Kebabs to Vietnam Part 1/3: How I started a company and got my first big client

Welcome to the first article in my three-part series on building Valuent. If you’re interested in the full journey, don’t miss out on Part 2: Turning Ideas into Paid Jobs and Part 3: Moving from Wannabe Entrepreneurs to Serious Business.

I currently run Valuent, a Salesforce consultancy that helps implement Salesforce software with my partner David. We’ve been doing it for five years, have a team of 25 people and bootstrapped the business to a couple million Euros in revenues. Doing this is great and I never thought we’d end up here.

Wanna know how I got lucky?

This is the story of how me and my business partner stumbled into making our first 0.5 Million euros in 305 days, turned our back to the Venture Capital world, and built a company while retaining complete ownership… even though we were pretty much clueless until much later. How amazing is that?

Looking back, and after talking to other founders about their own company origin stories, I think this path of a lucky start and learning along the way happens more often than you think. The thing is, before we stumbled on the idea that started bringing in money right away, we expected whatever company we started to be venture-backed. To raise a bunch of money, introduce something more or less innovative and grind it out… just like everyone who thought something of her or himself seemed to be doing it in the Berlin startup ecosystem.

But that’s not how it happened.

The story of what did happen is going to be a multi-post series. Let me know what you think. What made you smile? What made you cringe? What surprised you? What did you feel? Anything you can relate to? Because then I can add that to future pieces. And if you enjoy the ride as much as I did or at least half as much, then you’ll have a pretty good time.

Ok, now let’s get into it. This is our story of how we went from hopeful entrepreneurs without an idea to bootstrapping our first multi-million euro company.

There were so many surprises. Looking back I find it hard to believe it all worked out.

Part I: Stumbling onto the right problem

Back in 2016, I was sitting outside Sucre et Sel on Rosenthaler Platz, watching people, listening to the squeezing of the tram and the buzz of the city, sucking in the clichés that make the epicenter of the Berlin startup scene. Then a blonde guy with big glasses, hair gelled back, the WHU signature white shirt and a pair of slacks arrived. That was my guy.

The guy I had rejected for a job at Helpling, the Rocket Internet-backed startup that I worked for after University, two weeks earlier.

David had come through a strong recommendation, but he was only 22 — too young, I felt, for the job of managing an operations team of 40 people. But, something told me not to end the relationship with the rejection phone call. I asked him to dinner, and he agreed.

Over drinks (still water for David and sparkling for me) he told me about his first day as a student at WHU, where Stephan Schubert shared his entrepreneurial story of building OnVista. David had realized at the time, “Hey, this guy went here and had entrepreneurial success. Then I should be able to do it as well.” I felt a deep connection. After all, that was exactly how I felt as a 16-year-old exploring the streets of Palo Alto and interning at my first startup in Redwood City: “If they can do it, why not me?”

One thing that became clear quickly: we both wanted to build our own companies. That was the goal and all we knew about it. David was 22 and I was 26. A friendship was born.

In 2017 I left Helpling and we intensified discussions to start a company. But, I ended up joining Mario Kohle to build Enpal, joining when the company was called Evergreen Energy and we were only five people. I loved Mario’s vision and energy to bring the solar revolution to the German market. (I am not surprised they are now valued at +2 billion Euro!) Meanwhile, David stayed with an aesthetic surgery startup, where he introduced Salesforce as the digital operating system for the entire company and continuously developed it.

The next year, our teams at Enpal struggled when we introduced Salesforce. Sales reps complained it was too complicated and leadership was missing metrics, had the wrong metrics, and a lack of transparency on how many leads we needed per sales rep to name a few of the issues. Luckily, I knew just who to call.

“Dude, we introduced Salesforce and it’s not getting us the KPIs we need, sales is complaining and Mario is on my ass. Can you help us?”

“Of course,” David said. “Let’s meet.” I had no idea our little Salesforce problem would soon become big business.

A few days later we sat in Enpal’s conference room on Boxhagener Straße 80 and David showed us what’s possible with Salesforce.

He showed us how they managed the lead to cash process, including the capacity planning of the surgery rooms and the doctors. How they managed to call > 50 prospects per day per seller and ensured that none of the leads got lost in the cracks. We were impressed by how the system supported their sales and operations at every step of the way, and could be customized to their needs.

So, how do we do that for Enpal?

Enpal needed to ensure that each seller could handle the leads in the same manner as we scaled. It shouldn’t make a difference who the seller was. The system had to support the seller and ensure that each lead was called within 10 minutes, better five minutes. We needed to ensure that none of the leads got lost. Losing a lead could mean losing north of 20,000€ in revenue. Ouch.

And of course we needed to be able to track the relevant KPIs, like conversion rates per stage, time per stage and other metrics. All the metrics Mario and Stephan, our head of sales used to scale the sales team.

So that night with sushi in hand, we enthused about how we can streamline the sales process and get the relevant KPIs measured to help Enpal grow systematically. And it worked! Over the following weeks we fixed the Salesforce setup and made the introduction a success.

And this really got us thinking.

David and I had found a problem that both his current employer and Enpal had struggled with. And they were not alone. We knew a bunch of other founders who were not getting the value out of Salesforce that we knew was possible.

The Salesforce Opportunity

So let’s pause here for a second–you might be wondering, what’s the problem with Salesforce that it’s so challenging for teams to implement on their own? Well, let me tell you!

The biggest issue with companies that don’t get the value out of Salesforce is that the system is not correctly adapted to their business process. This leads to low adoption, deteriorating data quality. Low data quality reduces the chances for workflow automation which is a huge lever to streamline operations and again hurts adoption. Employees complain, the system is creating more work and they don’t use it. A vicious cycle.

The second issue is that companies stop adopting Salesforce once it’s introduced. This hurts both the processes for which it is implemented and leaves potential to further streamline processes on the table. For example the seller who needs to make 43 clicks (no kidding we counted it) before sending out a quote to a client. A quote that had errors in around 23% of the cases, because of all the manual steps.

But why does that happen? It comes down to the disconnect between the people who know exactly what the business needs (entrepreneurs like Mario Kohle and head of sales like Stephan Rink) and the technical specialists who know Salesforce well but don’t understand the intricacies of building a company. Nor what it takes to scale a company. David and I were fortunate to have hands-on experience in scaling companies. David knew Salesforce well. I had a huge affinity for technology, I built digital products to streamline offline processes and got hands-on training in data modeling from two of the strongest BI people in the Berlin ecosystem. Transferable skills as it turned out.

So we set out to help other founders. All our expectations about what building a company was all about weren’t coming up–we had a way to help businesses, and we didn’t need to raise a bunch of money to do it.

All we needed was a client.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out the next articles in this series: Part 2: Turning Ideas into Paid Jobs and Part 3: Moving from Wannabe Entrepreneurs to Serious Business.