Accelerating Revenue Growth Through Acquisitions

Welcome to the Rialto Marketing Podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series Interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience.

Join?Tim Fitzpatrick?and?Will Slappey?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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Accelerating Revenue Growth Through Acquisitions

Tim Fitzpatrick: Welcome to the Rialto Marketing Podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series Interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B professional service firm owners that are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have with me Will Slappey from IT Voice. Will, thanks for taking the time to be here.

Will Slappey: Thanks, Tim. I'm excited to be here and chat with you today.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, we're going to dig into a lot of your learning lessons. I just love sharing our experiences so that other people can learn from those and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that we've made along the way and learn from some of the things that are working really well and see how they can apply that to their business. Before we jump into that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions, help us get to know you a little bit, and then we'll kind of jump into the meat of things. So very quickly, just tell us what you do and how long have you been doing it.

Will Slappey: Sure. Yeah. So I'm the CEO over here at IT Voice. Was originally founded way back in the day as Slappey Telephone by my father. And now we started obviously doing just telephones, and now today we do the whole gamut of everything from that desktop support the servers, the network, and all the phones and the cloud and bring it all together and make it work for our customers. So I took over running the day to day about seven years ago for our client.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay, what's the most important lesson that you've learned in running your business?

Will Slappey: I would probably say just two different ways you could say it. One, having humility. And I think one of the ways of that for me that I've learned to do that is being curious. Early on, I thought I knew a lot more about just everything, right? Even a situation, and stuck my foot in my mouth many, many times. And I've learned to be more curious and more open and continually just questioning what you think you know. And that really allows you to learn a lot more, grow a lot more than if you don't. Sometimes you can kind of get in a fixed mindset real quick, so that humility, and specifically the curiosity in that humility has been one of the biggest lessons I've learned.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's a great one. We all know as entrepreneurs to growing a business is hard. Do you have any kind of mantra or something motivational that you say to yourself or share with your team to kind of help you push through those challenging times?

Will Slappey: Yeah, we have a lot of them. I have like a 35 minutes video that I did for my team and new hires that goes through a lot of mantras and stories. So I won't give you all the 35 minutes version. We have 25 pledges and probably one of my favorite ones is come straight out of the book. Good to great. Confront the brutal facts yet never lose faith. And so even kind of going back to the curiosity thing, don't be scared to talk about what you think is true. Right. If anybody on my team thinks that something is true, like hey, speak up and have that confront the brutal fact and we as a whole team need to do that. But also don't ever let pessimism seep into the point where anybody gives up and thinks there's no hope. There's been many times in business where I've had some people kind of say like do you think we're going to survive? Or whatever. Maybe not that drastic, but it's like yes we will prevail. And always having that, that's kind of a mantra we have.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it, man, you knock those out of the park. Thank you.

Will Slappey: I saw most everything that I know from a book or from a mentor.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You know what we all have. I mean there certainly are original ideas but gosh, so much of what is out there are things that we've learned and we're presenting them in a way that has made the most sense to us and a lot of times that resonates with people. So yeah, I love it. So one of the things you touched on was that your dad founded the company. So you worked with your dad for a certain period of time. This is something that's really close to my heart because the first business that I was involved in, my dad started and I worked with him for was close to twelve years. And it really, it opened my eyes to a side of him that I did not see as a child and for me it made me appreciate him and the kind of person that he is that much more. What was the experience like for you?

