Ron Antevy With e-Builder

Intro: [00:00:01] You’re listening to Innovation Radio, where we interview entrepreneurs focused on innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. Innovation radio is brought to you by the world’s first theme park for entrepreneurs the Levein’s Center of Innovation, the only innovation center in the nation to support the founders journey from Birth of an Idea through successful exit or global expansion. Now here’s your host, Lee Kantor.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:28] Lee Kantor here another episode of Innovation Radio and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, the Levein Center of Innovation. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the Innovation radio, we have Ron A.V with E Builder. Welcome, Ron.

Ron Antevy: [00:00:48] Thank you. Thanks, Lee. It’s good to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:50] Well, I’m so excited to be talking to you. You used to be with the builder. I don’t know if you’re still affiliated with them in any manner, but we’re here to talk about primarily your journey from entrepreneur and building builder to your exit. Can you talk about a little bit about what you’re up to today and then we’ll get into it? Builder.

Ron Antevy: [00:01:10] Sure, sure. So yeah, I’m no longer with the builder. I recently retired and I know we’ll talk about the journey, but about five years ago I sold E Builder to a public company called Trimble, and I spent the last five years at Trimble in various roles running the business, continuing to grow it. And then I was more on the investment side and running a corporate venture capital arm for Trimble. And now I’m off kind of doing the same thing mostly for myself. I’m out investing in technology companies, early stage type companies and mid stage growth businesses in tech.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:49] So let’s get back to the now. Let’s start at the beginning. Now, in college, were you always had dreams of being an entrepreneur and then, you know, venture capitalists and all the stuff that you’re doing now, was that something that you were aiming at or was that just something that happened, you know, through the natural evolution of a career?

Ron Antevy: [00:02:08] Yeah, I never thought about the venture capital side of things and never thought I’d be doing that. But as a kid growing up, my parents are immigrated here from another country. They were entrepreneurs. I they sort of instilled in myself and my brothers that, you know, kind of if you want to get ahead, the way to do it is to have a business and to be an entrepreneur. So I always had that sort of desire to be an entrepreneur. I studied civil engineering in college and my brother studied architecture in college. One of my I have three brothers, but one of them studied architecture. And he and I thought that we’d get into construction. And that was our family’s, our family was in the construction industry. And once we when he graduated and I graduated, I went I went to work for a big company for a few years. He got a master’s degree in construction management and wrote his master’s thesis about what at the time was the still very nascent Internet just starting. And his master’s thesis became the business plan for E Builder. We then built together over about 25 years.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:15] Now, when he had that, I guess conceptually there was a business there. When did you take the leap into the world of E E Builder and say, okay, this is something now that we’re going to put all the chips on the table and go boldly forward with?

Ron Antevy: [00:03:32] Yeah, So it’s interesting because so John John started the business in 1995 and then I was kind of advising him in the background. I had a really good corporate job. I was, as you know, a rising star in a business and a leadership role, making good money and so on. And but about three years in 1998, one thing led to another. I had been talking with John and I said, you know what? I’m going to I’m going to take a chance. And I took the big leap of faith. I quit my job. And I actually drove up to Gainesville, Florida, because the business was based in Gainesville, where both of us went to school and got an apartment. And I said, we’re going to figure out how to make this work. Didn’t have a salary for a year before I had any kind of salary there. And John actually made it four years without a salary before we started drawing a paycheck. So now and that was in 98. So 98.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:33] When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. When you have something now you have something to lose. What was kind of the was that a hard decision to make? You know, here you are. There was a path for you in this corporate setting to leave, that there was, I’m sure, some pros and cons. There had to be a sheet of paper with pros and cons on it somewhere. Yeah, trade offs, you know.

