SaaS Turnaround: From Near Failure to $10 Million ARR

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Derek O'Carroll is the CEO of Brightpearl, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) product for retailers and wholesalers.

In 2016, a SaaS company founded in a small city in the UK was struggling with a business model that was unsustainable. After almost 10 years in business, the company was struggling to retain customers and was quickly running out of money.

That same year, Derek O'Carroll was hired as the new CEO to help turnaround the company. He spent a lot of time talking to employees, partners, and customers to figure out the issues.

He started building a list of things that needed to get fixed. And the more conversations he had, the longer his list got. He quickly realized that he wouldn't be able to fix everything.

He needed to focus. So he eventually identified 3 key areas of improvement. And he decided to focus the majority of his time and his teams' time on solving those 3 things.

It looked like a good plan. But it wasn't smooth sailing. In fact, when they started executing on the plan, they actually made the customer churn problem even worse for a while as they lost a lot more customers very quickly.

But they stayed the course and kept executing the plan. And eventually, it paid off.

In the last 3 years, revenue has more than doubled and is growing at almost 50% year over year. And they've significantly reduced their customer churn.

The key lesson here is that if your business is struggling, or you feel like revenue has flatlined, or you have high churn, sometimes it can be overwhelming.

Where do you start? What do you solve? You might have a super long list of things. But identify the top 2 or 3 things that you believe will make a difference and do a really great job to execute relentlessly in those areas.

I hope you enjoy the interview.

This episode is part of our PLG & Growth series.

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