The number one reason boutique professional services firms stall, or fail to sell, is because the founder is still the rainmaker. If every deal depends on you, you don’t have a firm. You have a job. In this episode, you’ll hear how longtime member Robin Way broke free from this trap and built a scalable go-to-market engine that runs without him. His firm, Corios, doubled revenue, massively increased deal size, and added product revenue, all while Robin stepped out of sales entirely. Learn how he overcame skepticism, made bold investments, built internal capabilities, and turned partnerships into a powerful channel strategy. This is the blueprint for crossing the Valley of Death and creating a firm that is not only scalable—but sellable.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast. Brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re not familiar with this show, this show is dedicated to helping founders and executives of boutique professional services firms make more money, make scaling easier and make an exit achievable. And on today’s show, we’re going to talk about one of the really big challenges for a founder of a services firm as their firm evolves, and that is moving from the hero in the go-to-market motion, you know, being the chief rainmaker and the chief marketer. And any firm that is going to scale to any size and eventually result in a wealth creating exit has got to figure out a way to invest in a go-to-market motion that isn’t heavily, or even at all tied to him or herself. That’s what we’re going to discuss today. This is a common problem across the membership and to help me on the conversation is, we have a longstanding, well-respected member, Robin Way. And Robin has gone through this journey himself, has got the battle scar tissue to talk about it, and he’s willing to share his journey with us. So, Robin, for those in our community that might not know who you are. Would you introduce yourself and your firm? Please.
Robin Way: Sure thing. Thanks, Greg. Great to be here. Hi, everybody! I’m Robin Way. I’m the CEO and founder of Corios. Corios takes large enterprises like banks, insurance companies and healthcare companies off of what is usually their 500 pound dinosaur era data, analytics platform and moves them into the modern world. So we move clients to the cloud. We move them to Databricks and Snowflake and places like that. And it’s a it’s a real competitive marketplace. It’s a fast moving marketplace. Our clients are huge. They’re usually heavily regulated. And I mean, they’re massive. You know, these are the kinds of companies that Accenture and Deloitte make their make all their money most of their money, serving the needs of those clients. So how in the world would a Boutique Professional Services company like us, you know, have a shot and even thrive. And that is a journey. And that’s a journey we’re gonna talk about today.
Greg Alexander: Okay, sounds great. Thank you for that. All right. So, as I mentioned at the top, our topic today is gonna be how to extract yourself from the sales and marketing motion when you’re trying to scale your firm. And in preparing for this interview I found it interesting that you have a background in enterprise software sales. Yeah. So when you started your own firm, you were probably, like many of our members, kind of set up to want to go do the selling motion, because that’s where you came from. You were really good at it. You liked it. And that kind of created the problem. But by way of background, maybe set the table for us there. How did this problem of being the hero salesperson hero, marketer? How did that problem emerge.
Robin Way: Yeah. Well, it started when I read this great book called the Founders Bottleneck. You might. And I’m not joking. I’m not joking. I mean, I did learn about that concept in stark relief. As a member of Collective 54 I kind of already I sensed that it was true, and heard that it was true, but I believed it. And I love selling. I love selling. I love marketing. I love coming up with positioning concepts. I love defining our ideal crest, you know, client profile, all those kinds of things. But I knew that not only did I need to stop being involved at the top of the funnel. I really needed to stop being involved at the bottom of the funnel. Cause as soon as the client latches onto the idea that oh, alright! Here’s the guy or the gal who makes the final decisions at Corios. And oh, and they’re also technical like, they know my business problem. I’m never going to let them go. And you know the company would be stuck, not only depending on me as a seller, but also as a trusted partner for the customer throughout the life cycle of the relationship. And yeah, that’s a trap. And also we had. We had grown. We’ve, you know, we’ve been. We’ve been in business for 15 years now, so we had grown a lot of our free specialists into senior delivery roles, and eventually the sales roles. And that works great if you’re selling expertise as we are.
But we also were making a transition out of being only a seller of services. We also started about 8 years ago building software to productize our expertise. Another thing that Collective 54 members are probably familiar with from all the coaching that you’ve provided over the years. You know, and we had already kind of planned on it. But when you and you and I talked about this, maybe 4 or 5 years ago on a similar podcast, that strategy has really worked well for us. Because it’s a lot easier to sell a productized like a single lane productized service than it is to say, Oh, yeah, we can do anything. You got data, you got analytics, we’ll do it. No problem. I mean, cause anybody can say that, and maybe they can deliver it. But we’ve honed our message, and in doing so we’re about to roll out a brand new website. Because, if you please, don’t go to our current website for the next 4 days. It reflects this mishmash of ideas and concepts. We’ve trial ballooned over the 15 years we’ve been in business and on, I think it’s like Friday or Monday, we’re gonna roll out website 2.0. And it has one message which is our one message. And so when you’re selling that, you can bring in a lot of other people without 10 years of experience in delivery to now be your go to market, you know, ambassadors with your clients.
