Mike Malloy Helps SaaS Owners Grow With Fractional Sales Executives

Mike Malloy is the Founder and CEO of Malloy Industries, a company matching b2b SaaS businesses with vetted, trustworthy fractional sales executives to facilitate scale and growth. He boasts a dynamic background with experiences ranging from being a Deloitte consultant to an adjunct professor at Georgetown. Mike is passionate about helping entrepreneurs reclaim their time and freedom and advocates for the future of fractional work in sales. His unique approach combines professional excellence with a personal touch, incorporating dad jokes as his dynamic brand personality.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:18] Mike Malloy shares his professional background up to starting Malloy Industries
• [06:33] The six pillars of a sales engine and how to optimize them
• [08:47] How a fractional sales executive can help solve common sales growth challenges faced by SaaS companies
• [11:19] Mike explains how he built a network of vetted fractional sales executives for SaaS companies
• [14:59] The ROI of investing in fractional sales executives with a case study
• [17:25] Common mistakes SaaS businesses make when hiring salespeople
• [20:27] Mike discusses how Malloy Industries helps SaaS companies with investor connections and deal flow
• [22:29] How to address the modern customer journey in your sales approach

In this episode…

As the SaaS industry becomes increasingly competitive, many companies struggle to find the right strategy to scale their sales, leaving CEOs scrambling to wear multiple hats and keep up. Could there be a proven method to streamline this process and push businesses past growth plateaus?

Mike Malloy, a b2b SaaS expert, delves into the transformative power of fractional sales executives in the SaaS space. He shares his knowledge and unique perspective on how companies can transition from struggling to make sales to achieving robust revenue growth. He emphasizes the importance of standard operating procedures and reinforces the need for CEOs to focus on critical aspects of their business by delegating sales leadership to experienced professionals. Moreover, Mike highlights the benefit of leveraging a network of vetted fractional executives to accelerate business growth without the risks and commitments of full-time hires.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with Mike Malloy, Founder and CEO of Malloy Industries, to discuss the value of leveraging fractional sales executives in the SaaS industry. Mike shares the six pillars of a sales engine, how a fractional executive can help solve common sales growth challenges faced by SaaS companies, how he built a network of vetted fractional sales executives, and the common mistakes SaaS businesses make when hiring salespeople.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Mike Malloy LinkedIn | Email
• Malloy Industries
• Quiet Light
• Quiet Light Podcast on YouTube
• Joe Valley on LinkedIn
• Pat Yates on LinkedIn
• Mark Daoust on LinkedIn
• Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• The EXITpreneur’s Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success by Joe Valley
• Jon Hainstock on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

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Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hey folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identified and reach their goals.

Pat Yates  0:32

Hello, and welcome to Quiet Light Podcast again, I’m Pat Yates. We have a great conversation today I happen to have a chance to spend some time talking to this gentleman Mike Malloy, he’s a really cool guy has a great business Malloy Industries. If you’re in the SaaS business, you look at sales and you think about how you’re going to scale how you’re going to grow, he does a great job helping you vet that process and get sales executives are gonna make this business grow and be able to grow on top of it. Sometimes the power of perfect information can not only save you time, but energy and money. And I think with Mike he’s so dynamic and he’s so much fun too because he actively says on his site that he does dad jokes, which is awesome to begin with. But he’s also in a position to where he said that he has chief. I can’t remember exactly how it was. He’s got a chief cuteness officer as well, which actually bombs our podcast at one point for a short period of time. But just a fun guy a wealth of information if you’re in the SaaS business. And again, if you have a SaaS business you’re working on you know, we have plenty of people. John Haynes doc who’s a Quiet Light, just exited SaaS business, we have a wealth of knowledge. If you’re out there thinking about that. You can always email me [email protected] or enquire with us if you have any information that you need. And maybe we can forward you along to someone like Mike at Malloy Industries who will be able to help you. I think it’d be a great conversation today. So I’m excited to get right to it. Mike, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. It’s awesome to have you here today.

Mike Malloy  1:56

Thanks, Pat. I’m pumped to be here with you today.