Will Slappey: Yeah, I would echo a lot of what you said there and I think me and my dad are both by nature doers. We love to get stuff done. So I've not had a ton of maybe any conversations with my father where I just call him up and saying hey dad, how are you feeling today? Or something along those lines. That's not like the norm for us. Unless a question like that is probably like something really bad happened or something, right. And so working with my dad, just able to build that relationship on doing things and having so many conversations and he is one of the best salespeople that you, you'd ever meet. Just classic natural salesperson. He grew up on a farm so he kind of had this very just shoot from the hip sort of way. I could tell a lot of fun stories about how he would I remember this sitting I'll give you one. I was sitting in the conference room and negotiating a deal with a customer, and the customer is going back and forth with these different things in the contract and all these questions, whatever. So finally, my father takes the contract from the customer, rips it in half. It's probably like three pages, so it ain't got like six half pages. Throws it over his head and behind him and says, look, I'm a person of my word. I'm going to do what I say. If you're a person of your and do what you said, let's shake on it and make a deal. Stands up and the guy shakes his hand and we had a new customer. So things like that, that, you know, you get experience in doing that, working with your dad, that's, you know, that's a lot of fun. And, you know, so we worked together for this was probably about ten years, you know, that was full time in the business, and, you know, he was pretty much there every day. Our offices were across from each other. So a lot of fun. Just all sorts of whether it be doing lunch or closing deals, strategizing that we got to do. And it was fun getting to do that with my dad and getting to know him in that way.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. So I want to talk a little bit about revenue acceleration and growth. In the previous conversation that we had prior to jumping onto this episode, you had talked a little bit about your outside sales team and that you guys have acquired some companies. And I don't want to assume, but I'm thinking that those are two of the main ways that have really helped you guys grow. I want to dig into each of these. So let's talk about your sales team a little bit. First off, how long have you guys had an outside sales team? And just tell me more about the structure of that and how that works.

Will Slappey: Yeah, so we've had house with sales team for 40 years, the entire history of the company. My dad led that team for a long time while he was here, and strategically later, especially when we were planning for Zacks, that we brought the sales director in that now leads that team for us. It has outside people, and we also have some account managers, but those account managers will also bring in new revenue as well. We got some hybrid roles as well in terms of what we do. But the outside sales, the specific dedicated outside, I mean, they're focused bringing on new logos into the company. And one of the things I think that's really cool about that for us, that's different from some of the inbound marketing is that when you go and find a customer, a huge chunk of the time, probably 70 plus percent of the time, we do not have competition. Because when you find somebody who needs your product, but they don't know that they need it, and then now you bring that to their attention, most customers don't say, well, hang on a second, let me go get some more quotes or get some more opinions, especially when it's cost justified. They're like, Great, I'm going to get these benefits. I got an ROI. All right, let's move forward. And you've already built that relationship and trust. So there's some cool benefits on the back end. It can be a little bit harder sometimes to find the deal, but when you find that customer and you're the only one talking to them, it makes other parts of the sales cycle much easier.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, so they're very much hunters. They're getting out there. Because you guys have been doing this for so long, one of the things I was going to ask, why did you choose this path? Well, 40 years ago, that was the path. Right? Primarily, are they doing business development? Is a lot of that offline or is some of it online? Is it a combination of both? What does that look like?

Will Slappey: It's a combination of both. And for our team, we're not micromanagement in terms of our style. Right. So I tell all of our team, like, look, if you can hit your monthly quota number and your quarterly and your annual number, I don't really care what you're doing and how you're doing it. And so different people have a different style in terms of how that they do it, but that incorporates everything from physically knocking on doors, cold calling. We've got some guys that love to do the networking groups that are out there. And so our marketing team does help with a lot of the drip campaigns and stuff through email. But ultimately speaking, each of those outside salespeople develops their own strategy in terms of how that they want to bring that in, and we help them do that, but they all get to kind of determine what that mix is, and as long as they're hitting their numbers, then great.

Tim Fitzpatrick: How big is that team?

Will Slappey: So, of the roughly 20 that we've got, you've got basically about twelve that are kind of like account managers, and then you've got five that are the outside, and then you've got three others that are kind of in support and engineering other types of things.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. You have a decent size sales and support team there. What about acquiring companies? How many companies have you acquired and how long have you been doing that? Are you still doing it?

Will Slappey: Yeah, so we acquired our 17th one on Tuesday, and I was there yesterday welcoming them on board, and we've got another one that hopefully will go by the end of this month as well.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So this is something you guys are continuing to actively do?

Will Slappey: Yeah, we're probably going to slow down some because we need to pivot and kind of focus on some integrations here with all of those acquisitions. But we started that about three and a half years ago and have acquired a total of 17 B 18 here soon.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I want to dig into this because I think this is something that a lot of small to medium sized businesses totally overlook from a revenue acceleration standpoint. Because you acquire the right companies, you can accelerate growth very quickly. The distribution company that my dad and I were partners in was acquired, and when we were acquired, the company that bought us acquired. We had other distribution companies that we were partnered with. They bought all of them and rolled them up. Right. And it was so much faster for them to buy their way into the market. They were new into the market and it was so much easier for them to buy their way in than to try and start from the ground up. Why did you initially start down this path?

