Sanjay Jupudi bootstraps Qentelli to a 9 figure valuation - EoY Series 2024

Welcome to today’s episode of the WIN podcast with Carrie Richardson.

Today we kick off our annual "EY EoY Interview Series" with 2024 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Nominee Sanjay Jupudi, co-founder and CEO of Qentelli.

Qentelli (Kwen–Tel–LEE) is a Digital and Cloud Technology Company. Their Intellectual Property  includes AI based products, frameworks, methodology and process playbooks that help accelerate and deliver Digital Transformation, Cloud Adoption, DevOps and Quality Engineering solutions to our customers.

Sanjay Jupudi (along with his co-founder, Prasanna Signaruju, founded Qentelli at a Dallas based bar.  Their idea was too big for the back of a napkin - they had to borrow a piece of paper from the bartender.

Starting with Sanjay's savings of around USD 50,000 to launch the business eight years ago,  Sanjay and his team built Qentelli into a thriving debt-free business with a 9-figure valuation.    

Sanjay launched Qentelli in his basement, while also providing care for his six year old child.    Their team now exceeds 1200 employees, and their original operations and sales hires are still members of the team!

Spend some time with with Sanjay as he shares about starting a business with access to limited resources.  Sanjay discusses the sales strategies they used as a team of two, and the sales and marketing tactics they rely on now to grow from 10-50% annually.

Sanjay credits his success to extensive planning and research before exploring any new offers and idea.  Process and playbooks have been essential to their success.

Don't miss this episode of WIN!

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with either of them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Carrie Richardson: My name is Carrie Richardson and I am the host of the win. What's important now podcast. This is the beginning of our 2024 series for the EY entrepreneur of the year nominees. And our first guest participating is Sanjay Jupudi, who is the founder of Qentelli. 

[00:00:19] Carrie Richardson: Sanjay..

[00:00:20] Carrie Richardson: Thanks for joining us today. 

[00:00:22] Sanjay Jupudi: Thank you, Carrie. Thank you for hosting this. Wow. 

[00:00:25] Carrie Richardson: So tell me a little bit about how you founded Qentelli. 

[00:00:31] Sanjay Jupudi: So I'm, one of the immigrant entrepreneurs. I landed in the U S in late 2006 with four bags, a lot of dreams and a few thousand dollars in savings. When I landed, I quickly became part of a services startup.

[00:00:46] Sanjay Jupudi: I've worked with them for almost nine years, helped them grow to a hundred million dollar revenue company and also the market leader in their segment. And one day things didn't work out well, so I was forced to [00:01:00] resign and from my role. When this happened, I had two options before me: 

[00:01:04] Sanjay Jupudi: either go join another company, work for someone, repeat what I've done again, make someone else rich or start something on my own. 

[00:01:13] Sanjay Jupudi: I prefer to do the later. So I partnered with my business partner persona who was also working with me in the previous company and literally we sat at the bar called the rustic in Dallas.

[00:01:26] Sanjay Jupudi: We chalked down the business plan on a piece of paper in our plan was quite big, so we didn't. We couldn't use the napkin, so we wrote. We took a paper from the bar and we just wrote everything that we wanted to do the same night we even named the company. Obviously there was a little bit of alcohol , so we were very enthusiastic.

[00:01:48] Sanjay Jupudi: So we named the company and today, eight years later, we are 1200 people strong. We serve over a hundred customers in multiple geographies. [00:02:00] So it's been a quite, quite a journey landing in the U S. With nothing and building this company over the last eight years. 

[00:02:07] Carrie Richardson: That's an amazing story.

[00:02:09] Carrie Richardson: You had planned on having a much larger investment in Quentelli to work with. So tell me a little bit about what happened there.

[00:02:17] Sanjay Jupudi: We plan to have a large investment, but thanks to the some unkept promises, I was just left with a small saving of 50, 000. 

[00:02:26] Sanjay Jupudi: I invested that money into the company and today we have grown into a. Respectable nine nine figure valuation of the company. So it's a big return on investment, but all we had was 50, 000. We didn't raise any money. We neither have much debt on the company in the process.