Pat Yates  1:59

Yeah, it’s awesome. I know we’ve been talking about this for a little bit. We had to move it around a couple times when I’m excited to get in this conversation. So Mike Malloy with Malloy Industries, I have a feeling your name is involved with the company, I can clearly see that unless you bought it from another Malloy. So I’d love to hear about your background where you’re from businesses, stuff like that in your past. Tell us all about Mike.

Mike Malloy  2:18

Yeah, absolutely. So I have previous experience as a Deloitte consultant. I was a traveling sunglasses salesman and startup CEO in my mid-20s, turned incubator program director and adjunct professor at Georgetown, and I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs buy back their freedom and time. But as a result of my mom actually passing away in the fall 2021. And this was like a week after we found out my wife was pregnant with our first son. I found myself now at the forefront of kind of the future of work during the Great resignation and quiet quitting era where I’m all in that the future of work is fractional. And so, therefore, now, the CEO of Malloy Industries. I didn’t buy the company did start this one, for sure. And we actually helped buyback CEOs time by matching them with vetted fractional executives so they can confidently delegate. And so CEOs who want to scale their b2b sales from $1-2 million up to $10-20 million in annual revenue, benefit the most from the Malloy match with a trusted fractional sales executive. And we got into this business in a former life. As I mentioned, I was a traveling sunglasses salesman, which definitely had some fun from age 25 to 30 running the company, we raised more than half a million dollars from 27 investors, I did a deal with a Hall of Fame, NFL quarterback as our company spokesperson, and spent all summer on the East Coast driving around to beach towns, and every January, I headed out to California for a big trip out there. And ultimately, Pat, I learned that there are for-profits, there are nonprofits, and then there are no profits. And so we ended up in Himanta in that third bucket with some humbling lessons winding down the company. And you know, I just I love working with entrepreneurs at this stage, like it’s so energizing and I’ve had a couple calls already today with some other founders thinking through their businesses and helping them scale and be thoughtful about how they grow their revenue without just putting more and more of their time into it. I’m big on the leverage side of the business and small hinges swing big doors when you get the right systems and processes and people in place.

Pat Yates  4:28

What’s amazing about this, we both have a sunglass background that’s really odd because I used to cut my teeth in specialty retail, which was kiosk businesses and I was really close with a group that did kiosks all over the United States so I’m not who she worked with. Did you manufacture or did you buy from someone in United States?

Mike Malloy  4:46

So we didn’t work with Exotica, they’re the big umbrella evil empire out there. We had a small manufacturer in Milan, Italy. So these were kind of handcrafted. We had polarized lenses and started with one model and three colors through to about 150 different styles which was exponentially more complicated as we kind of expanded that. Yeah, but that’s a cool small world and the future’s bright for these sunglass guys.

Pat Yates  5:12

I used to work with a group called NYS collection who owned by Mark Bihar and Sal Bobino. Two really good friends of mine, for a long time, they did kiosks all over the United States. So I did that and even did a man like here in Louisville, Kentucky Derby one year, the little inexpensive glasses. So we had that weird background. So let’s talk about a little bit about the movie industry. So you specialize. Like you said before, one of the things we wanted to talk about was you all doing a sales scalability assessment for people to understand in SaaS businesses, how you can help them, maybe tell us a little bit about how that came along. And maybe what it is that…

Mike Malloy  5:46

Absolutely, Pat, and I got to interrupt you, because my chief cute officer, Max has just come here in the background, and he just wanted to chime in, make sure his audio was on the podcast, he’s getting down for his nap, got his blanket. And he worked hard the first half of the day, he’s…

Pat Yates  6:00

You have your cool, fake wooden background. So we could only see like a blanket as it came in. So it’s your son or daughter? Which one?

Mike Malloy  6:07

My son, yeah, he’s almost two. And so my office is really his office, he just lets me co-work here with him. And I take meetings while he’s heading down for a nap.

Pat Yates  6:16

I’m a big time father, I’ve been married a long time, I understand how much fun that is. That’s an exciting thing I love for kids that jump in there. So it’s no problem. But go ahead and tell us a little bit about this. When you try to 10x, your sales engine and your sales scalability assessment, you guys do Malloy Industries?

