Field Sales, with Austin Rolling [Episode 847]

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Austin Rolling is the founder and CEO of Outfield. Austin’s journey is a great story of persistence and resilience. Not the least of which is that his product was created for field sales teams. And well, his team has had to pivot during COVID. We’ll get into what he’s doing to prepare for the next normal. We’re also going to talk about being homeless. As Austin was not that long before he started Outfield. That’s not the typical journey for an entrepreneur. You’ll want to make sure you check that out. And we dig into what Austin foresees as the future of field sales.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Austin. Welcome to the show.

Austin Rolling: Hey, I appreciate you having me. How are you guys doing?

Andy Paul: We’re doing great. How are you doing?

Austin Rolling: I’m doing good, man. Just, looking forward to the weekend. Hoping for the best out of my Texas aggies, I’m not, I don’t have high expectations. Yeah.

Andy Paul: So you were, so you did the whole cadet thing.

Austin Rolling: Yeah, no, I didn’t. I just went there for grad school.

Andy Paul: Oh, for grad school. Okay. All right. So that was your MBA where you got that. Okay.

Austin Rolling: Correct.

Andy Paul: All right. So where was your undergrad?

Austin Rolling: I went to Eastern Michigan university. I studied communication

Andy Paul: That’s Epsilon.

Austin Rolling: Correct. How’d you know?

Andy Paul: I got a world of trivia stuffed into my head. useless information that just once it’s there, it just doesn’t go away.

Austin Rolling: I’ll tell you what I’m happy at the fact that you got the name. A lot of people I come across, they can’t even pronounce it.

Andy Paul: Okay. Yeah, so you’ve been sheltering in the Houston area.

Austin Rolling: Yep. I’ve been here since about 2009. I’m actually moved down here, right during, right after, like during the recession. I was working for Whirlpool at the time and actually hated the East Coast. They sent me to Philly and Philly is a really interesting city but that wasn’t for me. So I decided to come down to Houston and it’s been home. It’s been home ever since

Andy Paul: part of that, probably weather related.

Austin Rolling: it was weather related, man, but I’m a Midwestern guy. I

Andy Paul: I know, but enough is enough, right? I died. I grew up in Wisconsin, but yeah, when I went to school in California, it’s I’m not going back.

Austin Rolling: Partly the cold. It was partly the coal, but in Philly, the people are cold, which, that’s a totally different dynamic to it and yeah. And so that was like, I’m not a good fit. I like to smile and look people in the eyes and they don’t really do this almost.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And never did I ever spend it. I shouldn’t say it. And I haven’t spent a ton of time in Philadelphia. Actually. I lived there from the time I was six months to three years old, but I have no record, no recollection of that. So I have no idea whether they’re friendly. I’ve been a few times, but all right. Well, Houston’s a great place. So a question for you is, so what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about yourself during the pandemic?

Austin Rolling: Biggest lesson is, managing your attitude, managing your mental health, 

Andy Paul: And how do you do that?

Austin Rolling: yeah, most people can relate, but the pandemic has been really challenging, both on a personal level, but even also on a professional level for me, it’s just about, remaining optimistic.

Trying to be innovative, during these times. And then, I, it’s about waking up in the morning, challenging yourself to be the best that you could possibly be. I listened to a lot of motivational stuff throughout the day. and I work out a tremendous amount and I just try to remain positive.

And so during this time it’s actually been, I think, as a business owner, I think that we may actually look back at this time and realize that this was one of the most important years for us as a company. And, I truly believe that.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I think so. I think that. Moments of, great stress, as you said that, halfway off, if people are deliberate, as it sounds like you were being about, take care of yourself, but be doing the things you need to do to maintain as positive an outlook as you can. I think that presents opportunities for people.

Austin Rolling: The reason why that’s important is, as a business owner, your team takes cues off of you, right? And so your energy, you need to constantly manage, monitor your energy and how you project yourselves, because that’s gonna, that’s gonna rub off on the people that you work with. And during these times more than ever, you need to have that optimism and the right energy. And, it’s really important, but I’m excited.