Ron Antevy: [00:04:57] Yeah, well, you know, I didn’t have much to lose. I mean, it’s I didn’t have a family. I was single I think when I think now having the family and kids in school and all the the responsibilities and commitments that you have make it tougher to take the leap. But at the time it still was a leap because I had a great job and I had a career and so on. But when John started to, he actually called me and said, Do you? Think I should do this. He had an offer right out of school, and we went through a little exercise, and I told him exactly what you just said, which is he really had nothing to lose because he had had no money, he had no family. He it’s like worst case, it doesn’t work out. He can always go get a job. So it was easier for him in some respects to do it, even though it takes a lot of guts to do this. And it was a little bit harder for me. But and I think if I would have waited a few years, five years, had a family kind of thing, I probably never would have even taken the leap. It starts to become really difficult to make, to take the chance.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:06] And that’s a good lesson for the young people. Listening right now is just that. Right When you have less responsibility, this risk isn’t a big risk. It’s a small risk relative to the other risk you’re going to be taking later in your life.

Ron Antevy: [00:06:20] That’s right. Yeah. And I think some people for for the folks that are thinking about this, you know, if you’re if you’re young, if you’re right out of school, you might say to yourself, well, I don’t have the experience that I need or let me go out and work for a while. I actually think you figure that stuff out. You do figure it out. It’s more about being able to take the risk and the the sooner the better in some respects, because it’s a much it’s a much simpler thing to recover from if you try it when you’re in your early twenties versus when you’re in your forties or something. And that’s not to say you can’t do it. And there are many success stories of that as well, but it’s just a much higher hurdle of risk that you’re taking on.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:03] So what was it like? You moved to Gainesville and now you’re looking at your brother and you’re like, okay, now what? Like, did you have an action plan? Did you know how, you know, those first days were going to go, or were you now just looking at a blank sheet of paper and saying, okay, this is what have we got to do now?

Ron Antevy: [00:07:20] Well, when I when I first joined and John said to me, I have this great product and I have this great market and it’s this amazing business now with the Internet, and it was a collaborative tool that can be used over over the Internet for construction. And all we need is a sort of a go to market plan. We just need to scale things up. We need to operationalize things. And we have tons of businesses. We’re talking to lots of people, tons of leads. So I sort of was led to believe that there’s a great business here. We just need to operationalize a few things. After digging in and arriving and spending a little bit of time, I realized, you know, John wasn’t doing this for any reason. I mean, this was his belief, obviously. But I dug in. I realized the business model really was not a good business model, and it needed to be changed. There was a lack of focus. We were trying to do too much. There were some that we had to do a little bit of work we had to do with the product, so there was a lot that we had to do.

Ron Antevy: [00:08:22] I took a step back. We shed some things that were not a core focus that we where we wanted to be as a business. And that’s another important lesson. I think. I see small companies try to take on too many things. They’re afraid of missing out an opportunity, so they want to do everything. And the reality is you see huge companies that only do two or three things, but they do them very well. And so we did that. We focused we changed the business model completely. We change who we targeted. We changed how we price the product. And then we started to figure out also how to sell. That took a little bit of time. And then and then finally, what I did, we knew that we needed to raise some money. We were bootstrapped. That’s why none of us took salaries and we said we have to go out and raise some money. So I also did that. So that was kind of the the game plan for maybe the first year, year and a half that I was focused on.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:23] Now when at the time this is kind of early Internet, right?

Ron Antevy: [00:09:29] That’s right.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:29] Construction companies aren’t typically early adopters of new technology like this. Was that part of the challenge is getting them to even, you know, take the leap into the Internet and to, you know, get away from paper and pencil and onto a keyboard?