Mike Malloy  6:33

Absolutely. So, we found there’s kind of six pillars of a sales engine at a company that someone that companies are doing great and a few of them, and there’s usually at least one or two, where they’re really struggling. And these pillars include the business model clarity, what their sales season methodologies are, their CRM, or customer relationship management system. And then their performance metrics and analysis, the sales team and training and their sales technology tools. And so what we do is we’ll really dig in deep with companies and go through kind of these six pillars of the sales engine, figure out where they might be leaking some gas, and things are just not operating at a high level, whether that’s some unclear pricing strategy, and maybe they’re leaving some money on the table, or perhaps half their team doesn’t even use or trust the CRM system. And if the garbage in garbage out, if you’re not getting the right data in there, it’s not going to be able to inform your sales and have a solid, weekly pipeline meeting as you’re tracking deals. And then we also look at the overall sales team, because a lot of what we specialize in is kind of fractional executive matchmaking. And so bringing in vetted expert salespeople who have 10 to 40 years of experience selling b2b. And what we’ll do is assess Hey, how’s the current team performing? How are your SDRs your sales development reps are your account executives doing and what does sales leadership look like. And oftentimes, the CEOs end up harnessing, have 17 other hair-on-fire problems, and including probably going out to fundraise their next round and can’t focus as much on sales. And so bringing in some veteran leadership to kind of oversee and nurture and grow the sales team is a big part of what we do. And we try to help entrepreneurs along their journeys.

Pat Yates  7:13

It’s really incredible, because sometimes I think SaaS people, a lot of times have networks to be able to find people. When I looked at the site, I was really kind of surprised, because, the second bullet point other than fractional executives was challenges of scaling a b2b SaaS business. Tell us how that ties in. I mean, being an e-comm guy, I sell a lot of SaaS and understand it. But I don’t understand necessarily where your focus is on helping grow. What are the hotspots people really need for this business executive to come in and help with?

Mike Malloy  8:47

Great, great question. And there are a few kind of common problems that we’ll see. One is a lack of SOPs, kind of standard operating procedures. And Jenny’s doing things one way sales in another way. And Carl’s doing only half the stuff and a mediocre at best, and realizing that you need to kind of systemize repeatable processes that work, you don’t want to keep doing something that what is the quote, “doing the same thing and expecting different results is idiotic” or something like that. So the definition of insanity there, I knew idiotic wasn’t the right word. And so that’s one thing that we’ll look at is what are the systems and processes and then on a quarterly basis with all of our clients we dig into who is your ideal client profile, the avatar, like what do we know about them? How have our beliefs and assumptions about them changed in the past few months? And that comes in ties into the messaging, both the kind of top of funnel how are we attracting attention, getting folks to go to the landing page, click the ad, open the email, whatever it might be. But then what’s the actual script and language that your sales team is using in those meetings to identify the problems the pain points, the struggles that the future customers have. And one of the things that I love, and I learned this from a good friend, Mark Finnick, just stop using the word prospect entirely and just call everybody a future customer. Because if it’s a future customer, you’re gonna treat them a little different than just some prospect in this list. And making sure that you are relentlessly curious about their problems and pain points and what keeps them up at night. What are they worried about, that’s going to take them off track in the next three to six to 12 months. And so we’ll coach salespeople on how to ask questions and actively listen and kind of mirror back in their own words, what these problems and pain points are. And then as you put together different proposals, and even just email follow-ups, like using the exact words, they said, is pretty powerful, as opposed to jargonizing it or making it generic, and not specific to the company, you’re over the future customer you’re talking to.

Pat Yates  9:23

So the people that come in and work with you, let’s say that there’s a SaaS company, they’re gonna start looking around, you have a database of people who have worked in this in the past that you have proven results from that, I guess, in my mind is stay on thinking it’s gonna save you a lot of time and energy, and maybe even some pain of finding the people that you really need. So how do you build that database? It’s just people that you’ve worked with over the last few years?