Andy Paul: in the pandemic really sort of created this whole new world for your company because your product line was really oriented for field sales teams. So I’m just so curious how your world has changed and, have you had to pivot in the face of the pandemic?

Austin Rolling: Yeah, so he did. And, that was one of the things, anytime I hire somebody on, I’d take them through a Steve Blank. You Udacity course that you can find online, but the premise of that course is just how to think entrepreneurial. And I want everybody on my team right now. We’re about a team of 15, split between business 50, 50% of business and engineers.

But it’s important for everyone on your team to think from an entrepreneurial standpoint, because that’s how you can identify opportunities in the midst of a pandemic. And, yeah, we’ve pivoted in a number of different ways and I’ve challenged my entire team to be creative. Think outside of the box, what are some opportunities that maybe, we put to the back burner and the past that now, presents themselves as a, as an opportunity worth pursuing. And, yeah, we’ve had to pivot and we’re getting ready to launch a new app that I’m really excited about. I truly think it’s going to be disruptive, for the business to business, sales space.

Andy Paul: okay. Will you be able to tell us about it?

Austin Rolling: Absolutely.

Andy Paul: Okay. before you do that, let’s because I’ve had guests on the show before that have come on and said, I’ve got this exciting new product, but unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about it. And it’s come on, then that ruins all surprise. All right. So we’ll get back to that, but tell people what outfield does now or what you were doing when the pandemic hit. Cause it was really oriented towards helping you manage your field sales teams.

Austin Rolling: Yeah, I’ll field, it’s a web and mobile based, software application. And it’s designed, primarily for organizations who compete through outside sales, field marketing, field merchandising, activities. And that’s how we started. We started catering to that workflow. My background was in, prior to grad school and even a little bit outside of grad school was, and, I worked in a variety of different sales positions, including outside sales. And I just, I knew that there was a workflow, a different state, that we can cater and build around. And, we sought to do that and, we started the company in 2015, pre COVID. We registered at least 150 different companies, in 70 different countries, around the world. And so it was, it’s been quite a journey and, our biggest value proposition is just being able to offer a user experience and a user interface that really supports a traveling sales rep. And likewise sales managers, you got to imagine if you’ve got a hundred different outside sales reps working remotely around the country, you need a better way to be able to track and manage their activity and understand the nuances that make one market different from another. And so, we created a platform that allows companies to capture that data.

Andy Paul: You say emphasize field marketing. So field marketing, meaning primarily those organizations that are servicing like retail stores, brands that sell to them.

Austin Rolling: and yep. And that was our very first customer. And that’s how we got into business. The folks who don’t know, our company, we started, and Bryan college station, which is just North of Houston. That’s where Texas A and M is. And the first company of ours was, Cellucor. Which, they produce nutraceutical products like protein shakes, and pre-workouts all of this different stuff that you will find and like a vitamin shop at GNC, total nutrition. And at the time this was 2015 and they generated, I want to say, a couple hundred million dollars a year and it had a, a number I want to say a hundred. outside sales reps, around the country and they just didn’t really have a really good centralized way of being able to track all of that activity.

How many samples were they dropping off? What would the merchandising shelves look like? who did they speak with when they dropped into a store? And honestly, if they actually went, because sometimes people would report that they will go into a store and they’re just sitting on the couch, So they needed a way to be able to manage all of that activity. And we built this. We built a solution for them.

Andy Paul: And so includes things like route planning to your point about people sitting on the couch. So I presume you and I plan the routes, but they can also track, as you said, whether they actually do it.

Austin Rolling: Yeah. Yeah, they can. We built a route planner, and incorporated the Google API system. And, it’s really just about managing your territory. wWen I was in outside sales, I would sometimes spend 35- 40% of my week just behind the wheel. And as it’s just, the more time you spend behind the wheel, the less, the less context that you actually have with customers, right? And so if we can create a system that stream triggers that streamline the entire process, then you know, over the course of a year, you should be able to drive more results.

Andy Paul: So what basically has happened. if I can guess, but what’s happened with your clients in terms of, okay. I can’t send my people to the stores or the stores aren’t even open.