[00:02:47] Sanjay Jupudi: We even acquired a company using our companies. Balance sheet and some help from the bank. So me and my co founder turned a 50, 000 investment into a nine digit [00:03:00] enterprise value for Qentelli. 

[00:03:02] Carrie Richardson: That's amazing. Congratulations. 

[00:03:05] Sanjay Jupudi: Thank you. Thank you, Carrie. 

[00:03:07] Carrie Richardson: Tell us a little bit about Qentelli.

[00:03:09] Carrie Richardson: What problem had you identified along with your partner? That you were so enthusiastic about solving that night at the bar. 

[00:03:17] Sanjay Jupudi: So when we started Qentelli companies were facing one constant problem. How to deliver software faster. So software development lifecycle, SDLC as they call it, was slow and had a lot of manual dependencies .

[00:03:31] Sanjay Jupudi: Developers to develop code, testers to test it, and people to deploy the code. 

[00:03:37] Sanjay Jupudi: And this process was brutally long. And sometimes companies took three months to release the software after they developed it, and during the release, The entire system has to be shut down. So companies used to release software in the middle of the night after 12 AM and before 5, so they will not disrupt their business users.

[00:03:59] Sanjay Jupudi: While this was [00:04:00] happening, companies on the West Coast, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, they released thousands of versions of the software every day with zero downtime. You'll never see Amazon down because, oh, we're upgrading the new website, we're adding a new feature, so we'll bring it down for a few hours.

[00:04:18] Sanjay Jupudi: You'll never see that, right? So how did they do it and how are the enterprises here outside of these tech companies not able to do it. So the tech companies use something called automation and DevOps. We brought that technology to enterprises and we said, hey, we can do similar things. 

[00:04:36] Sanjay Jupudi: We went to CIOs, the chief information officers. Usually these guys are heads of technology for companies and they're responsible for companies, IT and tech, and we told them we could bring down your release time From three months to three days to sometimes, in hours.

[00:04:52] Sanjay Jupudi: So we solved that problem and everyone started, liking it because no one wants to wait 33 months, and businesses [00:05:00] were constantly complaining that, oh, it's it takes too much time. And what if our competition releases this feature ahead of us and we don't want to lose our customers to our competition. So that was the main business driver to start Qentelli. That was the problem we identified and over the years we've helped large enterprises and domains like airlines, banks, even pizza companies, telecoms, and many more to solve one critical problem, how to deliver software faster.

[00:05:30] Carrie Richardson: So one of the biggest challenges growing your business was a limited amount of capital . What other issues did you experience when you were launching Qentelli? 

[00:05:39] Sanjay Jupudi: Like you mentioned all we had was a 50, 000 investment. And then, we took a giant leap of faith.

[00:05:46] Sanjay Jupudi: We literally worked 14 hours a day, nonstop nights, weekends, you name it. And I use my home office as my base and me and my partner met Almost every day we build the business plan. What we did was we built a [00:06:00] small team that started, working on innovation, so we start with the first team that we hired was an innovation team, 

[00:06:07] Sanjay Jupudi: I started making calls to people that could use our services. We immediately got interest from three customers who are still customers now, even after eight years with so much competition out there. So We faced numerous issues, Carrie. We had limited resources.

[00:06:21] Sanjay Jupudi: We designed our own website and we created our own decks. We used to stop at a FedEx. Office center on the way to the meeting to print our business card sometimes or print a pitch deck sometimes. . We couldn't invite prospects to our office because we didn't have an office, so we faced a lot of those issues. We couldn't afford to take people for a fancy lunch or a steakhouse dinner because we were counting every dollar. Every dollar was needed.

[00:06:47] Sanjay Jupudi: We put a lot of that in developing the company so we could better our services and when we go to customers, they like what they're seeing. I was a sales guy. I was the finance guy. I was a marketing person, recruiter and ran all [00:07:00] operations and my partner took care of service delivery in all aspects of technology.