Mike Malloy  11:19

Absolutely. And so you hit the nail on the head in terms of the pain with the time and energy and like, how do you go out and source? How do you vet, do the reference checks, figure out if these people are legit. That’s what we’ve done. And so over the past three years, we built out a network of about 240 fractional executives. And it started, candidly, I mentioned, kind of losing my mom in September of ‘21. Like, I had $0 that month, I took a month off, I kind of grieved I was with my family. And part of that it was kind of the Mike Malloy of Malloy Industries Consulting show. And I realized that we needed this scalable, sustainable business model. So I called up one of my buddies and was like, hey, I think this fractional executive work, I think this is there’s a there, and you guys are pretty smart. And if I go find some projects, because I like sales and business development, you want to work together on it. And then they started telling a couple other friends and I started mentioning to some other people. And so it has really grown through word of mouth, we’re not advertising, I’m not out there trying to get every fractional executive on the planet, but he thinks they are, these are largely people I have worked with. And in my professional career, I’ve been in the DC area, and the startup tech scene for more than a decade, and seen a lot of people ride the roller coaster. And at some point, they get often a wealth of knowledge and expertise. And so, we offer this business development channel, an opportunity for these executives to find projects to work on, some of the magic starts to kick in. When our client relationships grow over time, and we bring in maybe a second or a third executive, we’re focused on the sales side. But we also have fractional executives in operations and HR, I’ve seen a lot of companies grow from like 10 to 50 employees, you don’t really need a full-time Chief People Officer at that stage, but you might need five or 10 hours a week, as things come up, you need a vacation policy, you need a performance improvement plan, you need annual review, type things, or personally just set up all the HR software. And then we also do a fair amount of like executive coaching, both for CEOs and other members of their leadership team. We’re at a match this week for Director of Operations, who’s going to shuffling up and taking on a lot of responsibility from the CEO. So making sure that the team has the support and the skills they need to grow. And yeah, what part of your question did I not answer, I guess.

Pat Yates  13:35

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, though. Okay, so there were a couple things you had on the site. I was super excited about. You already gave me the chief cuteness officer. So they sort of bum-rush the entire thing. We already found out what that is. I have a question on business. But you claim on there you have dad jokes. So I’m gonna let you go with one now. We’re gonna do a dad joke break. I’m gonna see how good you are. Because I listen to a lot of what do we got?

Mike Malloy  13:57

Well, Pat, do you know what happened to my neighbor’s cat? So a few months ago, this cat accidentally ate an entire ball of wool. And we’re like, oh, God, what are we gonna do? And he was asking me fine. Fast forward last week, it actually gave birth to mittens.

Pat Yates  14:19

That was pretty good. Actually. I’m not gonna lie. I liked it. Give me one more. We’ll get with two and then we’ll go back to questions.

Mike Malloy  14:25

What’s the giraffe’s favorite fruit? I don’t know. A nectarine.

Pat Yates  14:34

That’s good. Those are really good. I like that. Alright, so back to the serious stuff. So you put something on there. I was really curious. When you’re talking about marrying executives. Sometimes you don’t talk in ROI. But on here you said maximizing ROI with fractional sales executives. I think it’s an interesting term. Because everyone thinks if you hire someone you should go up. But tell us about why you put that on there. And maybe some examples of how you’ve quantified that.

Mike Malloy  14:59

Yeah. That’s a great question. And maybe I’ll give you one case study example. So we had a client last year that had missed their sales goal, their monthly sales goal when January, February, March, we started talking about March, April 15, they brought in one of our fractional sales executives. They missed it in April. And by the way, this goal was a $3 million a month, that was a big goal. They’re working to do big things here. And in May, after about six weeks with us, they hit that goal every month since then, end of this year, they have hit and exceeded that monthly sales goal. And so not only did they do that they got nine sales reps working with them, we actually, were able to look at all the data, create some customized dashboards for the CEO to see the performance across the nine reps, didn’t know which ones were the high performers and who ultimately to have them we did kind of advised to replace because they weren’t kind of up to snuff. We also recognize that their CRM system, and I hinted at this earlier, like nobody trusted it, nobody was using it, it didn’t have accurate data. And it’s been two years trying to get on it. And we led the migration to a new CRM software with fresh inputs got buy-in across the organization that we had about 40 employees. And so every department usually touches the CRM in some way. So now, they actually have a healthy functioning CRM system for all of their b2b accounts. And we did the kind of ROI calculations, it was a six-month engagement, they paid us $60,000 a month to work with our fractional executives, and they generated more than $600,000 in increased sales. And so yeah, I mean, that’s a pretty impactful change. And that was just during the engagement, which, you know, we’re about six months on the other side of it, and they probably realized, actually, no, they’ve realized even more benefit, since then.