Austin Rolling: Yeah. And that’s been a, that’s been an interesting sort of thing. The good news is that, as different niches start to open up, we’re starting to see an uptick and, top line growth and utilization of the app. But when March and April hit, it was really, it was really a tough time for us because we didn’t know what to expect. And it was one of those situations where, like you mentioned earlier, we like our entire business model is built around face-to-face interactions and now, That’s being taken off the table. And so we just didn’t know what was going to happen and, a good, business, a good, executive team they try to build a business that is insulated from market conditions, the best that they can. So we’re done, we’re diversified in a number of different verticals, we’re diversified across a number of different regions. this was a global 

Andy Paul: yeah, I was gonna say that.

Austin Rolling: Yeah. our entire business was empty, impacted by this and it was just one of those times where you really have to practice, resolve and navigate through this winter. It really was a winter for us. and, we just had to stay the course and think about different ways to influence the market and, how can we create incremental value above and beyond what we were doing at the time, all intents and purposes, my sales team, they’re inside sales reps.

And so they’re actually able to use our solution, for inside sales. Now, granted, we’re still positioned in the marketplace as an outside sales tool, but yeah inside sales reps can use our system in a very effective way. And so that was one of the things that we shifted our attention to.

all right, let’s train up our customer base on how they can adjust themselves and, how they can adapt to this new world and how they can work in office and utilize the system to be effective.

Andy Paul: So what’s the new thing?

Austin Rolling: What is the new thing. All right. for the folks who don’t know, the name of our company is called Outfield, right? Like you’re throwing a baseball from the Outfield and, one of the ways that we’ve positioned ourselves, and, in a competitive sort of CRM marketplace is one of the ways is brand positioning, right? We’ve always tried to end up identifying our brand as this merge between sports and sales. Okay. even from the articles that we would pose from the content that we were released, it was, we tried to tell a sales story, through that, through the lens of, some sort of sports narrative, and, that was compelling and then later on. We said, how can we take this to another notch? And I’m giving you a history lesson to tell you what we’re going to do. utfield. One of the challenges that we faced early on was okay, our NPS scores, our net promoter scores always ranked higher for the sales manager, right then than it would for the sales rep. The sales manager, they got a lot of everything that they needed in terms of being able to track that activity of the reps, collecting the data that they need in order to be effective. But outside sales reps, they viewed our solution as a tracker.

Andy Paul: Yeah, command and control, which is, yeah, the way reps look at CRM systems in general,

Austin Rolling: Yeah.

Andy Paul: They like them near, they don’t like them nearly as much as the managers do it. Yes.

Austin Rolling: And so we wanted to change how we were positioned in the minds of a sales rep, because what happens is if a rep is if in order to create, an effective CRM and needs to be a platform that both creates value for the manager and the sales rep, If it’s one without the other, then chances are that company is going to churn out.

So how can we create something like that. is viewed by the sales rep as this awesome productivity tool. and, in addition to creating incremental features that provide value for the rep, like a route planner and just different tools that will help them manage their accounts where we were like, okay, how could we create a platform that challenges the sales rep, to become better, and challenge them to. Maximize the utilization of the tool. And what’s the one thing that we know about salespeople they’re competitive, right? They like, they like being recognized for, being good. and so we released, this was back in February, at least a system within outfields called League Play, which is basically a gamification system within outfield. Right where reps get to compete with one another on a weekly, monthly cadence. And they get recognized for all the awesome stuff that they’re doing out in the field. and in addition to being able to compete with their colleagues, they’re able to compete with their personal bests.

And so you can think about what we built is almost like a Madden or an NBA2K with an outfield. And, Andy, when we released that program within, within the outfield, it was a smash, it was a smash hit. It was the first time that we released a feature where the utilization of that feature went completely north people were loving it. And they didn’t view vape for the first time they didn’t really view outfield as this tracking tool. They viewed it as a, as something that now I’m creating a platform where I can create a personal brand for myself. A reputation. and one thing about reputations is once you establish a reputation, you want to live up to that reputation.

