you have some clients that need some help. You know, here I am. And you know, within three weeks, I actually had my first client.
Jim James:Okay, so Aron, that's fabulous and nice and low risk transition, but plainly you are really good at what you did, or else you wouldn't have made it quite so easy. But as you grow from a sort of personal brand, you know, connections into hiring people, and getting leads coming in that are greater than you can do on your own. What have been some of the challenges that you've faced in overcoming those problems as you scale the business?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, you know, probably the biggest challenge in my world, especially since I've bootstrapped the whole thing, was always this balance of capacity to meeting demand, you know? And so, it was always did dance, you know. I didn't want to get in over my skis too much and land the client that was too large because I didn't have the team to support it. And yet, you know, I didn't want to have just very small clients that only needed, you know, a quarter of a person or a half of a person's time. So it was just this balance of trying to find the right clients. And on top of that, it was challenging because I wasn't really in full control over even sort of which clients I was targeting. I would really, all of my leads were coming through my partners, and they would simply, you know, if they would have me in mind, once a client said, "I need some help." "I need some services." They would call me. So, you know, I kind of had to just take whatever I was given and make it work. So I think the biggest challenge was making sure I had enough people at the right time for the project.
Jim James:Now, interesting. You talked really about the source of business being your partners, which is, I think often overlooked by people when they start a business. Were there any things that you did? Any activities that you did specifically with the partners that you think, you know, made a material difference to the wellbeing of the relationship and the deal flow that came in?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely was thinking about how to keep my brand top of mind with my partners, specifically my partner's SalesForce. You know, I was the sales rep who would be the ones who really... they would sell their product to a customer, and then they would be the ones who understood the customer needs more help. And then, you know, they would be the ones to remember to call, you know, Aron Clymer or Data Clymer. And so I would do things like if I could get any way I could get in front of the SalesForce, I would do it right. So I would call my partners and see if I could speak at their quarterly business review or their annual meeting, you know, anything I could do to just tell some customer stories, some joint customer stories, really. And, you know, keep my brand top of mind within the or their organization.
Jim James:I think, you know, that is really good effect. You've got a reseller team, haven't you, working for you? And from a marketing point of view, did you go in with them under their brand or were you already something to build the Data Clymer brand? And how did the client feel about that?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, you know, in almost all cases, we were able to keep our own brand and simply be a partner. And that was because a lot of the partners that we had are there: software vendors, you know, SAAS applications, usually business intelligence or data warehouse companies. And their business plan was not to get into the business of professional services. They actually did not want a large professional services team. I wasn't really competing with them. So they were happy to just introduce me as a separate company. Let me take it from there. So that worked out really well. One of my partners did have a subcontracting program where we would come under the umbrella of their brand. We did that for a while. I always thought that'd be a great lead generation kind of channel because there was a lot of these small projects. They were really just kind of onboarding, quick onboarding projects for their clients. But that actually ended up not panning out the way I thought it would be. You know, the rates were lower, we didn't get brand awareness on our own. So actually, it's kind of a mixed bag on whether that, you know, worked out well for us or not.
Jim James:Yeah, And joined experience with you on that where I partner with a big organisation going under their umbrella, and as you say, we've become really like an in-house department for them, right? And the margins were poorer. You've scaled the business note to 50, which from my own experience means organisationally there'll be some changes, but also from a deal flow perspective, that's now a lot of people to keep busy, isn't it?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, sort of, in retrospect, again, it looks like I'm happy with the evolution that we took. You know, kind of not moving too fast, not moving too slow, is the way I would describe it. You know, I think we just continually grew. But I didn't try to keep control of everything for too long, and I think that was the trick. The trick was, at some point, realizing, "Okay, delegation is the key. I have to delegate everything. I can't manage anymore. I need to be more of a strategic thinker. I need to be sort of the face of the company. I need to start totally transitioning my job." You know, at first I was the delivery person, then I was mostly sales and marketing. And through a lot of actually circuitous paths. I finally did hire a full-time marketing and sales team, but that was just this year. And so it's really just been this year when I've finally transitioned into, like, fully delegating everything away from myself and being more the face of the company. So I've gone through almost all the stages now.