Ron Antevy: [00:09:46] Yeah, that was the biggest challenge, actually. We were. So, you know, John likes to say we were we were way too far ahead of our time. We would go to a very, very large and reputable construction company. So multi hundreds of millions of dollars, billion dollar businesses. And we sit down and we talk to them that we have this Internet based software today. People talk about things like software as a service and things being in the cloud and all these terms that are very common in technology. Back then, none of this, none of this existed. So we would explain what we’re doing and the prospect these. Senior executives at construction companies would back all the way up. They didn’t even want to talk about or software. They were trying to wrap their head around the Internet and they’d say, What do you mean, this cloud? What do you mean? We put stuff? Who controls the Internet? Who’s paying for information to go back and forth from all these different people? So we would find ourselves, instead of being in sales mode, we would be in education mode. And. And that was happening early on. And that was actually another challenge that we had to overcome. Because you don’t you can’t have a business. You don’t make money by educating people unless you’re in an education business. So we had to figure out how to sell versus and how to get people to buy what we were selling versus just educate them about the Internet and the technology that was coming on board.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:16] So. So when you realize that, how did that change your marketing? Like is that this is a totally different tactic now that you have to deploy in order to get people to understand what it is your services.

Ron Antevy: [00:11:30] Yeah. So, so this was like a big turning point for the business and it probably happened it was in the early 2000. So it’s probably, you know, more than 20 years ago. But what we did is we, we, we had some customers and people that were using our product and we went out and interviewed those customers and spent time with. I did a lot of these interviews myself. We really tried to understand why did people use what we had, why did they pay us money? Really, It was almost like a very innocent question. We would ask people, Why are you paying to use what we’ve created? And from that we distilled the real major benefits of our product and which market segments were benefiting from our product. So we discovered that facility owners we were. So our software helps people build buildings and infrastructure and that kind of a thing. And there are a lot of people in the construction industry. There are architects and engineers and contractors and so on, but we discovered that it was the facility owner. So if you think of a hospital, it would be memorial health care system in Broward County, Florida. They have multiple campuses. They build. They spend hundreds of millions every year on construction. We discovered that it was that segment that benefited the most from our product. And then we figured out how to quantify the benefit. And once we did that, we embarked on a very targeted marketing plan.

Ron Antevy: [00:13:00] Instead of just going out and trying to get leads and doing trade shows and doing a lot of what common you would think of common marketing, we pinpointed we got very, very focused. We said, you know, there’s a certain there’s a certain kind of hospital. And we started with hospitals specifically, but we said in the United States there are 600 hospital systems and those hospital systems have more than one campus, and they spend a certain amount of money on construction every year. And those are the ideal client for us, and we can really save them tons of money. We figured out that we could save them anywhere from 2 to 4% of the amount of money they spend every year on construction. So you’re talking about millions of dollars saved. And we then put put various marketing tactics in place to get in front of those 600 targets and explain to them what we were doing in the hopes that just a few of them would agree to take a look at what we were doing. And then, of course, a few of them would would buy our product and our service. And that’s that’s kind of that started a journey for us. We eventually expanded from hospitals and health care to higher education and from there to government and from there to commercial real estate.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:20] Now, I don’t want to give short shrift to the beginning of this. You went The customer discovery point of any business is critical.

Ron Antevy: [00:14:32] Yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:33] How going to your customer to ask them why they bought the thing you sold them requires a level of humility and vulnerability that not every executive or leader has. Can you talk about those initial conversations? Because you’re you’re basically asking your customer why you bought the thing you sold them.

Ron Antevy: [00:14:56] That’s right.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:57] And you have to do that. And it’s you’re trying to get a nuanced answer and not. What do you mean you sold it to me? Because a lot of times people buy things because how they imagine it would be not from what it actually does.

Ron Antevy: [00:15:12] So. That’s right. No, you’re right. And not only that, but a lot of times when you are a customer and a vendor comes to you for any reason, you also have preconceived notions of why they’re there. When when a vendor shows up, you think, well, they’re trying to sell me something more, or they’re they’re there for a reason. What’s the real reason? So it actually is there’s an art form to it. Like I said, I did it myself. This was in the in the early 2000s. We went through a period of there was the dotcom boom and then the dotcom bust where Internet companies were frowned upon. And so we were struggling candidly, we we weren’t growing. We thankfully we had a business. Many of our peers in the industry were going out of business. Many Internet companies that were very well funded were were going bankrupt. So it was a time it was easy to be humble. I’ll put it to you that way. But but even so, I think you’re you’re spot on. I mean, it’s it’s an art. It took time to figure out how to do it. And one of the things that we learned, I would I would ask I would have to ask the same question. It’s like being a great interviewer or a great journalist or it’s like when you watch 60 Minutes and you see the folks that ask the kinds of questions that get people to really open up.