Andy Paul: Have to live up to it. Yeah.

Austin Rolling: yeah. And so these reps, they get scored and they get ranked based on their performance. They get scored and they get ranked on the utilization of the app. And so now we’re incentivizing people to use the solution the right way. And if they utilize the system in the right way, then the managers get all the data that they need. And so these reps, they are establishing this profile for themselves. We rank them, and categories of hustle, we ranked them in categories of leadership and all these different statistical categories. It’s very similar to a man. And so we were like, okay, This was awesome. People are really liking this and they’re really trying to figure out, how can I rank higher in this category?

How can I ring higher in this category? And you’re like, okay, awesome. They care about it. It’s one thing to release a feature and nobody gives a crap about it. They care about their reputation now. and so then the next thing opened up and we were like, okay, how can we enhance this? How can we make it better? And we are in the process of releasing a new app. It’s called Closers caught toes there’s coffee, which is basically a new environment where it’s the very first lead or a sales rep can compete with other sales reps across the globe to play within the outfield. They can only compete with their colleagues. Now they can port their data from Outfield over into closers. And now that’s a completely different environment.

Andy Paul: So anybody in the outfield community they’re competing against.

Austin Rolling: Anybody with an outfield community they’re competing against. And remember we have customers all across, the four corners of the globe, right across different industry verticals and we’re really excited about it because now that opens up opportunities for these guys to really establish a personal brand for themselves, very similar to an athlete.

Andy Paul: Well, the company’s okay with that.

Austin Rolling: We’re going to find out

Andy Paul: I presume that people can’t take their proprietary data and so on out there, but so on what basis are they competing with other companies, other users, the reps of other users around the world.

Austin Rolling: Yeah, it’s not proprietary then. So they actually, if I were to close a deal with ABC company, that deal would port over into the closers app. But my profile, my personal statistics, without revealing actual details of that deal, my personal, statistics, would port over. It’s almost like a fantasy league sort of thing.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I like that idea. what’s the, so what’s what are the statistics that are public within, closers to

Austin Rolling: Yeah. Yeah. Within our field right now, we can go into the outfield and every user has a black player card. It’s very reminiscent of a baseball card. I’m sure there’s people in your audience. Some of them are old enough to remember that,

Andy Paul: given this outfield, that’s not surprising. It

Austin Rolling: there you go. So on the back of it, we started off with.

hustle category, right? Leadership category, and a couple of other different categories, like preparation and all of these categories within each category is an algorithm. And there’s a number of different variables within that algorithm that makes up your score for bears. So there’s a macro score, a total score. And then there’s individual categories like attributes and the attributes Google, right? You don’t really know how to rank high to give you tips. and to rank high on Google was like this algorithm that features a number of different variables. We took that.

And, just based on what the activities that they’re. that they’re doing within our field. we’re really ranking them in different statistical categories. And so we never reveal to our users what those variables are. We just give them clues just some little like Google does.

And if you’re a member, Google refine that constantly refining the algorithm over time. So what we want to do is we want there to eventually be a strong correlation between that. Score is, and what that sales rep actually is in real life. And it’ll get better over time. That’s when we anticipate it’ll get better and more refined over time.

and, in addition to just the outfield ecosystem, we plan to be able to integrate with all different sources, CRMs

Andy Paul: interesting. I love the idea. I love this idea of, yeah. Is there a way that we can take all the variables? So a rep comes from. Industry a and let’s say he’s applying for a job in industry B and industry visa as well. Yeah. You’ve got no experience. It looks like they have a good track record, but yeah.

I have no way of knowing that’s relevant. Yeah, I think so the golden idea for the future is some way, it sounds like you’re beginning to think about it this way is how can I create a series of. Statistics that are normalized

Austin Rolling: Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Paul: yeah, this person’s, yeah, I’ll rank on a one to a hundred.

So this guy’s a 90 and the 90 is relevant to you because if you, that 90 would be okay in your field as well.

Austin Rolling: and that’s the part that I’m really excited about. That’s the part I figure. If you get enough smart people in a room, we can figure out how to do that. but I’m really excited to be able to solve it.

