We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mary Grothe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Mary, thanks for joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
Our company was named Sales BQ (BQ is the behavioral quotient). I founded the company in November of 2017 and focused primarily on building sales departments for small business CEOs. This path worked well for the first 18 months in business. We served over 45 companies, built their sales infrastructure, processes, and playbook, hired talent, and managed them. However, after 18 months, we finally had a feedback loop on the success of our engagements and realized that our clients, who on their own, had a great brand and marketing engine, outperformed the others. We had a decision to make. We could dig our heels in the ground and be the best sales training, recruiting, and consulting firm or we could adapt to what we felt like the market needed.
We chose to adapt. We brought on experts in branding and marketing and enhanced our services to offer a fully holistic revenue scaling team, led by a Fractional CRO and Fractional CMO. Unfortunately, this was at the end of 2019, and three months later, COVID decimated our company. We lost 60% of our clients in a 3-day period and I had no idea when the bleeding would stop or if I would even have a company anymore.
I was so distraught, I remember sitting on my knees and praying for God to just take the company away from me. I felt like I had not built it well… that I had not built it on a firm foundation that could weather a storm.
That Sunday, my pastor did a sermon called Unshakeable, He spoke from Matthew 7 24:27 and shared the scripture about building your house on the rock (Christ) and then it can withstand the storm. I felt the Lord tell me at that moment that my company was in fact build on the rock and what was left was meant to be and what dissipated wasn’t meant to be there and that together, we would rebuild the company. 2020 end up being the best year for us financially and also from a client success rate. With this success, it didn’t feel right to keep the name Sales BQ, as we had proven our Fractional CRO & CMO model and we needed a new name!
We went through an internal branding exercise and eventually, it was my husband David, who came up with the name, House of Revenue. My husband doesn’t work in our company, but we often spend our evenings together chatting about the day’s happenings, and his contribution to the branding conversation felt so right. Knowing we had built our house on the rock and had the best year to date, the name felt perfect.
To commemorate this, he bought me a wall-hanging scripture of Matthew 7 24:27 that still hangs in our office today.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I am the founder of House of Revenue® and CRO at Payroll Network, Inc. I am a faith-based leader, entrepreneur, global keynote speaker, and the host of two podcasts: ‘Revenue Radio’ and ‘Destination Remarkable’.
I began my sales career at a Fortune 1000 company at age 22, where I quickly advanced from an admin role to being the number one sales representative. By following my natural instincts to always put the customers first and listen to their needs, I was able to drive success for my clients and myself and brought in millions of dollars in revenue.
Driven to help others achieve success, I founded my first company at the age of 28 and became a business strategist for startups. Over a three-year period, I helped 36 startups reach profitability. My passion for scaling companies grew and I founded Sales BQ® to expand my reach from startups to companies with $1 million to $3 million in annual recurring revenue.
Our team recognized that focusing on the sales process alone was no longer enough to successfully scale a company, so we evolved Sales BQ® to House of Revenue® and developed a holistic revenue strategy that integrates sales, marketing, branding, customer success, and revenue operations. House of Revenue® builds unshakeable revenue foundations set for scale by focusing on all aspects of the revenue engine, as Fractional Chief Revenue and Chief Marketing Officers. In the past year, our team has helped multiple second-stage growth companies, between $2 million and $20 million in annual recurring revenue scale.
As a faith-based leader, my goal is to inspire and empower others to commit themselves to “do remarkable work”, to structure their lives so that they can truly honor their values, and to ask the questions, “What is most important in my life? Do I want to be successful, or do I want to be significant?” I am a global keynote speaker on entrepreneurship and faith-based leadership and am working on two upcoming books to be published under Forbes.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
We built an inbound marketing engine that follows, to a tee, the HubSpot Inbound Marketing methodology. This changed our business! In our first 2 years of business, I led business development through speaking engagements. Like clockwork, I spoke at an event, and we immediately had 2-3 new clients. However, COVID changed everything and my speaker calendar was wiped clean.
With that, we knew we needed to innovate and diversify our lead engine, so we got certified through HubSpot, launched a new website, and launched our inbound marketing program. We have continued to build on it for the past 2 years and now organically rank number one for our top converting keywords, which yields 1-2 qualified inbound leads per week.
When the pipeline is light, we activate our paid media campaigns, at roughly $1,000 per month ad spend, for the same top ranking keywords to ensure we capture as much of the traffic as possible.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
As an openly faith-based CEO, I struggle to find business books that align with my core ethics and standards. When I first started my company, I read Business by the Book by Larry Burkett. That book helped me understand the core foundational components to setting up my business’s core values, principles, processes, and culture.
The second book that helped me was Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt. As a consultant and business strategist, this book helped me understand the difference between strategy and execution and how they’re often mixed up.
The last book that I read that helped catapult my leadership ability as our company scaled to $5M in 4 years was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Unfortunately, I read that book about 6 months too late and had already made several of the mistakes that he warned entrepreneurs to avoid. But the book gave me the confidence to pivot as quickly as possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.houseofrevenue.com
- Instagram: @marygrothe
- Facebook: @houseofrevenue
- Linkedin: /in/MaryGrothe
- Twitter: @marylgrothe
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@marygrothe
- Other: www.marygrothe.com