Ron Antevy: [00:16:36] It was that kind of work, and I would have my list of questions and I would start with softballs and build the relationship and build some rapport with the customer. And I’d eventually go deeper. And some customers were more willing to share information, and others were even after I told them 20 times that I’m not there to sell anything and I’m really there just to learn and to make our product better for them and to help benefit them. Still, some customers would keep it close to the vest and not want to open up completely, and that was okay, you know, but you do enough of these and what you start to tease out different trends. I start to hear the same information and I developed a rule of thumb for myself. I said, if I hear the same thing four or five times, for me it’s fact. At that point I would write it down and say, you know, this is this is a fact. And so I just did a bunch of those interviews and they did get easier over time. And the other interesting benefit of doing that, that it is, by the way, very critical. And I and I think a lot of entrepreneurs missed the mark on this. They’re excited to do some of the other stuff and get out there and try to sell or whatever they want to do.

Ron Antevy: [00:17:53] But this is this is the key to everything in terms of your success is really figuring this out. And so so I did it. I did it for a long time. And what I found is the people that even I also, by the way, I did it with prospects, which is even harder to talk to prospects about it because they really wondering what it is you’re doing there. I did it with folks that that didn’t choose us, that bought our competitor product. But but one of the benefits I was going to tell you that we got out of this process is people if you think about how many companies actually do this, how many companies get a call from the CEO that says, tell me why you bought from us and tell me what we could do better and tell me what you like and what you don’t like and so on. And it spreads so much goodwill amongst our customer base and our prospects. People would say, boy, these these folks really care. They’re trying to do the right thing. They’re trying to build a great product and a great company simply because we were doing these interviews and selfishly, we were doing them to gain more information. So it’s a great I can’t say enough about it. I’m passionate about it.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:06] Now. Before you decided to do that, was it a hard decision to make to actually do that kind of work? Because it takes a lot of time and then I could see some people rationalizing. Like, Why do I have to do this? I already know what my product does or service does.

Ron Antevy: [00:19:24] Yeah, it was it was tough to convince and it really in early, early on it was my brother and I that did it. Like I said, this isn’t a kind of a task that you can, especially as a startup. Obviously, when we towards the end of our journey, we had several hundred employees and it’s a different situation. But early on it’s the kind of thing that you have to you can’t delegate. You need somebody senior who can ask the right questions, who can who can take the conversation wherever it goes, wherever the prospect or customer takes it. So so it was hard to convince John and it was me and John and a couple of other people that did it. I would say, though, that the the hardest conversation and the hardest decision to make was actually something else, and that was the focus conversation. So when we were selling to a lot of different, we had contractor clients, owner clients, architects, engineers, subcontractors. We had different markets that we played in, different geographies that we were involved in. And we we made this decision that we’re going to completely narrow the focus to these 600 hospitals. When when we made that decision, that was a lot of debate before we we agreed to do that because it’s very counterintuitive. And my brother in particular, but others in the company were like, we’re going to we’re going to go out of business. What do you mean we’re not going to sell all these other leads that come in. We’re only going to sell these 600 companies. I mean, that’s crazy. And so that was the toughest decision that we made. And in hindsight, it was it was a turning point. It was pivotal for the business.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:11] Right. And and that’s the thing when it comes to narrowing focus and pruning, you’re not saying you’re never going to sell to these other people. It’s just not today. You know, you’re going to focus today on these 600 and let’s really let’s own this market and be the go to resource for these folks. And then let’s down the road, we get to all those people, but just not today.