Will Slappey/l Yeah, let me say one thing on a point you just made, because this is just my two centa here, and I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs about this that have asked me the question of, hey, should I buy a company and do that or not? From my experience in the M and A world, what I usually tell people is don't acquire a company until you have got your account management and your ability to bring on new revenue nailed down pretty good. And the reason for that is when you acquire a company, the vast majority of the time, it's because you have owners who want to exit. Not every time. We've got some owners that are on board with us and they're doing a great job, but even some of the owners that are on board with us, sometimes there's multiple owners, right? And so one or two want to hop off and others want to stay. So vast majority of the transactions, we've had at least one person, if not multiple people from the original owner group that has left. And so a lot of times with businesses, if they've never had a really strong sales team, what happens is they come in, they do a really good job, and then people tell their friends and they stay with them because they do a really good job and they've got a really good thing that's going and their business just kind of grows and it kind of maxes out at whatever that owner can handle and have a really great business going. And then they get to an age or time or whatever that they want to exit and then they exit. And even though the business has a lot of value, there's a lot of risk associated with that because some portion of that value is attached to that owner that is leaving and so don't have a good process to reestablish the value of what you're doing there. And in some times almost selling the customer again because now there's a major change. And so some customers or immediate reaction can be, is this going to change? Am I going to like this? And so you literally are having to resell those customers again, even if all their services and the rest of the team and everything stays the same. This can be a little bit of a shock to the system. And so I've seen some bad stories where people did not really know how to drive sales, acquire companies, and not really be able to step into that strongly and just think that revenue is going to stay. And then if it doesn't stay, they could end up in a really bad situation.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I definitely think the way you can maximize that investment and we can dig into this a little bit, is on that front end, right? You've got to have either a strong sales or marketing or both, right? If you've got those engines up front, you can take what's already in place on the back end, I think, and really accelerate things. How have you guys gone about finding these companies to acquire?

Will Slappey: So part of what we did in our strategy and getting back to your other question, what caused us to kind of go down this path is that we got to a place in the business to where I was ready to grow to the next level. It was time for my father to be able to exit to some capacity. And so we recapitalized the company, brought in some outside investment as a part of that recapitalization, let my father take some chips off the table. Going back to the relationship piece gave me a little bit more freedom to take some risk with the company and not feel like that if all of a sudden I take a bad step, I put my father's retirement in jeopardy. So we went down that path and part of that additional investment that we got, that team has helped them. They brought some of the expertise to the table from an acquisition perspective. And so they do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of finding them. And on doing the due diligence on those companies, I'm able to spend 95% of my time on operating and integrating the companies. And then I do spend some time with the new companies because most of the new companies want to meet me. Who are we going to be working with? Those kinds of things. But I'm not up to here in terms of trying to do those acquisitions. The way that we find those companies to buy is basically from two sources. One is there's these people out there called investment bankers, basically a business broker. You know, for those of you not familiar with those two terms if you think of just a real estate agent, right? People that you know, real estate agents are obviously buying and selling homes. Well, investment bankers buy and sell businesses and so there's all sorts of lists and so that we are on. And so then when somebody says, hey, I want to sell my business, they get an investment banker. Investment bankers circulates like a one pager out to the list. And then we'll see any that interest us fit our criteria. We'll sign NDA, get the bigger 20 to 40 page book and then if we like it, we can go deeper and eventually make an offer on buying it. So we get them that way. And then the other route is that we've gotten some buy side investment bankers as well. What the buy side does is not too different than real estate agents. You probably all got a letter in the mail before that says, hey, are you interested in selling your house? They will call on businesses that fit our criteria and say, hey, have you ever thought about selling? And then they will happen upon somebody who is and then they'll bring them in to the process that way.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating. What are some of the hurdles that you've come up against throughout this process of acquiring other companies?