Pat Yates  16:46

I mean, obviously, it gives you such a jumpstart. I mean, it’s one of those things that if you bring the right sales executive in, it can work. So when I go down to this, and when I was looking at this, it’s because it’s a little foreign to me, I’ve always never, I’ve never been a good person at hiring people. And a lot of times it’s better to let someone outside of this make a decision, because you can either be emotional about it, or maybe too tied to one person or maybe interpersonal stuff, and sometimes looking for the best person. But I would think all those fall under common mistakes, which you have down there things of trying to go out and do it yourself. Tell me some of the things that people might be thinking in their head, okay, I can go do this myself, versus going into a firm who can help me in this process, what are those mistakes?

Mike Malloy  17:25

Absolutely, I think one mistake is hiring a buddy or a friend who says, hey, I can help out with this, but doesn’t actually have the qualification, the skills, the leadership, to do what needs to get done. Another big mistake, is thinking that it has to be a full-time hire, and that we need a full time, I got to shell out six-figure salary and benefits to this person. Like, that doesn’t have to be the case. And we are very flexible in how we do our engagements depending on what the client is looking for, but typically, in one to two days a week is enough time for fractional leader to come in and oversee things. And then the time flexes up depending on how involved you want them actively selling and closing deals versus coaching all the people out there selling. And another big mistake that we see as well is not asking the salespeople for their quotas. And like, what have they historically sold? What was their quota? How did they exceed and like, if you’re a good salesperson, you’re gonna know your numbers, you’re gonna know, you’re supposed to do this month I did this, you know, I did 123% and it grew X percent month over month or year over year. So I think those are a few important questions to ask. And I would say another one, too, is kind of limiting it to either just their personal network and like not posting and not like casting a broad net, or like you posted on Indeed, anybody’s gonna plan. Indeed, there’s no vetting of these candidates. And it gives you a giant stack of 50 resumes. Now Pat I did hear a great hiring strategy last week. And let’s say you get 50 resumes in front of mine said, we’ll just take half of them and throw them away, because I don’t want to hire anybody who’s not lucky. Which I thought was wild. And a little fun there. But the real, I think, value that we try to bring is saving the time and energy of going out and finding the candidates sourcing them. And being able to know that they’ve got the skills and the expertise, and in many cases, the Rolodex of folks in the industry, because that’s also something worth tapping into. If someone’s been selling B2B software for the past 20 years to an ideal client profile that’s very similar to your ideal client profile. And they happen to know those folks, cell phone numbers in their phone, they can just pick up the phone and call them, that can also jumpstart a sales pipeline as well.

Pat Yates  19:17

That makes a total sense. I think that we have people that come into court like that are selling SaaS business, they’re always valuable, and sometimes I see some that hey, I’ve lost my way and when I’m figuring out exactly how to do it. I mean, let’s say that someone’s a solopreneur out there, and they’re a SaaS person they’re building in their little stuck. And maybe it’s not growing like they can, you know, maybe they need to think about this. But that could be fearful of the commitment or the cost or anything like that. Are there predetermined notions of SaaS owners out there that you might be able to break down to say, hey, you may want to make this move, because and maybe it’s not as expensive? Because what are the rubs that you get of people not wanting to use the services you might want to address?

Mike Malloy  20:27

Yeah, great question. I think, well, one of them does come down to the commitment. And that’s the biggest benefit, I think a fraction was negatives is, isn’t a long-term commitment. Typically, our projects start with a three-month engagement, for five to 10k a month, let’s call it 15 to 30k, that you’re basically betting like, hey, this is going to grow our sales. And the other thing to note, too, with the time is that like, you can flex it up or down on a month-to-month basis, usually the first month or two, we do need more time to kind of onboard get up to speed, understand what your current sales systems and processes like what’s the messaging you’ve been doing talk to around the team. But then it’s a matter of like, hey, how much do you want to invest in sales and growing your revenue. And oftentimes for the CEO, like they need to spend time on other things, they need to go help product and engineering work together better, because, V3 of this thing isn’t going to launch because the folks aren’t getting along or, somebody left the company or you know, even as their own chief cuteness officer and is out on maternity paternity leave, and you got to kind of fill in those shoes. So I think that’s part of it, as well. And what we tried to do is to kind of help the founder understand, sort of like, what’s the Northstar metric for the company? Like, is it revenue? Is it customer growth? Is it engagement growth? Is it how efficiently are you growing the business with your kind of lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost are the margins there? And sort of based on what that Northstar metric is, we’ll give some guidance in terms of where to focus the sales strategy and where the CEO even can focus more of their time, attention, money, energy and effort to be more effective as the leader in the company.

