Ryan Harris

Last week I wrote about how I'd build a multifamily tech stack. The feedback was phenomenal. Here are my top 3 takeaways: 1) There's more to it than cost, integration, and bandwidth. Investors can play a part in this. Some may say "We'll only invest in if you use X property management software". If you're a 3rd party firm, the client pressure is real. Some firms give more leeway to their client to build the stack they like. Your client may not agree with what you choose. 2) A multifamily business is a constant juggling of priorities. You may have some "less than ideal" tools, but the undertaking to offboard then research + onboard a new product isn't worth the headache. All that time and effort is opportunity cost which could be spent on higher ROI activities. The question isn't so simple as "What's the best decision for our tech stack?". It's more so "What's the best decision for our tech stack given our firms top priorities, bandwidth, and time this will take?" Now you know why so many stick with their current solution in lieu of a better alternative. 3) Custom solutions need to be balanced with how much maintenance they require. In my post I wrote that "I'm a crazy person which wants to build everything from scratch". If I was managing 20k+ units, maybe this wouldn't be feasible. How many errors and support tickets would we incur for my frankenstein hubspot CRM concoction? Depending on how I set it up, maybe more maybe less, BUT the benefits of building yourself need to be heavily weighed with the amount of software maintenance and training you will incur down the line. Ask yourself - if our team 10xed would this solution be sustainable? Do you agree with my takeaways? What would you change?

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A few years ago, I pitched an idea to a VC at Denver Startup Week. He gave me 10 seconds, asked one question about revenue, and said, “Come back and talk to me when you’re making $25k a month.” Fast forward to today—our monthly sales far exceed that benchmark. The best part? We’ve done it all without outside funding. This is power. 💪 There’s strength in the resilience of a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it with grit, passion, and determination. I’ve learned that success isn’t about how many investors say “yes”—it’s about how many times we rise up, define our own path, and turn the “nos” into fuel for our dreams. To every woman building her vision: keep pushing, keep grinding, and remember—you are powerful beyond measure. Without.Their.Permission #WomenInBusiness #Entrepreneurship #Resilience #RiseUp

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When we launched Followup, the construction industry wasn’t exactly tech-savvy. They’d heard of big names like Salesforce, but it seemed like something only huge companies needed. Followup was different. It spoke their language. Slowly, construction companies started seeing the value in a CRM built just for them. Today, it’s still early days. Technology adoption is growing, and construction companies are realizing it’s not just about staying competitive—it’s about future-proofing their business.

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Picture this scenario: You're the CRO of a Series A startup. You hired and onboarded a team of BDR's and AE's. New logos are coming through the door often and your ARR is on the rise. Your BDR's are going above and beyond setting meetings, understanding the product as well as how to give an initial demo. Your AE's are discovering product market fit in new verticals and are bringing whales into their pipeline, which go on to closed-won. You now have successfully raised a Series B round. All of this growth and momentum is an exciting new challenge and you now need to invest most of your time and efforts in orchestrating the funnel of leads coming in from marketing, inbound, and outbound, the sales cycle, the offerings, and the post-sales process. You decide it's time to hire a VP of Sales. Do you let the VP of sales bring in their own AE's or do you push to promote your BDR's to the AE position and existing AE's to strategic or team lead while only bringing aboard a new BDR team? It is a matter of preference and experience. In my experience and the conversations I've had with sales professionals, the former happens more than the latter. Have you also seen the same scenario play out? What has been the result? What would you do?