Ron Antevy: [00:21:36] That’s exactly right. And that’s how that’s how we would that that’s exactly the conversation that we would have internally for the folks that were just die hard. You know, how could we be turning away from this business? And we’d say, look, it’s just for for now, it’s not forever, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:21:53] So now as you kind of you penetrate the one market, you expand to the other markets. Now you’re getting traction, you know, probably more than you could have imagined when you first started, Right. All your dreams are coming true.

Ron Antevy: [00:22:06] Yep.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:07] How did you know it was time now to exit?

Ron Antevy: [00:22:11] Well, you know, we had we had a really great run and the company grew once we nailed down, when we got the focus and we got kind of the whole business, the go to market figured out and the sales process figured out. We had a period that I would say longer than a decade where we are average annual growth was in excess of 30% was between 30 and 50%. And so the company started to really, really took off. And and then fast, fast forward all the way into 20 2015, 2016, 2017, the company is doing north of $50 Million. At this point, they’re over 250 employees. And we were thinking, you know, and I’m thinking to myself, we really weren’t thinking about exiting actually, but I was thinking to myself, Boy, I’ve never done this before, which I had thought, you know, for for the 20 years along the way. I thought that, too. But at this point, I started thinking, you know, I’ve never done this before. We’ve had so much success. We’re getting into the quote unquote big leagues. I’d really love to have a partner with experience to help me get to the next level, to get to 100 million or 200 million, and maybe I can de-risk my own personal situation and take some chips off the table, so to speak. So I thought to myself, you know, John and I will sell part of the company and continue to grow the business. I was very bullish. I thought there was lots of opportunity ahead. I just thought it’d be great to have somebody else sitting at the board table with me and not just going it alone.

Ron Antevy: [00:23:57] So that’s really what started the process. And and then what happened is we went through the process and we were a highly sought after asset. So because we were a bootstrap business, we had these great growth metrics. We were a leader in our space. Many of the financial buyers that are out there, the the. Private equity investors, they were just all of them were lining up to want to do something with us. And then we had a couple of strategic what people call the strategic buyers. So companies like Trimble that came along and said, We really like what you’re doing, but we aren’t really into buying a piece of the company and being a partner with you, we’d need to buy the entire company. And so we we you know, one thing led to another. We didn’t really plan for it to happen that way. And then when we sat down with them, we really liked what what they had to say. And we like the opportunity to continue to run the business and continue to grow the business. And I thought that I would get with Trimble in particular, the ability to have that partner. I’d have somebody to help me go to the next level. And that’s really how it turned out. I mean, we ended up growing the business significantly more once we were purchased and I had the support of a big company to do it. And at the same time I had the autonomy to keep doing things like running the business the way I did when I when I owned it.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:24] And that’s another great lesson for entrepreneurs when it comes time to exit, to know ahead of time who the players are and who would be the good partners that might become the good exit partner.

Ron Antevy: [00:25:37] Yeah, that’s it. Just to highlight that, I’d say you really have to think about it before the day comes. And, and, and I was having conversations with the private equity folks for a number of years before I actually decided I was going to take an investment. And then I also knew and I had had conversations with most of the strategic buyers that are out there. So if you as an entrepreneur, if you take on an investment. And of course, now I’m on the other side of that and I see how how it looks from an investor’s perspective. But that’s really a marriage. And the the amount of money you get is really the least important. And that may not seem obvious when you’re a fledgling entrepreneur and the getting money is so important for you to continue to grow your business. But it’s really who you who you marry up with because you’re going to be dealing with them. It’s a true partnership and picking the wrong partner will will ruin the business regardless of how much money they give you or the valuation and so on. So that’s an important lesson. And then if you go in and sell the business and exit completely, that’s also very important because it’s true what they say. You put 20, 25, 30 years. We put a lot of time into this business. Some people don’t do don’t, don’t go that far, but it’s still your baby and you still care about the customers and you still care about the employees and you care about the vision and the further the future direction of the business. So it’s important that you pick that right partner. And you can’t just do that in a in a process where you have one or two meetings and you make a decision, you know, you need to be doing that early and thinking about it ahead of time. Good point.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:24] Now, changing gears a little bit here, talk a little bit about the Levant Center innovation. How do does how do they kind of help the ecosystem and why are they so important to an entrepreneurial ecosystem?

