How to Grow and Scale Your Business with Kyle Racki

March 20, 2019

Are you looking for new and relevant ways to grow your business?

Sometimes the best way to learn is to talk to those who’ve done it before. Kyle Rack now has a SaaS business, was the CEO of an agency, and published a brand new book called Free Trials and Tribulations, which is about how to grow and scale your business while getting punched in the mouth. Now let’s talk business.

About the Show:

The Casual Fridays Podcast is a show for marketers and businesses looking to get on the social media fast track. Each podcast is an interview format, where I get up close and personal with top brands and leading experts to talk about digital marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and more. This Casual Fridays Podcast is sponsored by Tack – a tool that helps brands and businesses acquire and manage digital rights to user-generated content (UGC).

About Kyle Racki:

  • Kyle Racki is the CEO of Proposify, a product that helps thousands of companies with their sales workflow. He recently wrote and published a book, Free Trials and Tribulations: How to Build a Business While Getting Punched in the Mouth.

Key Quotes from Kyle Racki on How to Grow Your Business:

  • “It was a hairy time and a really stressful experience, so that’s when we started thinking about products we could create and becoming more of a SaaS company.”
  • “We didn’t have a niche and we didn’t have a specialty, so we were just a general web design business. As time went on, it became difficult (and I imagine extremely difficult these days) to compete with the Wixes and the Squarespaces of the world if you’re selling to small businesses. If you sell very specialized service to larger businesses that can afford to pay you more, that’s a whole other story. We just didn’t have that niche figured out.”
  • “I was way too in the weeds. I wasn’t working on the business as much as I was working in it, and so I didn’t have the experience or the skill set to think about my business as an entire machine. And it’s not my job to be a cog in the machine. My job is to finetune that machine and get the right people and the right processes in order to scale it.”
  • “It started with recognizing there was a problem.”
  • “We hired a developer just to work on only that product, which I think is very, very important if you run an agency and want to spin out a product.”
  • “It was a marathon, not a sprint.”
  • “I’ve had to continue to level up my skills, get some  coaching, and really figure out how you run a big company.”
  • “You can’t operate the same way you did when you were ten people.”

Key Takeaways on How to Grow Your Business:

  • 06:39 Kyle’s agency experience, including the challenges and stressors he faced as the CEO of a web design agency
  • 07:55 The beginning of Proposify
  • 08:57 Kyle’s experience selling his agency
  • 12:48 Strategic acquisitions as a creative way to grow and sell your business
  • 16:31 The two biggest takeaways from Kyle’s early agency days: finding a niche and focusing on finetuning the business
  • 18:00 How and why to focus on a niche for your business
  • 19:34 Launch of Proposify and starting a SaaS product
  • 22:31 Finding a business partner  with complementary skills
  • 29:43 Proposify’s growth and scaling

Items Mentioned in the Show:

Contact Kyle Racki:

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