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SAAS NORTH Conference is less than one week away. Do you have your ticket yet? I’m excited to be speaking on the panel, “Totally Fubar! 3 Epic Founder Fails,” moderated by Kenneth Pham. I’ll be joined by Ewan Reid and Kelsey Hahn to discuss the challenges we’ve faced as founders. Entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster, and we’re sharing valuable lessons learned along the way. If you're a SaaS founder scaling quickly in Canada, I hope to see you and your team in Ottawa from November 13–14. Get your SaaS pass now—and use code MIKEPSN24 for 25% off your ticket: https://lnkd.in/gtm7eY8E #entrepreneurship #founders #leadership #scaling #startupstory

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Scaling a SaaS company isn’t just about rapid growth; it’s about building a team that can thrive WITHOUT you. In my early years as a leader, I made the classic mistake of trying to stay too involved in every aspect of the business. I wanted to be in the center of everything so that I knew what was going on at the very granular level and could answer any question my boss would ask. I wanted the "A." And, honestly, I was a bit of a control freak. But I also was not sleeping, and my wife was not happy with how much time I spent at work and thinking about work versus being present with our young family. It wasn’t until I realized this wasn’t sustainable that things began to change for me personally and the people in the organization I was leading. Recently, Glenn Gow, CEO Success Coach, highlighted a critical insight: the true role of a CEO is to build a great leadership team. One that can pivot, adapt, and grow the company independently. This shift from being the hands-on creator to an empowering leader is crucial and one that many early-stage founders are unable to make. In fact, during our conversation, Glenn shared that 60% of early-stage founder/CEOs get replaced within five years, primarily due to the inability to scale the company fast enough. The core issue often lies in their failure to evolve and step back. . . to let others take the reins. This hit home for me. I’ve seen firsthand how vital it is to hire leaders not just for their expertise but for their ability to build and scale teams. The ability to recognize inflection points in your business and adapt your leadership style is what ultimately drives sustainable growth. So, here’s my challenge to fellow SaaS founders: Are you ready to shift your focus from doing the work to empowering your team to do it better than you ever could? Would love to hear your thoughts on building and scaling leadership teams. What’s worked for you, and what hasn’t? #SaaS #Leadership #ScalingUp #TeamBuilding #FounderJourney #SaaSBuilder

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I’ve come to deeply appreciate the strengths of the PE playbook over the last few months. The emphasis on optimizing before investing. Working towards “efficient growth” vs “growth at all costs.” A good example is the approach we’ve taken at Workzone since getting acquired December of last year. For every organizational function, we’ve tried to uncover hidden strengths and optimize “foundational processes”, before making a single hire or investing additional dollars. This is helping establish a strong foundation across GTM, R&D and back office before we pour gasoline to ramp up growth. For example, on Sales & Marketing, we’ve tried to optimize every aspect of the funnel from lead sourcing to closing by diving deep into the people, processes, and metrics components. On Product, we’ve gone deep into customer insights and interviews to build a roadmap that genuinely solves our ICP’s biggest problems vs building something based on assumptions. On Engineering, we’ve doubled on fundamentals like 100% platform uptime, data security, balance between development time and bug fixing, deploying new features vs enhancements. None of the above required heavy investments or additional hires. It’s largely strengths & gaps identification, solving for root causes and keeping things simple. Now when we take a step back, we feel more confident about investing in the business having done the groundwork on: - Getting the house in order - Identifying areas that need definite investment to drive results - Establishing operating rhythm (thanks EOS) Call it PE playbook or simply emphasis on efficient growth - the rewards of this approach have a multiplier effect across the organization. End of the day, the mental and financial peace that comes with running a profitable organization that is strong on fundamentals is unmatched. This comes from someone who has spent a lot of time in the past with “grow at all costs” playbooks!

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The most common thing I'm hearing from companies right now is low 'early stage' deal conversion. TOFU stagnation. If you are speaking to companies within your ICP and struggling to translate demand into pipeline, there's one thing I'm seeing more than anything else that is the root cause of why. You're finding pain.... but you're not building on it. Certainly not quantifying it. It's not enough to just find it. It'll end up with no action.