[00:07:04] Sanjay Jupudi: It wasn't easy to juggle so many balls at the same time while also taking care of a six year old because my wife had a full time job. 

[00:07:13] Sanjay Jupudi: So it wasn't easy, we did it. It's interesting, but it wasn't easy. 

[00:07:17] Carrie Richardson: So you built a nine figure valuation business out of your basement while parenting your six year old.

[00:07:23] Sanjay Jupudi: Yes. 

[00:07:24] Carrie Richardson: Well done. 

[00:07:26] Sanjay Jupudi: Thank you. 

[00:07:27] Carrie Richardson: I don't even feel like I need to ask you why you were chosen as a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards after hearing that story. But what part of your story do you believe was the most compelling? Why were you chosen as a finalist this year? 

[00:07:41] Sanjay Jupudi: We live in an age of starting companies with the first goal is to raise money without having a product or a service. But even offering or a business plan. What we have done is the exact opposite. We have created a different playbook, took a very small investment, turned into a [00:08:00] respectable company.

[00:08:00] Sanjay Jupudi: We built a lot. We built a big brand presence and brand value. We work with Fortune 100, Fortune 50 companies. We grew organically . And then we also did an acquisition the profits, so I think our playbook has been, very different from what you have seen, which is what would have prompted EY to look at me, look at my application and look at it, bring us as a finalist.

[00:08:24] Carrie Richardson: I understand you got to meet some of the other finalists last night. 

[00:08:27] Sanjay Jupudi: Yeah, it was pretty interesting and adding to what I just said, we grew anywhere between 10 to 50 percent year over year on good years. We grew 50 percent and OK years. We grew 10 percent we grew during COVID.

[00:08:40] Sanjay Jupudi: We were always profitable, had excellent employee and client satisfaction and highest employee and client retention in the industry in an industry where keeping talent is very hard. Thank you. And keeping customers is even harder,. 

[00:08:55] Carrie Richardson: When you started the business, your partner was responsible for the technology. You were [00:09:00] responsible for all of the other roles. Which role were you happiest to give up? 

[00:09:05] Sanjay Jupudi: So the first thing I gave up was the ops role, the operations, running the company, the day to day aspects of the company, while I know it is very critical, but it could be done by someone else because my role, my goal and my partner's goal is to be in front of our customers and in front of our employees that gets the best out of our time and value for us.

[00:09:27] Carrie Richardson: What's the most important thing you learned about yourself running Quentelli over the last eight years? 

[00:09:33] Sanjay Jupudi: I've learned that impossible is just a word in the dictionary.

[00:09:37] Sanjay Jupudi: If I'm able to set my eyes and to a goal, I'll find ways to achieve it. Staying true to employees, customers and our goals and being sincere in our approach has really helped us achieve this kind of a growth. And, we are one of the few companies that didn't let go or furlough any of our employees during COVID.

[00:09:58] Sanjay Jupudi: I think being sincere[00:10:00] to your mission is the biggest factor for why we have been successful all these years. 

[00:10:05] Carrie Richardson: And you mentioned growth many times throughout the last 20 minutes.

[00:10:09] Carrie Richardson: How do you plan for growth? What process do you follow when you're evaluating a decision that you're going to make or an opportunity that you're going to pursue? 

[00:10:19] Sanjay Jupudi: So we do a lot of planning before we start something we analyze. We do a lot of market research.

[00:10:26] Sanjay Jupudi: I have teams that help me with every aspect of understanding if a service is going to be lucrative if we're adding a new service line, so we do a lot of research. We talk with industry peers. We talk to customers. Most importantly, we just talk to our customers and ask them, hey, we are planning to do this.

[00:10:43] Sanjay Jupudi: Do you think there will be a opportunity for companies like us and services like this to be sold in the marketplace, so we take a lot of input. And we follow the analyst and we download research papers. We do a lot of research. It's never oh, we just thought of an idea and then [00:11:00] let's get started because it takes investment.

[00:11:02] Sanjay Jupudi: It also takes time. And time is opportunity, you can't just wait, waste time on the wrong opportunity. We also look at our competition to see what they're doing, because if there are few companies that are doing this, it must be a good pie is so big.