Andy Paul: very interesting.

Austin Rolling: Yes. initially we’re going to break things down, right? The way that we look at it.

And it’s like when you think about the UFC and you think about the boxing world, how they got the heavyweight light, heavyweight, they got featherweight middleweight and all these different divisions. That’s how we can start it off. We can start that sustained off by segmenting different people based on volume.

volume of deals versus, overall sales per transaction. And then there’s ways that we can dice it up initially. But our end goal is to be able to normalize this in such a way that it can translate over across different industries. It’s never, this is my do, this has never been done before.

Andy Paul: No, it’s not. I think it’s, I think it’s a very interesting idea. And I think it’s something that’s a long overdue, at least my perspective. No, seriously. I think this is, yeah. That. It could become your business by the way.

Austin Rolling: It could be. Yeah.

Andy Paul: That’s my humble opinion. All right. So you mind if I ask you a personal question because you have a very unique founder story because, just after you earned your MBA, you found yourself homeless.

Austin Rolling: I did. I

Andy Paul: So tell us about that.

Austin Rolling: after grad school, couldn’t get a job, man.

Andy Paul: That sums it up.

Austin Rolling: yeah, I couldn’t get a job. And part of the reason why is I didn’t really pry myself like some of the other students in a lot of the other students during college, they did internships with these top companies, either in big consulting, finance or oil and gas.

I did my internship for free. I started Aggie land, which was an on-campus accelerator. I had every intention to go to B-School in order to become an entrepreneur afterwards. I just did, I did the corporate America thing. It wasn’t really for me. and so in my experience, I tried to tailor my expense to give me as much exposure to entrepreneurship as I possibly could, but the tradeoff was okay.

now you’re not networking with some of these big companies. So after during the transition between my last semester in college, I started up, me and my co-founder. We started up an organization called a BCS startup, which basically the goal there was to establish this entrepreneurial ecosystem within Bryan college station.

That was very similar to Austin or Boulder, or, and, through that, we met a lot. Yeah. Different people, obviously that concept, I’m hoping that people within A, and M they’ve improved since we’ve ended that organization.

But, Not any of that really translated to a career. And so I started up all these different projects and a lot of them failed and, for the BCS startup, we did something called a mentor match. We coined a mentor match where we got, a little seed investment.

From one of the accelerators on, in college, college station, they gave us 20, 20,000 to get that company off the ground. And again, it didn’t really work, Didn’t really work for a number of different reasons. But then after that, I found myself with no options. And so it’s like, all right, we went through that 20,000 pretty easily.

I had no, I had no backup plan. I had no backup plan in my mind. I thought that was going to work. And it did not so

Andy Paul: yeah, some of the, no home, no car.

Austin Rolling: suddenly no car. When I was, when I was doing that, man, a lot of things started to spin out of control. my, I lost my house and my car and I

Andy Paul: what, so where’d you live?

Austin Rolling: Yeah, it was, I lived, people’s floors. I live on people’s couches. I lived, wherever I could live, in order to catch a break.

and so we, 

Andy Paul: did you have the vision for outfield in mind already at that point? what was keeping you going.

Austin Rolling: Yeah, it was keeping me going, after college is after our first or after that second venture, we put a nail in it. I said, okay, let me just do this. Let me just go get a job. and so in that process, here I am, I’m couch surfing and floor searching and trying to find a job with big corporate America, which you know, that wasn’t a dream of mine.

But it was all right. I’m hurting right now. but it will never work out, interviews wouldn’t work. W I could not, I couldn’t get the interviews that I would get, something would happen, where I just didn’t get the job. I would go through five or six interviews and they decided to go somewhere else, go, go with somebody else.

And I just said, you know what? All right. Let me go back to the guys who invested in our, our second startup and see if there were any opportunities with them. And, Manesh Patel was the president at the time and DAS Cunningham. He’s a CEO and they were, Dawson is a, it was a nagging, but I developed, I don’t know.