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Why are so many software vendors afraid to talk about pricing upfront? Construction companies don’t have time for games. In SaaS sales—especially for accounting software—hiding the cost until after a demo isn’t just old-school, it’s shady. Today, a prospect thanked me for being upfront with the full cost on our first call. They said, “Hey, thank you so much for telling me how much we’ll be spending. Every other software vendor I’ve talked to has refused to give me an idea until after the demo.” Stop wasting time. If you’re confident in your solution, be confident in your pricing. Or do you like to wait until the end to realize it’s not in your budget? #ConstructionTech #SaaSSales #ConstructionAccounting #Contractors #B2BSales #SalesTransparency

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SaaS leaders tell me the same thing: "We need more leads, but good ones." That's where WMAmerica comes in. We don't do fluff. We do results. When I joined, my mission was simple: help SaaS companies grow fast. Not just any leads, but the right ones. Take one client: They had product-market fit but zero lead flow. In 3 months, we: 1. Boosted qualified leads by 60% 2. Closed 5 new major clients 3. Got them scaling like never before Another founder? Sick of bad leads. We stepped up and: 1. Booked 30+ meetings with perfect prospects in a quarter 2. Grew their revenue by 40% Lead gen is tough, but with the right partner, it's a game-changer. Ready to see results? Let's talk.

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Weekend sales thoughts I've learned in the last 18 months of building Mobly. -We consistently pitched Mobly's pricing as roughly offsetting the cost of renting badge scanners, with the benefit of one singular system that integrates with the customer's CRM. That's cool and all, and it worked sometimes. Buuuuuut.... -Started running into trouble when the offset wasn't exact or as high as we averaged with other customers. CFOs and CMOs basically stop and say "why would I spend MORE for the same thing?" -Now we've started shifting to thinking about the influencers and decision makers not in the room. How do we make this a slam dunk for them, too? Cause a lateral spend for a bit of efficiency isn't cutting it. So what do we do? -We focus on the end result of solving a much much bigger, underlying issue. When you have crappy, unintegrated processes that are slow, you have a far slower Speed to Lead, which leads to a lower conversion rate than you should be having. Mobly customers have seen a 17% average INCREASE of Lead > Opp conversion. Let's do that math.... Assuming 30 shows a year, collecting 100 leads on Average at each, a $20k average deal size, 20% lead >opp conversion and 30% opp > closed won conversion. Current State: 3,000 Leads > 600 Opps > 180 won deals & $3.6m in won revenue for the year from events. Future state: 3,000 Leads > 702 Opps > 211 won deals & $4.22m in won revenue. Now we're looking at a $620k increase in revenue! So which is more powerful? Saving someone a few grand in scanners or making them $620k? Which one will the CFO care about?

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Founders & sales reps on LinkedIn; I’ll give you free consulting. No such thing as free lunch? You’re not wrong. But before we get into that: I’ve sold $20,000,000 of software, hired 25+ top performing sales people, and led the peloton at the fastest growing tech companies. So what’s the catch? You have to try my product! Tell me the good, bad, and ugly. So I can improve it for people like you. What is it? AgentGrow. Your personal LinkedIn prospecting assistant. It solves the “I need more pipeline” problem. Hit me in the DMs if you want free consulting. It’s an open invitation.

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We've been enhancing our metrics on lease renewal rates and denials/cancels, and just added metrics for min/max rent too. I think this "Cancel %" metric (the ratio of lease applications to cancellations) is going to be incredibly interesting. We're working on a study using this data that shows application denial/cancellation rates by MSA, and some MSA's are approaching 70%... meaning that for every 10 applications, there are 7 rejections/cancellations before a lease is signed. That's craziness! Fraudulent applications are a major issue in some markets, and in others, application fees are now limited by recent legislation... making it easy for prospective residents to apply for several units at a time and choose the best option. I think understanding application/cancelation rates by market is going to be a lot more important for investors going forward. Stay tuned for the MSA-level analysis on app/cancel rates, but in the meantime, if you want to see how this applies to your market, schedule a demo or start a free trial at: https://www.hellodata.ai/ Thanks Tim and Nicolas for your work on these features! #multifamily #realestate #data #ai