Will Slappey: The integration piece takes a lot of work and there's been a lot of learning and growth that we've had in doing that. The checklist that we have now, even like my initial presentation that I do in Onboarding has grown tremendously since the very first one. Our first one turned out okay, but it was rocky. And there's a lot of things that knowing what we know now could have been significantly better. There's so many little things, Tim, in that world. I mean, probably one thing that jumps out of me is even things like terminology and I won't go into the long story, but like something like the word service revenue. I have a definition of service revenue. Not all the companies we've acquired share that same definition. And now you're talking to each other about service revenue and I mean this and they mean that and you're talking apples and oranges and not even realizing it and now you're miscommunicating. So even things like that, that we've learned, like we got to be specific when we are saying things until we all get on the same page. We even have a glossary that we had to build. Now we've got on one of our central drives of like, what do these terms mean so that when we use them, we get everybody on the same page. And so a lot of those things, like when you're growing organically, that's like a new hire comes in and they are in a learning mode and a lot of companies even have a training process. When you're growing your company organically, you don't always realize all of those things that people when they come in in a learning mode and you got training and things that are happening to where they get on the same page with everyone else. And also they're only like one person and so they're not likely to kind of drag the company in a different direction. And everybody knows that they're new, so everybody assumes that they don't know what they're talking about anyway versus when all of a sudden you acquire a company. You got people who could have been at that company for 20 years, and they're not necessarily in a learning mode. And they know what they mean when they say service revenue. And so it's a different sort of challenge to be able to get everybody on the same page, even with everybody I mean, we've had a great experience with all great well intentioned people, but you can still have miscommunications by people and not even realizing that people are on a different page.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, they have this way of doing things that's ingrained and you're now trying to move that over to the way you do things. And that takes time. I mean, gosh, even just thinking about like migrating company books over, it's not an easy thing.

Will Slappey: Going from cash based accounting and owners who run all sorts of things through their books that shouldn't be. And now you're we have audited financials and accrual based that can be a pretty stark change. And then people just make judgment calls on I'm going to have this as a cost of good or I'm going to have that as an expense and there's a legit judgment calls. Neither way it's necessarily absolutely right or wrong, but sometimes it doesn't line up and then you got to adjust all that, adjust the historical. So there's a lot of little bitty challenges along the way that you learn.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So when we first spoke, you mentioned that one of the key hires that you're working on is a chief operations officer. Are your acquisitions what's really driving that?

Will Slappey: Yeah, for sure. There's really two things that are driving that. One is just capacity. Right. So as we're growing, there's more--here's the principal, I wish I remember which mentor told me this so I could give them credit, but long ago and don't know. But they told me that 2 to 4% of the people time of a business should be spent being strategic. So if you have ten people, that's 20% to 40% of the owner's time should be spent being strategic.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it.

Will Slappey: So then when you have 100 people, that means the CEO is going to probably be that's two to four people now being strategic. And that usually breaks down to like the CEO being 90% strategic and then the executive management underneath him or her being 50% to 70% strategic. And then the next layer of management being 10% to 30% strategic or whatever to where it kind of adds up to two to four people if you did on a weekly basis, you could say 80 to 160 hours a week or whatever, right? And so as we've grown and we'll be at 200 employees here at the end of the year with the final acquisition, the amount of, you know, we need to have four to eight people time being spent being strategic. And so I'm being kind of tapped out, if you will, from just I've only got so many hours per day. So part of it is just capacity that we need other brains in the company to help think and be strategic. So capacity is one thing, and then the other thing is, for me in my career, the really cool thing about growing up in my father's business was that I got such an awesome opportunity at such a young age to be able to jump in. The one bad thing has been that I've been at this one company. I've done a few part time jobs and stuff along the way, but nothing of real significance. I've got all of my experience inside of one company over the years. I do peer groups, I go to conferences, I read books, all those. But still I've been at one place. And so part of it is also bringing in somebody who has been at larger companies and other companies that hopefully will have been around some turns and over some hills that I have not been. Can help to bring some insight and say, hey, there might be a better way to do this, or, hey, when you reach this side, this is some things to anticipate and be able to bring some stuff that both the strategy and maybe even some plug and play things that we can improve the company on. So those are the two big things that we're looking to accomplish.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 200 people, that's a lot.

Will Slappey: You want to remember all of their Names.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So COO, are you in the middle of that process? Have you even started it yet?

Will Slappey: We have made a decision and we'll announce that in January.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay, so you've found the person, and how many other executive level people do you have out of those 200? You just hired a COO. You've got yourself.

Will Slappey: Yes, there are six others. So there's eight of us total that make up the executive team.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it. And what types of roles are those people in?