I guess they found some sort of favor in me at the time. And they were like, okay, here’s what we do have is we got all of these outside sales reps, working for our nutraceutical company and we have no idea what they’re doing. as it turns out the company who invested in, and then in our, C startup, they actually ran and sold your core.

And they had another problem that they needed to solve for. They knew that myself and my co-founder, we knew how to execute on building stuff. My background happened to be in outside sales. So I knew exactly what that value proposition was. so that amounted to about a year and a half, like this whole transition, it was about a year and a half of couch surfing floor search.

And before. I went back to these guys and I said, all right, we’ve got another concept, help us solve this problem. And boom, We, that’s when it happened. And so we started building out an outfield and they were an industry leader. And once their competitors found out that they were using this, this application called outfield, we were able to penetrate that vertical if tele course using this.

And they were one of the top dogs in this space, then we must, they must be doing something right with this

Andy Paul: Yeah, get that. You got to get that anchor clients

Austin Rolling: Yeah. So yeah, so we did that and, while I was getting that company off the ground, I finally got a job with Beats by Dre. Finally got a doubt with beats by Dre, which was, it was an outside sales position.

imagine that I was using my app for their organization. 

Andy Paul: doing field marketing

Austin Rolling: I was correct. Correct. And the fact that it was a remote position, and I could create my schedule with them that allowed me to do both at the same time I was building my company. While working, I just had a steady flow of income coming in.

So all the money that we were making, without a field, I just reinvested back into the company. I didn’t see me and my partner, we weren’t on payroll for the first two years. We just started hiring engineers. We started hiring students,

Andy Paul: But you’re paying the rent by your day job though.

Austin Rolling: Yeah, I was paying the rent by my day job of paying everybody.

So it was, it turned out to be a blessing and disguise and I’m a person of faith and I truly believe that everything happens for a reason. It really wasn’t meant it really wasn’t meant for me to land, within corporate America like that. because those types of positions, they were going to offer me 150,000.

but then, that’s 60, 70 hours of my life. And I just knew in a situation like that, I would’ve never been able to work on a startup project. So the perfect opportunity came by with beats. And that allowed me to do both and, ever since then. And we’ve just been growing as a company and as it’s just been a Testament, man, because that first year and a half, it was really dark.

There were times where I had to

Andy Paul: Yeah, I can imagine.

Austin Rolling: I was checking myself into the hospital, man. Cause I was having panic attacks and yeah, it was a really dark, really dark time. So it was rough, man. It really was rough,

Andy Paul: and so if you were to surf, summarize, if you could put a capsule and say young people, because one of the issues that we talk about in this program is mental health and sales and, it’s, Tough issue, especially now during the pandemic, in particular, but always as, so what you, if you’d summarize, what got you through it?

What was.

Austin Rolling: a lot of quality and uplifting media, I will surround myself with, I read a lot positive thinking type books. I listened to a lot of motivational tapes. I listened to it, a lot of Christian music, anything that can keep me uplifted. I had to, I worked out a lot. I needed those endorphins, I needed to. And so when it came to managing my mental health, this isn’t anything that you do. One time a day, managing your mental health is something that you do consistently throughout the day. You might need to stop throughout the day. You may need to pray or meditate, whatever you believe in. Take out a second periodically throughout the day.

And, try to just keep yourself uplifted. And if there’s anybody around you, that’s generating negative stimuli, you got you got it. I got a stiff on them and I remember mail and I was trying to get this company off the ground and I was couch surfing and all that stuff, man. you get a lot of people, even in your inner circle who start to like doubt you a little bit.

And it’s and so you got to just push them and you just got to focus on what you believe in. You got to focus on what you believe in just from a mental health perspective. From a mental health perspective. That’s the key thing that I want to get across. It’s not anything that you do once a day.

It’s not anything that you do. One time a week. You don’t go to a motivational seminar once a year. This is a constant practice. This is a custom practice that we, as a people, need to undertake. If we really want to maximize our potential.

Andy Paul: very interesting. And so just to follow the close loop on our field a little bit, is that, so you still best bootstrap the company.

Austin Rolling: Yeah. Yeah, we bootstrapped it.