Ron Antevy: [00:27:41] Sure. So I’m a volunteer at the Levine Center and I’m very passionate about what’s happening there. What the Levin Center does is provide resources for an entrepreneur, especially early in that process. Now, the Levant Center helps throughout the process from the idea stage into creating a business to the acceleration and even the post accelerator stage. But they’re providing a wide variety of resources, people that you meet lawyers, accountants, marketing people, other entrepreneurs with experience. So a ton of different experiences that if you’re an entrepreneur just starting out, you’re trying to figure out, what do I do first? How do I what do I do next? As I said, I for me, for 20, 20 some odd years, every day was a new day. I was figuring every time I thought I figured something out, the game changed. The company got bigger. The I had new challenges to deal with. So how do you figure all that stuff out? I mean, you can try to learn it all the hard way and and you eventually can do that. Or you have folks around you that can help you and mentor you and advise you. And that’s really what the Levant Center does. It provides that whole ecosystem of people and mentors to help answer questions and help you with problems that you may have along your journey.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:11] And now that E Builder is kind of in the rearview mirror, what are you up to now? How can we help you?

Ron Antevy: [00:29:20] Well, these days I’m looking for opportunities where I can be an investor. So I’m thankfully, I’m in a position where I don’t need to be an operator of a business anymore. And and after a number of years and as the business grew, it’s more and more pressure. And when we are part of a public company, it’s even more pressure to hit numbers and do all of those things. So I’m happy to step away from that now. And I’m really looking and I’ve been working with a few companies where I’m an investor and then typically an advisor or on the board where companies that are technology companies, typically it’s enterprise software. And I’m I’m usually looking for companies that are past the initial idea stage and pass product market fit. So they have a few million dollars in revenue already. They have some customers and they’re trying to go from that level of say, two or $3 Million in revenue to 20 or 30 or $50 Million in revenue. So that kind of scale up phase is it requires a whole different set of skills and it’s a it’s an area that’s super fun for me in an area that I have helped other companies grow at. So that’s what I’m looking for these days. And it’s fun. It’s fun to see other entrepreneurs that have built something and to see them take it further than they ever thought they could do, just just like I did.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:54] And so these are SAS technology companies, or are they in construction or it doesn’t matter what industry.

Ron Antevy: [00:31:02] Doesn’t matter what industry, but it’s SAS tech companies and it’s B2B. So and enterprise type stuff. If the if the market that the company is selling to is a is a big complex market like construction, like utilities, energy, that kind of thing, it’s even better. But yeah, it doesn’t need to be construction. So concepts are many of the go to market concepts when you’re selling a business application software to a large enterprise are really the same regardless. So that’s the idea.

Lee Kantor: [00:31:38] So if somebody wants to connect with you or somebody on your team, what’s the best way to do that? Is it through LinkedIn or do you have a website for your firm?

Ron Antevy: [00:31:46] So so they can connect with me through LinkedIn or I can give you my email and they’re happy for someone to email me directly at Ron at A.V. Capital dot com. So my last name, Capital Dotcom.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:03] Well, Ron, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Ron Antevy: [00:32:09] Oh, thanks so much for having me, Lee. I appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:32:11] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Innovation Radio.

Intro: [00:32:18] This episode of Innovation Radio was brought to you by the world’s first theme park for entrepreneurs, the Levein’s Center of Innovation, the only innovation center in the nation to support the founder’s journey from Birth of an Idea through successful exit or global expansion. If you are ready to launch or scale your business, please check out the Levant Center of Innovation by visiting Nova Dot edu. Forward slash Innovation.