Ambitious growth plans, leaving SFDC and a challenging environment
In 2020, as chaos gripped many workplaces, Adam Pisk alongside Winston Ong capitalized on an emerging trend of remote only outsourcing, as commercial office buildings around the world shut down. The company now helps companies of all sizes outsource their most important roles to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually, in any language, anywhere in the world. Virtual assistants in the Philippines & Colombia, customer support agents, telemarketers and bookkeepers are their most popular roles. Thus, BruntWork was born and has been growing ever since.
With ambitious plans to cover multiple industries, countries and languages, BruntWork knew they needed to implement a CRM that would allow them to grow quickly, onboard teams with pace and ease, and provide the transparency to make decisions across the business with confidence that they would have a positive impact the whole way down the funnel.
With significant experience in Salesforce, the question became whether or not to repeat that same tech stack journey, or to strike out into a new platform. Speaking with Adam who is now the Chief Revenue Officer, he acknowledges that for a burgeoning business, SFDC was simply not an option due to its prohibitively high "cost of acquisition". Beyond that however, the BruntWork team were pretty clear that they didn’t want to go down the same path, and were looking for a platform that:
- Had a user-friendly interface for the team
- Was straightforward to set up, but could still handle more complexity down the track as the business grew
- Enabled easy onboarding
They came to the conclusion that HubSpot was the right fit for BruntWork, as Adam reflected - they "needed a CRM that can scale well, but still have the flexibility out of the box and there is no competition [for HubSpot] in that space. [We] wanted to avoid bolting multiple systems together, and so we chose HubSpot".
More Than 1000 New Customers, and >$5M in Monthly Recurring Revenue
Since joining HubSpot three years ago, BruntWork have scaled the business to be a fully-remote operation across Australia, Colombia, Serbia, Ukraine and the Philippines, with clients in more than 14 countries. Adam firmly believes that HubSpot has been a critical part of this success, and has enabled them to scale to 2500 staff and $50million in recurring revenue. There are three main ways that HubSpot has helped them along this journey:
Onboarding at volume with ease
With the team growing by 2-300 people a month, having a platform that doesn’t hinder that pace is essential. Adam acknowledges the part HubSpot plays here, saying that "because HubSpot is so easy, it’s a 2-week onboarding process for staff in any part of the business". This is largely because they’ve been able to build infrastructure to support people in focusing on what is important to them in specific moments of their roles. For example, in setting up their sales pipeline, there are only a few key fields that reps need to pay attention to in each stage so they’re focused on progressing the sale, and not on managing their data inputs.
Scaling the platform in alignment with business growth
When they first purchased, the out-of-the-box structure of HubSpot provided a simple, yet effective platform for the business to leverage. As Adam recalls, ‘the initial set-up was only about two hours because HubSpot out-of-the-box is basically everything a business needs to start. Then down the track you can add in more as you need it - no other CRM has all the scaling options within the same core platform’. This is reflected in BruntWork’s addition of Operations Hub which BruntWork added into their portal in September of 2022.
Transparency across the business for insightful decisions
The insights the BruntWork team were able to glean from the HubSpot platform have supported them in how they've expanded the business to have a strong focus on the North American market, which now makes up 70% of their net new business. The initial focus was on the Australian market, but they were quickly seeing demand across the NAM and EU markets as well. When deciding if and how to pivot that focus, HubSpot allowed BruntWork to make an informed decision based on the entire customer lifecycle, rather than just looking at individual plot points which would have been the case if they were using disparate systems. In HubSpot, they can see the holistic performance of markets using metrics to track the whole journey from keyword performance to lifetime value (LTV).
The team were able to test not just NAM, but many other markets across the globe and then tweak based on the ROI they can easily see within HubSpot. Beyond that, HubSpot has enabled them with the infrastructure to support a global growth strategy and made it easy to scale. Looking back on that journey, Adam says that "it is a result of the insights of the HubSpot platform that allow us to make strategic and informed business decisions".
Reflections on the growth journey
Looking back on the last three years with HubSpot, Adam is confident that HubSpot has enabled them to have the systems and technologies in place to scale at the speed and capacity that they have. "A lot of the success is because of the technology - we run multiple teams with a single source of truth, easy training and simple upskilling which is exactly what you need when you’re bringing on 2-300 people a month". This is a significant change considering Adam was so deeply embedded with SFDC prior to making the move to HubSpot. He was reluctant initially due to the perceived cost of change when it comes to man hours, replicating the customisation in a new platform and upskilling the team, but the shift was so easy it has changed that mindset completely. When asked for advice for other businesses, Adam said "don’t let the perceived cost of transition put you off - the cost of management and total cost of ownership is absolutely worth it."
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