Mission: Deepen relationships between business owners and their most trusted advisor.
Vision: We envision a world in which all business owners get quality financial advice.
https://www.loom.com/share/10ef9c1e533043d2873cd6e7b0fc48b2?sid=5a5017aa-3da7-4ba7-85fc-58357b64c1c9
When starting a company, the amount of times you hear “It takes twice as long, and twice as much money as you think” is remarkable. Certainly we would be different, I thought.
As we head towards the final close on our second round of capital, we will have plenty of fuel to deal with what comes our way, but one of the reasons we raised more capital was the above statement. Another obvious reason was our early success and our opportunity to pull forward the key hires that we did; which will ultimately allow us to stay sub ten people for the foreseeable future. We have been been very capital efficient to this point, and I am proud of the sheer amount of “product” we’ve been able to build with a lean team, on the amount of capital invested. We’ve also crossed $500k of ARR, and will pass $1m ARR later this year. It’s the twice as long part that can be maddening however. We want the product we see 12 months from now, now. We want the contracts we are in discussion on, signed now. And no matter how much urgency we act with, patience remains a key ingredient. Something I am working on 🙂
June was in important month in a lot of ways for RISR. We have implemented a lot of EOS to power our organization; and in June we doubled down. To think that 18 months ago, we didn’t have a company, and 15 months ago we didn’t have a product in market — a lot of work has gone into us getting to where we are. A lot of the up-front infrastructure from the company’s perspective was built by @Cory Siegfried who acted as COO. As we added customers, not only was he tasked with early infrastructure (think financials/book keeping, payroll, benefits, vendors, etc.), he was on-boarding, training, and supporting our early customers. We are certain that a critical component to our success & growth will be to not only keep the customers we have, but to grow them. To that end, we are aligning Cory’s title and focus to a critical area of the business. He will now focus on optimizing our customer success motion, and expanding our client contracts. Just in Q3/4 this year alone, we’ve got roughly $300k of expansion opportunity. As we looked to free up capacity to focus Cory on customers, we saw leverage in our relationship with Steve Hutchison. Steve is the brains behind our valuation engine, and our “head of business advisory”. We’ve got a contract relationship with Steve, and he will step in to take over all of our financials. This will give us an added layer of expertise in our financial & cash flow modeling/projections, and free up important capacity for Cory. This was a smooth transition and an important move for the business as we continue to grow — Hats off to Cory playing such an important role in early RISR, and now turning his focus where it’s most needed.
Brandon led our engineering team (He & Megan… plus one of our friendly contract relationships and their former colleague Will) through a six day hack-a-thon over a Thurs-Tues stretch in June that touched nearly our entire application and got us ahead of timeline on the v2 build. Not only is our team incredibly talented, and fun to watch; their ability to train AI models and leverage co-pilots in our development is having a dramatic impact on our speed an our ability to ship code. As we get beyond v2 and continue to think about how we can leverage AI not just in our dev process, but also infuse it in our application, things start to get really exciting.
(Here is Will, Megan, Brandon… and the dogs last Sunday mid hack-a-thon)