Greg Alexander: You know, follow up question to this. So I do remember conversations with you in group format, but also one on one where you had a healthy dose of skepticism in this area. And I always enjoyed that because I like the point counterpoint style of conversation. And you were challenging me, challenging me to defend my position. And I think that’s what makes for great content creation, a great healthy community. And somewhere along the way you decided that you were going to get over your skepticism, and you were going to do this. And I’m asking you to advise members that are listening to this that are skeptical themselves, just like you were back then, because sometimes, if they just hear it from me, they’re like, yeah, that’s Greg’s opinion. But so what? I hear it over and over again. I’m tired of listening to him. He’s a broken record. Hearing it from a peer like you would be really, really good. So what was it that finally got you to say? You know, I’m going to give this a whirl.
Robin Way: Well, first let me define what it was. We did. So in mid 2023 I brought in a really good friend of mine as effectively the head of our go to market engine. He’s our chief strategy officer, and he was actually the chief revenue officer for the company that we retire out of these large clients today where I worked for him 15–20 years ago. And so not just bringing in him, but investing in an entire team. You know, taking it out of agencies, taking out of third parties, and like anybody who wants to lead management for you, bringing it all in-house, making actually pretty substantial investment. So that’s what we did.
The proof in the pudding of like, well, hey, you can do anything. But what we started to believe was I instinctively knew it, and I started to believe it when I saw the metrics, which was get myself out of this practice of go to market. There are people who are really good at it. You do need to find people who understand your space. And our chief strategy officer knows it in spades, but also build an entire team around him, internal. And for us, that means data-driven. It means social. And it means channel. Really, those are the three key elements of building a sustainable go to market engine.
And the results of that. So, speaking to skepticism of others, could say, well, hey, look! You put your mind to it. You can try anything, but we tried it, and we stuck to it. And so I’ve got a couple of metrics here like we grew our, I’m gonna use the terms SQL and MQL. And if you don’t know what those—I know you know what those are, Greg—but MQL is marketing qualified leads. SQL is sales qualified leads. We grew our MQL funnel from basically nothing to today about 45 leads. Today, we grew our SQL funnel from about 6 million dollars on an average deal size of about a quarter million per deal to today. Our funnel, our SQL funnel alone is 27 million at about one and a half, almost 1.5 million dollars per deal.
So, and in terms of revenues, we closed 2024 with about a 40% year-over-year growth in top line revenue over fiscal year 23. This year, if we stay on plan as we are right now, we’ll finish 25 at somewhere between an 80 to 100% growth year-over-year. And we’re not unprofitable doing it. In fact, this year, EBITDA growth rate will be huge, and in part because we’re licensing our product in addition to contracting our services. And product revenue, after you’ve covered your cost, that all flows right to the bottom line.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, so great explanation as to how to overcome skepticism—use data. And you guys started tracking your data. And the data is the data. The data doesn’t lie. And that’s what gave you faith to make the investments. And that’s what gave you patience to hang in there, because, you know, these things aren’t get rich quick schemes. It takes a little while to build these things. I wanted to talk to you about the two other things that you mentioned, because that first example was so good, and those two other things were social and channels.
Robin Way: Yeah, let’s start with channels. Tell us a little bit about what you did there. In order to get a client from where they are today to where they want to be, they’re gonna end up choosing one or more modern data analytics platforms. For our clients, typically it starts with a hyperscaler like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure on the bottom—that’s a cloud infrastructure layer. And then they’re gonna pick a data analytics platform—that’s usually like Databricks or Snowflake. And then there might be a front-end tool.
One of our most favorite partners who’s like front-end for analytics is called DataIQ out of Paris. But there’s a number of different sort of—you’ve got your cloud infrastructure layer, your kind of your modern data warehouse data lake house layer, and then the tool that the analysts in the business, the bank or the insurance company actually use to create new analytics assets. Well, all of those companies have sellers—thousands of sellers.
So the channel for us is: we’ve built, and for some of those—not Azure—but with AWS, with Databricks, Snowflake, and DataIQ, each of them have sellers. Amazon has thousands of sellers. The channel strategy for us starts by understanding what are the problems that those sellers face and helping make the realization of their goal easier and faster and less friction. I’m a seller as well. And so I sort of instinctively, and having been in a role much like them, I knew what was important to me. And so we are effectively selling to the sellers. Let us help you achieve your objectives and the objectives of your clients.
One of the things I’ve seen is especially important in the culture at Amazon. If you’ve ever read anything that Jeff Bezos has written—the dedication to a customer-first culture—it’s not. They’re not just flapping their jaws. That’s real at Amazon.