Pat Yates  22:08

It’s really great. I mean, I think that sometimes people are really averse, because they especially entrepreneurs, because they think they know all this and I think sometimes breaking down those barriers and coming in and talking with a group that can do this is so much better. I noticed on here too, that for entrepreneurs, you help maybe workout investors are possible deal flow to help them if they need to grow. Tell us a little bit about that.

Mike Malloy  22:29

Absolutely. Let me add one more point before we go to the deal flow slide just on, for the CEOs, there’s kind of five stages of the modern customer journey, where a lot of like, everybody starts by being problem unaware. Like, I don’t know that I have a problem. I don’t have to solve it because I am blissfully ignorant. I don’t know that I have problem. The next stage. And this is both like for our customers and our customers’ customers, say she was like, I’m problem aware, like, okay, like, this is hard, like our sales aren’t growing, we have kind of choppy, month to month growth slash decline, we’ve kind of plateaued, and then you become solution aware and you’re like, all right, well, we need to bring in a person to sell more. So like, how do we do this? Is it a full-time hire? Is it how senior or junior do we want somebody? And when their solution to where they’re kind of out there? They’re looking, they’re saying, Hey, what are the options, they’re Googling things like, b2b SaaS sales or B2B SaaS, fractional sales, which we will hopefully continue to show up on that first page there, which has been a good lead generation SEO strategy for us. Because then they become product aware, so the customers are aware of your business. And now it’s like, why are you the right choice? And what can you do to continue to validate in the future customers mind like, hey, this is the best choice. Well, let me rephrase that, this is not a bad choice, because customers and humans in general are not always looking for the very best possible optimal solution. They just want one that doesn’t stop and they want one that isn’t bad and you want to reduce the downside risk. And part of it is like by making a short term commitment by saying hey, five to 10 grand for a few months like let’s see how this works is different than $150,000 plus a bonus plus a sales commission on top of that, for the things I’m closing like that’s a lot that you’re kind of putting into it. And it kind of last and fifth stage and that customer journey is when they’re most aware and they want the product and you really just have to make them an offer they can’t refuse and I encourage everybody we work with and everybody listening here to like think about that customer journey from problem unaware to problem where solution aware product aware to most aware most of your marketing and messaging that has to be problem unaware or problem aware. Pat, let me ask you a quick question. What time is it right now?

Pat Yates  24:43

It is probably dad joke time but it’s 2:30 Eastern.

Mike Malloy  24:47

Oh, it’s time to go to the dentist for sure if we’re doing dad joke time. And what’s funny is I wasn’t even looking for the dad joke love there. I asked a question that directed your attention to look where I wanted you to look in this case, at a clock to figure out the time, companies need to understand what questions can you ask future customers to direct their attention to the problem they have that you’re going to solve for them? Because once they’re aware of short-term memory in the past five seconds, I’ve thought about, oh, well, like, what is this? Oh, wow, this sucks. Oh, it hurts, it feels uncomfortable. Now you want to do a little bit of work, to find a painkiller to find something that is going to help alleviate that pain and stress. And there’s another great sales framework called the pasado framework where you start with the problem. And we’re asking a question like that, and then you kind of accentuate the problem, kind of twist the knife in there to remind them, like how hard it is that they’re dealing with this thing. And then you get into the solution, not your solution, just be like, the solution wouldn’t be nice if somebody could come in, that had decades of experience that you could confidently delegate your sales to so you can go focus on running the other parts of the business, how much of that time, what if you got an extra five to 10 hours a week, where you can spend it on what matters most to you, whether that’s in the business or with your family, because, the kids would like to have your home for dinner and you’d like to go to their game after school and not necessarily be working 80 hour weeks, and then you have an offer. So problem accentuate the problem solution transformation, what does this world look like and then well, if this is something you’re interested in, let’s talk about a fractional sales executive and how they can kind of unlock that time for you to focus on what matters most in your life. And that’s a great way for any business to just think through. It’s always starting with the problem and reiterating it and making sure people feel that pain to then they want to do the work and hopefully is not a lot of work because you want to reduce that friction but get them interested in solving the problem.