Andy Paul: why haven’t you made that decision to say. Let’s go get some external funding.

Austin Rolling: Good question. we’re thinking about it now. Quite honestly, we’re thinking about it now, quite honestly. one of the things that’s important is, for us. Being an accelerator and just reading all the entrepreneurial books and my co-founder, he’s really a student of entrepreneurship as well.

we came across a lot of horror stories, one from. bringing in somebody into your company who may not be aligned with you in terms of vision or personality. That was one thing that we were concerned about. Something else is that as an entrepreneur, you want to make sure that you have your systems and processes together before you get a lot of money.

Cause otherwise, we see people all the time who get a crap ton of money, 2 million, three, 3 million, 4 million in investment. And next thing two years later they’re broke again and now they’re raising again. And next thing they’ve diluted their stake in their company to 3%.

We don’t want to do that. What we wanted to do was yeah, what we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure that we knew exactly what those monies would go towards. That we had our systems and processes in place. We can prove out our business model. We can prove out our operations that way we could approach.

somebody, from an investment standpoint with much more confidence, much more clarity in terms of what works, what doesn’t, that way we know where their funds are, where those funds would go. And then also in that way, you have a little bit more leverage when it’s time to negotiate a term seat. And so all of those things we had in mind, but now we’re starting to think about it now.

We’re starting to think about it now. but that’s a good question. We’ve been doing this for about four or five years. We just wanted to make sure we knew what we were doing before we went out and spent somebody else’s money.

Andy Paul: I think there’s a lot of virtue in bootstrapping a company. The startup that I did a number of startups in the one that was the biggest success by far was one that was essentially bootstrapped and took it, the founder and his co-founders and the good management team took it from.

I was there from, we went five to 125, another multi-billion and basically bootstrapped. So

Austin Rolling: yeah.

Andy Paul: As long as you, what he did was so wise that the CEO and founder was, yeah, just wasn’t going to be swayed by other people’s timeframes. he had the vision and yeah. Competitors were growing two, three times faster at the time.

He didn’t get panicked by it. Just Ted the vision stayed the course and all those other companies disappeared. And

Austin Rolling: We hit here’s the thing. Out of the top CRMs for outside sales. What were the top three right now? but all of our competitors they raised. So we’re in a similar situation. 

Andy Paul: well, 

Austin Rolling: go ahead.

Andy Paul: Yeah. it’s our, it goes along with your story about, having this vision and having faith throughout the dark times is yeah. Having that same vision with your company.

Austin Rolling: Yeah. That, and if you want to, if you want to explore new business models, it’s difficult sometimes when you’re attached to a VC who just wants to return in five to 10 years, they want you to stay the course. but I’m, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a son of an entrepreneur.

I’m the grandson of a, of an entrepreneur. And I love thinking outside of the box. And so I would hate for somebody to just nail us down to something because it’s convenient for them. I don’t know if we could spin out. Closer’s coffee into this global sales league. If we had a VC that was attached to the idea of, of outfield alone.

So that’s something else you gotta be mindful of.

Andy Paul: absolutely. Yeah. I like, and I do like that idea

Austin Rolling: we’ll see me. Yeah, it, Hey, either this is going to be a billion dollar idea or is it going to fail, but you know what? I could not think of any reason not to try doing this.

Andy Paul: Yeah, no, I, yeah, I like it. All right. So Austin tells pokes how they can connect with you and learn more about what you’re doing.

Austin Rolling: honestly, I’m not the biggest social media guy. I’m actually a private

Andy Paul: I know you are hard to find on social media.

Austin Rolling: Yeah. I’m not big on social media. my email is Austin at outfield app. That com I’m also available on LinkedIn. I’m not on Instagram. I don’t have snap. You don’t go to school.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Even hard to find a little bit on LinkedIn,

Austin Rolling: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got to old school like that.

I do have a Facebook. my family won’t let me delete my Facebook. They won’t let me delete it. So you could probably find me on

Andy Paul: All right. All right. Email’s good. All right, Austin, it’s been a pleasure and I look forward to it again.

Austin Rolling: Outstanding. Thank you for having me.