[00:11:16] Sanjay Jupudi: We don't need to worry about, oh, there's two other people doing so we may not be successful doing it, so we look at everything from a very holistic view measure twice, cut once. 

[00:11:26] Sanjay Jupudi: The key to scaling and doing good and growing is knowing if something is not working out well ahead of time. Fail fast and pivot faster, right? So we have done that a few times. We would rather fail faster than fail later, and our planning helps us launching new opportunities and new services.

[00:11:49] Carrie Richardson: If you had to start over from zero, what would you do differently? 

[00:11:52] Sanjay Jupudi: I actually thought a lot about this question. It's a quite difficult question to answer. I think for the most part, I would [00:12:00] like my journey to the same.

[00:12:01] Sanjay Jupudi: We have several ups and downs, but journey was awesome and never regretted a single day of what we have done the last, eight plus years. I would have taken a few more chances and probably hired a bigger sales team earlier on. So we delayed a little bit for many reasons, investment being one of them.

[00:12:19] Sanjay Jupudi: But if I could do things differently, I would have hired a bigger sales team earlier on in the journey. 

[00:12:27] Carrie Richardson: So when you think about the future, what do you believe is the biggest opportunity for Qentelli?

[00:12:34] Sanjay Jupudi: So when we started using automation and DevOps as the means to the end. We decreased the time it takes to deliver software by over 95%, now is the time of AI. We're doing several projects for our clients that reduces. The time it takes to develop software. I think AI will be a game changer.

[00:12:53] Sanjay Jupudi: And Qentelli is in the forefront of the AI revolution. We see a big opportunity for us [00:13:00] to use AI and help our customers deliver software at record pace. You'll see software develop in days versus months and years. So I think AI will be our biggest opportunity. And we are all set to take on the AI revolution.

[00:13:16] Carrie Richardson: Would it have been a completely different business launching today versus eight years ago? 

[00:13:22] Sanjay Jupudi: Oh yeah, 100%. If AI was at this level eight years back, launching businesses Would be really easy and faster. So I was telling this at AI panel recently that AI is going to be a not only a game changer, but it's a true equalizer.

[00:13:39] Sanjay Jupudi: You'll see entrepreneurs coming from places you would never imagined and with. With investments that you can never imagine and with the growth that you can never imagine. So that's the power of AI. If people know how to use it for good, but you can do a lot of things much faster than what you have been doing all through your [00:14:00] life.

[00:14:02] Sanjay Jupudi: I think it's going to make a big positive impact to the way technology works, the society works, companies work. So I feel the next few years AI is gonna have a big revolution. 

[00:14:15] Sanjay Jupudi: We have gone all in on it.

[00:14:17] Sanjay Jupudi: We have done projects using AI, even before AI is a household name. With thanks to ChatGPT and OpenAI, AI became a household name, but there's a there's a different version of AI before ChatGPT came, it's called traditional AI. So we have done projects using traditional AI, and now we are also doing projects using generative AI, which is a game changer .

[00:14:37] Sanjay Jupudi: We have gone all in. We have several projects underway using AI and we expect a lot more to come in the next few, quarters and years. 

[00:14:47] Carrie Richardson: So what advice do you have for founders that are starting businesses today? They have access to things that you couldn't have imagined eight years ago. 

[00:14:56] Sanjay Jupudi: I would say, while AI solves a lot of things[00:15:00] I still believe sales solves all the problems.

[00:15:03] Sanjay Jupudi: So what I would advise for founders is find a way. To build a service or a product or a solution .Find a way to sell, find your customers, find the problem statement, address your problems around it. And there are so many people that would give you a give you an opportunity.

[00:15:21] Sanjay Jupudi: I would definitely advise people to create solutions and services around the problems that exist and find customers that you can sell to. 

[00:15:32] Carrie Richardson: So you were the first sales rep for Qentelli. What process did you follow for identifying new opportunities? 

[00:15:40] Sanjay Jupudi: So we did this in two ways, Carrie, we used a more scientific and reliable process where we hired a small team of what we call inside sales team or sales development reps. 