Pat Yates  26:41

I agree with that. That’s a great approach. And I think obviously, you do so many things. I mean, what else have we missed that you guys do at Malloy Industries, I’m fascinated by everything you do. It’s pretty great.

Mike Malloy  26:51

Yeah, so I’ll refer me here on the deal flow newsletter. So started this about a year and a half ago. resonantly. Part of what our secret sauce is making these transformational connections for entrepreneurs, whether that’s to fractional executives, investors, or even interns, I can touch on the second year. But for entrepreneurs, we connect them, especially the ones that are actively fundraising with our network of over 550 investors and super connectors, to increase investor awareness and get a handful of first meetings with investors who opt in after reading our Malloy’s monthly deal flow newsletter, and will basically pick five companies a month, we accept applications on a rolling basis, we’ll pick the top five, we share their pitch deck, as well as some additional information about the company their Calendly Link contact info, what’s their traction, the recent wins. And this ranges from pre-seed to seed series A Series B companies. And again, I’m not going to promise that somebody is going to get out their checkbook, the second they get my email and write your check. But we’ll typically get one to five first meetings for each company, and open some doors that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to get into. And from there, it’s according to process, and we have, I think, in the year and a half, we featured 103 companies, with about 20% of them raising millions of dollars from our investor network. And so that’s something again, it’s a labor of love, we charge a small fee to feature and that really just covers our cost to put it all together. We want to help the companies raise money, we want them to know us like us and trust us. So, when they’re looking to grow, they come to us for their fractional executive needs.

Pat Yates  28:32

That’s incredible. I think, so many companies I’ve talked to it’s amazing because Quiet Light has such a great philosophy of trying to add value before any transaction that we did to educate people on what they need to do, make sure they’re prepared and then try to find a way and you’re obviously doing that for people that really kind of need this help. It’s a little niche, it’s different. It’s not like you’re placing a fractional salesperson or any kind of business very targeted, very specialized. So tell people how they can get in touch with you if they want to reach out to you Mike.

Mike Malloy  28:59

Yeah, great question. If you go to malloyindustries.com/pod podcast, that’s kind of our landing page. We’ll have a lot of resources there. My email is [email protected]. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. But yeah, we’d love to follow up and I should hype up too. We do have a dad joke, daily newsletter. And so I’m gonna just ask real quick Pat. Do you know how many beans are in Irish bean soup?

Pat Yates  29:37

How many beans are an Irish bean soup? I feel like I should know this answer but I don’t.

Mike Malloy  29:41

There’s 239. Do you know why? No. Because if you add one more it’d be 240.

Pat Yates  29:53

That’s pretty funny. I like that. It’s funny I looked on the site to you mentored for companies are on Shark Tank. So was I. Talk about a small world, I was on the show as well. So that’s funny because I’ve seen some of these episodes.

Mike Malloy  30:05

Yeah, for sure. And that’s the big stage. Absolutely. For entrepreneurs. There’s so many of those conversations that happen behind closed doors, though, how do you prepare from them? How do you kind of mentally know the questions, they’re gonna ask and have the slides in the appendix and even understand the vocabulary for entrepreneurs? Like as they go up the fundraising ladder, there’s different terms you got to know of like, oh, you preferred what does this mean? And I’m going to do what when the converts at what valuation and how does this actually turn into a simple algebra problem, not like a calculus problem. I was a math major though, so I can help by the way.

Pat Yates  30:42

I can tell you we have a very, very similar trade Mike. We both love children and both love joking around. We’d like to have a lot of fun, but we’d like to inform people and help them grow their businesses. I think that’s what I took away from this. Mike, you’re doing a great job there. I hope people if they have interests or have a SaaS business, we’ll reach out to you at Malloy Industries, and hopefully, you know, we can connect some people with some things get help. I just appreciate you coming on the Quiet Light Podcast today.

Mike Malloy  31:04

Thanks, Pat. It’s my pleasure.

Outro  31:08

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25, and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast, subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.