Robin Way: Sellers don’t care about making the number. First.st They care about serving the needs of their customers. And I actually bank on that, too. I’ve always had the personal philosophy of a service mentality. You make other people successful. You in turn will end up being successful, too. You don’t know where, and you don’t know when and this is true, for selling to sellers. You don’t know when a particular salesperson from Amazon or Databricks will give you a call, but it’s probably gonna be because you made one of their peers successful. So they talk amongst each other and go, hey? Who do you know who? And hopefully they say Corios! And that happens because it used to be all outbound. And now, through the beauty of you know, really good channel relationships. Those calls are coming in both directions. And you’re probably gonna ask me about social. We don’t communicate with our clients over social. I mean a little, you know, for baseline awareness. We really use social as a means to get highly focused channel specific communications out to the sellers at aws, the sellers at Snowflake, and so on. It’s not pummeling our end client buying influences with social because a they’re not paying attention to that. They’re certainly not paying attention to Linkedin or any other kind of social channel. But the sellers are. It’s especially when you make it clear. We have a private channel just for Corios and you and your peers at Databricks, at Snowflake, at data IQ, where we’re gonna give you highly meaningful content about your own customers, and how we can help you address their needs better. So that kind of also completes what might have been your next question.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, just a fantastic story of scaling. Right? If you think about what Robin did. He used a sell through model. So there’s no way that he could hire any of us could hire the the thousands of sales reps that aws hired. For instance. It’s just wouldn’t have been economical. But partnering with somebody that has that in place. And culturally aligning yourself with those people. And when you do get that inbound call doing a great job for their client and letting word of mouth take care of the rest, is such a fantastic way to scale a small services firm. And it’s not surprising to me that you’re basically doubling revenue and profits every year, which is just a fantastic thing. Robin, if someone has yet to do that, you know, has not established these channel relationships. How do you get started.
Robin Way: Yeah, yeah. Well, I can speak for my own professional experience and talk about so each of those organization and and no matter who from today’s audience is listening. But I’ll start with like Aws aws, as a partner organization. If you just Google. Us. Partners, you’ll get your, you’ll find your way to the page where you can sign up and become like a bottom tier, what they call registered partner. And they lay out very specific data, driven metrics, basically at aws, those metrics are annual recurring revenue for aws that was sourced through you. Deal flow. How many, how many num, what number of deals are you creating for them? And how many certified professionals who have been, you know, who have tested on exams provided by aws, do you have on your team. And as you want to climb the tiers of that ladder, then but it’s very crystal clear, you know, and and the things that they measure are the things that get done. So so that’s the way that’s that’s what the partner organization wants from you. What the sales organization wants from you is completely different. They want, for example, demonstrated competency. Sure, that’s kind of like table stakes. Bring me a reference client on my platform who’s got us a a wonderful story around what we call in our space use cases. But basically, here’s a case study. This client saved this much money or made this much money or reduced their you know, financial risk or their operational risk. By implementing this solution that you implemented on the Aws platform, for example, and A and a public reference story for us is Cvs health. So the client sign up for public reference approved by their legal and their Pr. Team and the Aws legal and Pr team and me. And that story is now in the public domain. Aws, sellers love that because that’s what they they bring that to the customer and say, Hey, look whether your use cases are the same as Cvs health or not. This is A. This is a team at Korios, who went through all the hard work and pleased the client so much that they agreed to do all the extra work it took on their side at no benefit to them. To approve this case. Study. That means for for Coryos. We had to do a lot of work and earn every step of the way before we could get to that reference story. So yes, there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg sort of a situation, is you. You gotta put yourself forward and earn the 1st nugget, but once you’ve done that. You’ve earned the right to call on other sellers and share your story. And if they say, Yeah, you know, I mean one thing with having a thousand sellers or several 1,000 sellers is they might not be focused on a client that has that problem. But somebody might. And they might talk about you, even if they’re never gonna sell your service or your product. They go. Yeah, but I know somebody who might. And that’s and that snowballs. It takes a while, but it it snowballs.
Greg Alexander: You know, if you think about the kind of brand halo effect. You know, if I’m you know the next Cvs health and my aws, partner says to me, call Korios. I mean right away. You know you rock it up to the list of possible vendors, because a company that I respect. Very much has endorsed you to me. I mean, that’s the power of referrals. It’s that transferable implied trust. All right? Well, we’re at our time window here for the podcast I want to save the rest for our private member Q. and A. But just to summarize here, you know, for those of you that are listening, that know your path to scalability requires you to get out of the way on the sales and marketing side requires you to make some investments in sales and marketing, and requires you to stick with it, you know, and invest that time and be patient. You know, if if the results that Robin shared with you today, which are quite remarkable. Happen for you. It’s going to be a worthwhile investment. You just. You just got to do it. There’s no other way. That’s the way to get through the valley of death. So, Robin, on behalf of the community as always, I appreciate you contributing to the community and being here today.
Robin Way: It’s been my pleasure, Greg. Thank you.
Greg Alexander: All right. All right. A call to action for you listeners. If you are a member and you want to ask Robin some questions, we’re going to have a private member Q and A. Look for the meeting invitation there and attend that, please. If you’re not a member, you’re listening to this you might want to become one. Go to collective54.com. Fill out an application. We’ll get in contact with you. But until next time I thank you for listening, and I wish you the best of luck, as you try to grow, scale, and someday sell your firm.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.