Jim James:Okay, look, and as you know, this shows about how entrepreneurs can scale and get noticed as they scale. So you mentioned that some sort of circles that you went in, Aron. And although you make it sound, you know, flawlessly easy, I'm sure there were some lessons that you've learned along the way. Do you wanna share maybe one or two of the obstacles that you faced as you grew? And the solutions that you found?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of the way I grew was really opportunistic, so maybe that's one of the lessons is take advantage of opportunities or see the opportunities as much as you can in the moment. So, for instance, you know, as I had been thinking about, "Well, at some point I've really probably going to hire a sales rep or, you know, somebody who can help me generate our own leads and have a little more control over our own pipeline." You know, the opportunity kind of presented itself. One of the sales reps that one of my partners had actually just left and was unemployed for a few months, and was trying to figure out his next move. And we connected, and I realized, "Oh, this is a perfect fit. He's already in the business, in the industry. He knows our business essentially. He's, young in his career. So I could afford, you know, to pay him not his huge salary." And it all worked out. And so, he did jump on board. And actually, he was learning as we went too, kind of all learning together, but he had been in sales and so we were able to build up a decent sales pipeline and that did work for about a year. It was working, but it wasn't a whole team, but it was one person that helped a lot. But he had to wear all the hats. He did marketing too. He helped our website; he did our website. He did all sorts of other stuff he'd never done before. So he was learning as well. And at the same time, then we wanted to do more, more like LinkedIn, marketing essentially. I figured I'll hire a firm to do that. I don't want to hire a whole team to do that for myself. Let's try a firm. it always sounds great. You're going to get five meetings a week, you know, guaranteed. Blah, blah, blah. We hired a firm, and again, that was, that actually probably wasn't worth the effort. We did get meetings, but not very much conversion on those meetings. And so, I think I learned over about a course of a year and a half that, you know, as much as I can, having in-house people to do what we needed to do. Always seemed to pay off.
Jim James:Aron, you mentioned that, you know, you got this agency, they brought you leads, they didn't convert. And why do you think that was? Was it a procurement issue? You didn't give them the right brief or were they just working on a basis of bringing you meetings rather than qualified meetings? What was the learning from that?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, I think it was that... it's just really hard for an outside firm to really understand your business enough and be able to qualify exactly, you know, leads in the way that you need them to. And it's not their fault, really. I mean, they were doing a good job at what they were trying to do. I think we tried the service out for about six months. If we'd given it a year, it might have, you know, it might have generated more and, you know, perhaps that could have worked out. But at the same time, the timing was off there because I found another person. Actually that was about the time that I hired my head of marketing, which also was again, an opportunistic kind of hire. The opportunity, you know, sort of presented itself. This person was available. They had a good fit. So I made a decision to just go ahead and hire. And not use the external firm anymore. So it just kind of, again, like opportunities come up and you make decisions quickly and you move on.
Jim James:So, from a financial point of view, Aron, What stage would you say it makes sense then to invest in the full time headcount of a marketing manager versus the variable, often lower cost agency? Did you work on that? I mean, I you are saying that you are opportunistic, but I think you'll be, you know, underneath this very modest moment. You've plainly got a plan. You work in data, so you'll have figured this out, I'm sure.
Aaron Clymer:Well, yeah, I think that every business is different. You know, it depends on your margin, depends on your fund, you know, how you're funded and all of that. But for us, bootstrapped in services, it seemed to be about, you know, when we were 3 million, maybe two, 3 million in revenue. That's when it started to make sense to support a marketing and a small sales team. Yeah, so it's just a matter of kind of working out the math and seeing what you can do. And of course, you know, you worry about cash flows, always a problem, right? You always want to make sure you have healthy cash flow. And so we would do everything we could to support that. You know, get lines of credit from banks, you know, make sure we have a cushion, make sure we have some fallbacks, because yeah, it's in its business. You always have to worry about cash flow. So we were able to do it. There were times when we thought we would need those. We actually ended up not needing a lot of that. But we got very close sometimes.
Jim James:So often, what happens is a company will hire someone as a marketing manager and then find that the overhead doesn't, you know, translate into direct revenue increase, you know, especially in a service business where you maybe have three to five times you know, a multiple in terms of cost to revenue. What sort of budget can you give the marketing manager? Because it's not just the salary, is it? They need the money to attend trade shows, or build out websites, or get involved in chat bots. What can you make? Don't have to give us the actual numbers, but percentage wise, can you give us some ideas?
Aaron Clymer:Sure. So, you know, generally, in services, your net margins, you know, there's a pretty wide range, but you want to be at least, let's say, 15% to 30%, the way I say it. If you can keep your cost of marketing down to 3 to 5% and sales maybe 10 or 15% in terms of cost of those of businesses, then it works out. You can still maintain those net margins that are still profitable.