[00:15:51] Sanjay Jupudi: These guys do constant research on Who to target? , who's in need of your services? What are changes happening at different prospects, and these [00:16:00] guys go use email, LinkedIn or, some form of a communication to reach out to them and pitch our services, and generate leads.

[00:16:08] Sanjay Jupudi: So we generated anywhere from 30 to 40 leads a month and we used to call them and, Pitch our services, that was the more traditional way of doing it. And then on the other hand, we had a few other ways to generate leads. One of them was we sponsored a lot of CIO events. So we were in front of.

[00:16:28] Sanjay Jupudi: People and we put together events for CIOs and thought leaders to do some, speeches and thought leadership articles, and we use that to also generate interest about Qentelli. And last but not the least, I also picked up my phone and call people that I know could use our services.

[00:16:47] Sanjay Jupudi: So networking helped us a lot of to generate a lot of interest. It still does. It's one of our biggest generator for opportunities. While we still follow the traditional SEO using the website,[00:17:00] sometimes outreach to customers via LinkedIn to generate some interest. We have done it all.

[00:17:07] Carrie Richardson: When it was just you and your partner and you were the only person that was focused on sales, what was the first thing that you did? 

[00:17:16] Sanjay Jupudi: The first thing I did was networking because it was easier to go to people I have either worked with in the past or know about me in the past.

[00:17:23] Sanjay Jupudi: So that was easy. That's low hanging fruit. Then we started attending networking events, even with all the technology people like a warm handshake and maybe a a few minutes off of their time during a networking event .

[00:17:38] Sanjay Jupudi: People like that approach. We still continue that. I was also reaching out to people via LinkedIn, using, the traditional method of reaching out and pitching our services. So I was doing it all. 

[00:17:48] Carrie Richardson: Who was hire number three? What was their role?

[00:17:52] Sanjay Jupudi: Hire number three still, plays a very key role. Her name is Rashi. She managed all the delivery operations. Prasanna took [00:18:00] care of the technology.

[00:18:00] Sanjay Jupudi: I was doing the sales, so we needed someone to make sure what we promised to our customer was delivered. Rashi managed all the delivery and she still does. She does an amazing job and she manages close to 1000 people and she has a few leaders that work for her.

[00:18:17] Carrie Richardson: How big was Qentelli when you hired your first sales team member? 

[00:18:22] Sanjay Jupudi: Close to 70 or 80 people when we hired Carmen  as a sales rep. I just, congratulated him on his seven year anniversary. So one and a half year after we started the company, we made the first sales hire.

[00:18:33] Sanjay Jupudi: And that's my point before I should have hired him six months after we started the company versus a year and a half. 

[00:18:40] Carrie Richardson: I appreciate you sharing your story with us today. You were parenting full time while building a startup. What was work life balance for you like at that time?

[00:18:52] Sanjay Jupudi: You would get different answers from my family and me for the same question. These days people are talking about work [00:19:00] life intersection. It was more an intersection for me versus balance. In the first few years, there was no life. But then eventually, when we started to grow, when we started to stabilize I had a better work life balance. One day I decided we should not be working on the weekend.

[00:19:18] Sanjay Jupudi: The last five plus years, I've quit working on weekends. So it was a journey. For any entrepreneur, the initial days is not going to be easy. And you need a family that could at least understand what you're going through and support you in the process. 

[00:19:34] Carrie Richardson: I think that's a great place to stop today.

[00:19:37] Carrie Richardson: Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story. I think it's a phenomenal and inspirational entrepreneur journey, and I wish you so much luck at the finals for EY Entrepreneur of the Year. 

[00:19:51] Sanjay Jupudi: Thank you, Carrie. I really enjoyed doing my first podcast. 

[00:19:55] Carrie Richardson: Ah, it's a special time in a man's life. 

[00:19:59] Sanjay Jupudi: Very![00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] Carrie Richardson: Have a great afternoon. 

[00:20:01] Sanjay Jupudi: You too, bye.