Will Slappey: Yeah, so we've got our CFO that's obviously over the financing and accounting. You got the COO, and then you got our director of sales. You've got our director of vendor management, which is especially with the growth, and you've got every acquisition that brings in all of their vendors and everything. So it's like a lot of what that team does is consolidating all those together. You've got our director of technology being a technology company. Jake is the guy that's overall of the technology over the engineering teams, our sales engineering teams. Then we got our HR director.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it.

Will Slappey: And then we've got our director of service, which is over that daily service delivery to our customers and project team.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it.

Will Slappey: And so those are the different functional areas of the company.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it. That makes sense. So let's talk about marketing. You guys are doing a lot of stuff on the sales side, acquisitions really helping you grow. What are your thoughts on marketing? I mean, are you guys doing a ton of it? Where have you struggled with it? What are your thoughts?

Will Slappey: Yeah, and when you had initially asked me to hop on the show, I was like, well look, Tim, marketing is probably one of our weaker areas. So I don't know that you want me to come on your show and you said come on anyway, so here I am. We have spent a ton of money over the years. I don't know, somewhere like the 2000 $400,000 worth of money on marketing, trying inbound marketing and Google Ads and pay per clicks and retargeting and all of the different things that you can do there from like a digital perspective and not had a whole lot of success with it. And so you kind of touch the stove a few times and you kind of get burned. On the flip side, I have some of my peers in the industry that like swear by it and they get all of their new business from marketing and that's how they do it. So I certainly believe that, hey, it can work. It obviously does work. There's a lot of businesses that are growing by it. We have not cracked the code on how to make that work for us. And strategically, as we've gone through, we are consistently growing our recurring revenue. We're growing our recurring revenue about 10% per year organically. And so we've had good success through the current means in terms of how that we're doing it. Also with all the acquisitions, our name kind of says IT voice. Those are the two main things that we do. And there's underneath that there's cloud and there's Internet and that kind of are supportive and a part of all that as well. But most of the companies we're acquiring are doing one or the other and we have this huge opportunity for cross selling in our company. So that's a huge focus for us in terms of the growth. We've got the whole cybersecurity division. That's massive opportunity for us with our existing customer base. So a lot of what we're focusing on is continuing to do what we're doing on the outside sales side. And then a lot of that is going to be focusing in on how do we cross sell to our existing customer base. We do have a marketing manager, we do all the email drip campaigns. And a lot of that is focused more on the existing customer base than it is. And all of the outside salespeople are putting in all their prospects and stuff. And so anybody that they don't actually get much traction on, then now they're in some of our various long term marketing plans. So we are doing some of those pieces, but it's not driving a massive amount of revenue for us, at least that we can identify. Because sometimes you send a customer and you're like anything marketing, whether it's seven or 13 touches, there's all sorts of different philosophies on that or whatever, but the point is still the same. You got to touch a prospect a lot of times. Sometimes it's hard to say because we are doing a lot of different things and I'm really active on LinkedIn and keeping yourself in front of them and then all of a sudden one of our salespeople happens to knock on their door virtually or physically or whatever. And marketing ultimately did help make that happen. So we do believe in our doing it, but a lot of these specific conversions are happening right now through our sales team. The one thing I would probably say, I think this is kind of part of your question, so I'll tell you a really quick, interesting story. And since you brought my father up, we'll go there. So when I was a kid, we took a trip to Italy and we couldn't read a lot of the road signs or do a lot of different things. And my father turns down a one way street to get to where we needed to go. And of course all of us scream and like, dad, what are you doing? And he looks at us and says, I built my entire career going the wrong way down one way streets. Now later, hearing him talk about that, he's not wrong and he's like, hey, if everybody is going that direction, I don't want to go fish in the same pond that everybody else is fishing in. I would rather go to this other pond. Maybe there's not as many fish, but if I'm the only one that's fishing there, I'm going to have a much better chance than going and trying to compete where everybody else is competing. And so that's one thing I probably would say to the listeners out there. There's a lot of different ways to grow. And this happens all of the time in investing in other things where all of a sudden people see this mob that went that direction and they're like, oh, I want to go join it too. But then by the time they buy Bitcoin, it's already peaked and then it's only on the way down, you know. And so using Bitcoin, the ones who really did well were the ones who bought it when it wasn't so cool and it was the new thing, right? And so for us, getting back to the question, there's not a lot of people physically knocking on doors, right? I mean, if you go knock on a business door right now. You might be the only one that solicits them this year.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You're zigging while others are zagging, right?