Jim James:Okay. Yeah, because that's often a problem, isn't it? When in a service business, people hire a marketing manager and then they worry about, you know, where's the revenue coming from? So with the marketing manager, what's their role now? Because it sounds as though you've moved role as well. And going from, if you like, direct selling to brand building, Aron. Can you just tell us the strategy behind that for Data Clymer?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah, and I wanted to do sales and marketing in parallel because they're so intertwined, right? You need marketing to be able to support sales with a lot of content, a lot of customer stories, and so forth, and vice versa. You know, you need a good, tight relationship there. And I knew that both of them were going to feed off each other. So we actually invested in both sales and marketing about the same time. And we built up a larger sales team again, knowing that there's a good chance that they're going to be able to, you know, in effect, pay for themselves in a shorter amount of time. Marketing definitely takes longer. We just, again, we had just enough runway and a big enough company by the time we did this again, three to four million. And then since we've done that, we've doubled in size actually. So it's definitely, you know, the margins are still there and we're still able to support the team. And I'm sorry, wait, what was the question again?
Jim James:That's terrific. So when you say doubled in size. Well I was asking the question about the difference in role that you play now, because as the entrepreneur, you know, when there was one of you, you're doing a bit of everything, standing out in front of your sales partners and so on. But now as the CEO of a 50-60 person enterprise, have a different role to play. So I just wondering from a, you know, getting noticed perspective, Aron, and what you are doing differently and what role you're playing now?
Aaron Clymer:Well, first of all, it's been immensely helpful to have a full-time marketing team because our brand awareness has really shot through the roof. When we started the journey, before I had hired these teams, we only had about 300 LinkedIn followers, for instance, on the company site, right? Fast forward to nine months later, were over a thousand followers, and we're on the way to 1200 followers by the end of the year. So that's three or four, you know, X, just a brand awareness on LinkedIn, for instance. So, to be able to churn out just get really active on LinkedIn in general. Have a lot of content being posted per week. Doing webinars, doing eBooks, doing all this stuff that just didn't have the time to do myself has been huge. So I was doing everything I could before that. Although I wasn't as active on LinkedIn as I think most entrepreneurs, that was probably one of the blind spots I had. I was just too focused on the business, and I kind of wish I'd done more of that earlier on. But, that all has been really helpful. So I'm thinking about what I, you know, what I used to do before that. I tried to get, again, I was leveraging partners more. So again, I would try to push any kind of webinar that I could join with a partner, with a customer, speak at conferences, absolutely put out blogs. I mean, I was writing a lot of blogs. I had my whole team write blog, like one blog a month. So it was trying to distribute the marketing across the team we had, which was mostly engineers.
Jim James:So Aron, you were motional along quite nicely with, you know, all these staff and organic inquiries, but what made you decide to make the investment in marketing?
Aaron Clymer:Yeah. You know, it was really the deal flow through partners. T'was just unpredictable. And It felt like I couldn't guarantee, you know, what the sales pop in look like a year or two down the road. And you know, our space is very crowded. There's a lot of systems integrators, and services companies like ours. New ones pop up all the time. So how the full sort of deal flow from partners would be divvied up between all of these services companies is very out of my control, and I wanted to have more control over our destiny. So that's why we invested in sales and marketing, to build out our own sales pipeline, lead funnel that we could have, we could predict much, sort of, more accurately, what sales would look like down the road, and therefore hiring plan would be much more stable.
Jim James:Yeah, that's great, so you go from being reacted to being proactive and being in troll. That's a wonderful answer. Yeah, which must have been made interesting video. Now this, if there's one lesson, one key takeaway that my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs and I could take away from you on, you know, building the brand out and crossing the chasm, Aron, what would that be, do you think?
Aaron Clymer:You know, I think I would say fail fast. Fail fast in everything you do, especially in marketing as well. You know, try a lot of different things. It's perseverance, right? Fail fast and persevering because you will figure it out. And expanding your network, talking to other entrepreneurs, you know, that's probably another thing that I didn't do early on. I'm doing it now. I'm so grateful. I'm building more of a network of my peers because you just learned so much. I mean, this podcast is an excellent example on that.
Jim James:Great, Aron, thank you. And thanks for coming on and sharing your journey, in such a transparent way as well. Because as fellow entrepreneurs, it really helps to hear from other entrepreneurs who aren't selling something but are really just sharing some value. So, Aron Clymer, if people wanted to find out more about you, where can they do that?
Aaron Clymer:Oh, that's our website. It's Data Clymer. I was able to use my name in the domain was available. It kind of worked. There are a lot of analogies we use about climbing to the top of your data, getting on top of your data. So that's spelled Clymer, C L Y M E R. So dataclymer.com, and you can learn all about us there.
Jim James:Aron, thank you so much for sharing. So, for my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs, you've been with Aron Clymer, Founder and CEO of Data Clymer, who just shared with us and with me, Jim James. Aron is in Minneapolis. I'm over here in wonderful Wilshire in the west of England. And if you've enjoyed this show, do please share it with the fellow entrepreneur. If you really, really enjoyed it, then do please review it on your favorite listener in platform, either Spotify or Apple Podcast. And until we meet again, I wish you all the best, and just remember, keep on communicating.
Aaron Clymer:Thank you.