807: He Exited His Company Than Invests $1m Into Energy Company For Operations Roll

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2017

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Christopher Engman, the founder of companies like Vendemore, Retain24, TaxiSystem and many others and he’s also an active investor. One of his companies, which he’s now active and an investor in is called Climeon. He’s also involved with Proof Analytics, Trigger Bee and many others.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Inside the Tornado
What CEO do you follow? – N/A
Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 7
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Put learning fast in front of prestige”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:38 – Nathan introduces Christopher to the show
02:14 – All of the companies Christopher founded are profitable and are growing companies
02:50 – Christopher’s biggest exit was Vendemore
- 03:04 – Christopher ran it for 9 years
- 03:12 – Vendemore was initially bootstrapped and raised funds
- 03:51 – The exit was three years ago
- 04:42 – Christopher and his wife owned 75% of Vendemore
05:40 – Christopher took 50% of his Vendemore exit to start Climeon
- 05:53 – It has 350 shareholders
06:11 – Christopher believes that Climeon will be the next dominant player in mechanical engineering
07:13 – It is easier to raise funds if you have a number of shareholders
- 07:28 – The next round for Climeon will be a big round
08:08 – Christopher shares how Climeon works
- 09:50 – The process of energy transformation inside the Climeon
10:37 – Christopher believes in the potential of Climeon
11:24 – Team size is 40
11:41 – Climeon has less than 10 customers
12:10 – Climeon’s target clients are steel plants, cement plants and those in geothermal energy
12:36 – Christopher runs sales and marketing
12:42 – Climeon’s founder is in CTO side
12:54 – Christopher shares how he found out about Climeon
- 13:20 – Christopher’s shares in the company is quite big
14:05 – The starting contract value of Climeon
14:40 – Climeon is getting several hundreds of millions of dollars per client
14:51 – Christopher doesn’t get commission from the sales
16:40 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Building companies isn’t always about revenue, but the value you bring.
If you believe in something, go for it.
Turning heat into electricity is the future of energy.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	launched many many companies his big exit came with his last company a vendor more which he sold
0:04.1	you then used a lot of the company the money he made off of that to sink it into an investment
0:08.6	with climbing which basically takes heat and translated it into electricity they're still early
0:13.9	they have 350 investors though christopher is now an operational role in sales and business
0:18.6	development they've got five again customers looking at contract sizes that really many startups
0:23.1	have been seen before.
0:24.1	So we will see what happens.
0:25.8	This is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their
0:31.4	industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
0:35.1	You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks
0:38.4	like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.
0:44.8	He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our $100,000 unit sole mark. And I'm your host,
0:50.7	Nathan Latka. Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-2-B
0:56.3	SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created with
1:00.2	year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data
1:05.2	points, you can go to g-et-l-a-com. Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself.
1:12.4	It's so freaking valuable.
1:14.1	And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access
1:17.8	to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month.
1:22.1	So we're full this month, but you can go to gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list for
1:25.4	next month.
1:26.4	And look, there's big people on the waiting list.
	...

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