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Startup leaders often say "we need to hire someone who has scaled and has a proven track record from a big company." Big company leaders often say "let's hire scrappy startup people who are not afraid to do the work so we can move faster." Both rarely make sense. Instead, hire for aptitude, grit, problem-solving ability, fit and passion. #motivation #2024trends #talent #hiring #futureofwork #LinkedInTrendingTopics

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Huge Win! 🚀 We slashed leave administration time by over 50% at Barkbus, boosting employee satisfaction! Modeling leave laws across states considering all the nuances is an incredibly complex software problem. Our lean team (shoutout to Rhiana Gademsky, Dhiwakar N Amarnath, Orlando Vallejos) along with fantastic advisors have built a solution that's making a real difference! What are your biggest challenges with leave management? Let's chat in the comments or reach out to book a demo!

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Ever wondered how companies like Amazon handle a million different product combinations while still delivering on time and within budget? 🤔 It's all about building systems that embrace customization *without* sacrificing efficiency. 🤯 This is a key takeaway from our recent interview on how we're tackling the unique challenges of the housing industry. Watch the Full interview with Vikas Enti, Co-Founder and CEO, Reframe Systems: https://lnkd.in/gTM2NzHr #construction #innovation #technology #supplychain #ecommerce #ProductionOptimization #CustomizationMadeEasy #TechnologySolutions #productionchallenges #ecommerce #fulfillment #customization #supplychain,#manufacturing,#amazon,#shorts,#business,#tech,#innovation #efficiency #automation #logistics #operations #processoptimization #leanmanufacturing #industry4.0 #digitaltransformation

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Today is the day I've been working with founders and owners transitioning out of leading the sales team and into a scalable and repeatable sales team motion for 5+ years - Hiring the right sellers at this stage is tough - Betting on a VP of Sales to figure it out is costly and rarely works - Scaling before product market fit happens more than you think - Automating before knowing what works stops ruins more than it helps I've personally transitioned out of founder-led sales successfully (and unsuccessfully) I have taught founders and sales team 1on1 for the past 5+ years how to do this (I still do 1on1s and they work great) Now I have proven the process works and can teach others Today, I introduce Victory Hub The place for founders and owners transitioning out of founder-led sales and into a sales-led motion If you are a founder or owner of a b2b business (bootstrapped or VC backed) and transitioning out of leading the sales team, join us at Victory Hub

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The South Park Commons Founder Fellowship is the best way to start a company because -1 to 0 is when a company actually starts. Not at revenue or first product. Your company starts even before you have an idea—when ambition takes hold. And SPC is the only truly pre-idea program. Conventional wisdom pushes many founders to stay lean and wait for revenue or product or ideas to seek funding and support. And in the past it made more sense because there wasn't much support available. But now there is and delaying it leaves value on the table. Everything is downstream of -1. It's very easy to get stuck on good ideas and miss great ones. To waste 5 years of your life on something that was never going to work because you didn't have the right support to help you pivot earlier. Start maximizing your chances as soon as you can. You're the average of the people around you, so surround yourself with insanely talented & ambitious people. Partner with world-class operators & investors like Ruchi Sanghvi, Evan Tana, Finn Meeks, Arian Agrawal, Jonathan Brebner, Danh Trang, Dylan Itzikowitz & Gopal Raman. We've been helping founders through -1 to 0 for nearly 9 years at SPC. We defined it, developed the best practices, built the most talent-dense community dedicated to this specific stage. This gives us the confidence to bet $1M on founders before they have an idea. Founder Fellowship apps are open. We give worldbuilders $1M, bespoke partnership with the SPC team & the most talent-dense community in tech. So you have the best chance at pulling off the impossible. Apply with or without an idea. Our only precondition is ambition. FAQ here: https://lnkd.in/dDjxeck8 Application here: https://lnkd.in/d2RGEAQd

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