Will Slappey: Yeah. And so for us, we found that it works and using those old school tactics and we're layering in and I talk to our team all the time about, you know, coupling the online and the offline together, that can be really powerful. So, of course we're doing the emails and, you know, we use HubSpot, we're doing the sequences and we got the drip campaigns and all those things. But there's a fundamental focus of ours that is wanting to have that offline component. And in this world of AI and virtual and automation and there's some power and just a real human being. And when you have a real human being that shows up at your office. I follow a guy on LinkedIn and he posted Dear McKee, he posted this post the other day where one of the things he does is he'll go to his prospects building and take a selfie of himself, like pointing to their logo, send them like a message or email or whatever. And that's one of the ways he gets his foot in the door. Because they're like, oh my gosh. Sometimes they'll get a message back real quick. Hey, I'm here. Come inside. That's just a whole different approach from that 100th email that says, hey, I've got the perfect solution that's going to have a 5000% ROI for you. Can I schedule 15 minutes of your time? A picture standing from their building really stands out differently.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love it. Well, this has been awesome, man. You've shared all kinds of cool stuff that I know people will be able to take some nuggets from this episode. I want to ask you one more question before we wrap things up. And it's this knowing what you know now, is there anything that you'd do differently?

Will Slappey: I ask myself this question from time to time and people ask me this question and it's a really hard question to answer because when I look at everything I know now, it's because of all the stupid decisions that I made on the hike that I made. So I'm like, it'd be great to take everything that I know now and somehow put that into like a USB drive or something like that and plug it in the brain of my self from 10,20 years ago. But to be honest, a lot of the things that I even know now, I kind of have these memories of sometimes my father or other people trying to tell me those things and I didn't really understand it or believe them when they told me. And I had to experience it myself and experience some of that pain and learn through that in the trial and error in order to be able to get there. I think if there was one thing I'd probably go back to where we started with the curiosity thing is that don't be afraid to make a mistake. Don't regret the mistakes that you make. If you learn something from it. My dad used to say this all the time. He'd say, I don't mind paying for a mistake, just don't make me pay for it twice.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that's great.

Will Slappey: Learn from them So if you're making mistakes and you're learning from it and you're getting better, then that's money well spent, that's time well spent, that's mistake well spent. And I think the one thing going back to the curiosity and the humility piece, I think that is a key piece that if I'd maybe learn that a little bit sooner, that some of those sometimes I had to go through multiple mistakes of the same kind to ultimately learn the lesson. And humility and curiosity maybe could have allowed me to have learned those a little bit sooner and maybe not had quite as much pain and maybe be a little bit farther down the path that I am that might be going back to that one point. That might be what I'd say.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, where can people learn more about you?

Will Slappey: So if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me directly there, and I'm sure that's LinkedIn.com/en/willslappey scrolling across the bottom of the screen. And then of course, connect with our company It Voice, which is Itvoice.com, and would love to have any connections there.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. Please go out and connect with Will. He shared a ton of value here. You don't stay in business for 40 years if you're not doing a lot of things right. So I love it. And one of the things that I really love about how you guys have grown is it is different than what a lot of people that we talk to, people do go out and acquire, but not a lot. So it's not something that they're commonly thinking about. And with your outside sales team, I think there's a lot people will learn from it. So thank you for taking the time.

Will Slappey: He's doing acquisitions out there, and I'll give them ten minutes to give them the highlights. And I can share some of the stuff proprietary, but there's some generic stuff that I can share for people, and some people shared some stuff with me to begin with that got us started on the right track. So ping me on LinkedIn and would be happy to help somebody get started if they want to do that.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's awesome. Well, thank you for taking the time and I really appreciate it. I've taken copious notes here. For those of you that are watching, listening, thank you for doing so. Again, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you want to connect with us, you can do it over at rialtomarketing.com. The other tool that I've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. We talked a little bit about revenue acceleration. If you want to accelerate revenue you have to remove your revenue roadblocks. And one of the things we do is help people remove the nine common revenue roadblocks that we see from a marketing and a little bit of a sales standpoint. If you want to get some visibility and discover which road roadblocks are slowing down your growth, head on over to revenueroadblockscorecard.com, and you'll be able to find that out in less than five minutes. So thank you guys so much. Till next time. Take care.

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About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick

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