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Sam Caucci has managed and coached sales and leadership teams for publicly held, private sector and franchised companies across the globe.
Sam founded 1Huddle, a workforce training platform using game technology to help organizations better prepare their people for work. With clients across the globe, 1Huddle has impacted people across organizations in a wide array of sectors, with clients including Loews Hotels, ESPN, Audible (an Amazon Company), Madison Square Garden, and FASTSIGNS. Applying an innovative approach to preparing people for the workforce, Sam oversaw the creation of the training game platform, the first game-based platform that transforms the way organizations onboard, train & develop their team members.
Before 1Huddle, Sam was the National Director of Franchise Sales And Marketing for the Parisi Speed School, directing the sales training program for 83 locations. He was previously in a leadership role with Life Time Fitness, serving as Director of Sales and spearheading the grand opening and overall management of the company’s expansion into the NJ/NYC market. Before joining Life Time Fitness, Sam was General Manager for Perfect Competition Athletic Development, a sports performance training center nationally recognized for its preparation of elite athletes from across the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MLS. While at Perfect Competition, Sam managed sales, sponsorship, and negotiation for the team responsible for the training and development of over 2,500 elite professional athletes.
Sam is proud to have been a part of the sales and service training of thousands of workers. He is the author of the #1 Amazon Bestseller, Not Our Job: How College has Destroyed a Generation of Workers and How to Fix it. He has been featured on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, The Huffington Post, ESPN, Yahoo Finance, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg.
In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Sam says:
As a Founder, you have only one point of view on your business and its overall opportunity, and sometimes investors don’t share that same opinion. The biggest challenge in any fundraising process is to find investors that share a little bit of your worldview.
I would spend more money faster. I would double down my investment in marketing and customer acquisition. The currency of a successful business is not always cash, runway, or sales. It can also be time. As a startup that wants to grow, we had to get time on our side. Once you know what moves the needle through the business, you should go all out on it. Once you find the one or two metrics that give you insight into how fast you can grow, you should spend aggressively on it, not carefully. I believe it is riskier to grow slower than it is to overgrow.
Read on to know more about Sam Caucci and his journey.
Sam Caucci: I’m the Founder and CEO of 1Huddle. We are a workforce training platform that onboards and upskills employees faster using games. Currently, our company is in a massive growth spurt. We just finished raising our Series A Round at the end of 2019. And with the start of 2020 being thrown into chaos around COVID-19, most recently, we are working with customers across the globe that are trying to figure out how to transition to remote work.
Sam Caucci: I spent my career managing sales and service teams across the sports industry, and I always felt that colleges were not still doing a great job of preparing young people for their careers. I also felt that companies were continually struggling to onboard and make new hires for careers in sales. So, it was that experience that led me to the idea to build a platform using something people are already great at, like a game, to more effectively get them ready for work.
Sam Caucci: 1Huddle is the fastest way to onboard and upskill workers. We use game mechanics as a way to make the things employees need to know stickier. When I started the company, we focused solely on sales. The companies that used our platform used it for training and communicating with all of their revenue-generating employees. What we learned rather quickly, about three years ago, was that our product has applications beyond just salespeople. When we started the company, we were initially called ‘Sales Huddle’ because we worked only with sales people. As our company grew, we pivoted to a focus, not just on sales, but a focus on every industry. This repositioning not only opened us up to a much larger customer base but was also complimented by us changing our name and rebranding as ‘1Huddle.’
Sam Caucci: In Q4 2019, we raised $8 million in total so far.
Sam Caucci: 1Huddle is an enterprise SaaS platform, so naturally, our go-to-market strategy was to sell to the enterprise. When we started, our initial focus was on targeting C-Level executives that are responsible for all revenue-generating job functions. This approach was extremely successful as it allowed us to position our product as a tool used to drive performance. In the beginning, we spent $0 on marketing because when we started the company, all of our focus was on direct selling and earned media, which included us getting major global media hits on everything from Fox, to CNN, to CNBC.
Sam Caucci: Our players. We have an extensive user base that not only uses 1Huddle when they play for companies, but they also bring 1Huddle with them to their next job. This network effect is the primary reason why 1Huddle has grown as fast as we have.
Sam Caucci: They only spend money on things that they can measure. While it makes sense that you need to be able to measure your marketing spend to make better decisions, when you are a startup and young, it’s fair to assume that all of the cards are stacked against you. You have to take risks, and sometimes you have to take risks on things you can’t measure. So a lot of startups get screwed up because they get stuck in the minutiae that every ad that they publish is something that they can measure and something that they can trace back to sales. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on marketing that I can’t measure ROI on, but I am confident that has had an impact on the way the overall community has seen our product and had exposure to our brand. Sometimes, you just have to take risks.
Sam Caucci: Our company was lucky enough to be generating revenue from day one, and we were focused on growing in a very disciplined manner. With that in mind,
every company has decided on when or if to fundraise. For me, I knew that we had a company and a product that had a tremendous opportunity in the market, and the only way to move as fast as we wanted was to be through fundraising. So the decision to fundraise was one, made out of opportunity in one that knows that while we continue to grow without fundraising, life is ultimately short, and we wanted to move fast. The process of fundraising was easy. It’s like no other sales process where we have to find investors, reach out to investors, have conversations with investors, and you can make it with a lot of them until enough of them say yes and give you money.
I’ve met hundreds of investors. I have met around 200-250 investors in the last 5 years. I met them through attending networking events, directly emailing them, and asking for warm introductions. Direct introductions is always the best option but it is not something that you can totally influence. There are some startups out there that just don’t have a network yet, and you can’t get introductions if you don’t have a network. However, the one that you can control the most is direct outreach. You can 100% control doing your homework, doing your research, creating a customized and personalized awareness, whether it is via email, social media, AngelList, or attending an event. The key is to not be generic and that is where most startups miss. You can’t take a single email and send it to everybody. So direct outreach is the best one if you take the time to personalize each one and reach out to people appropriately.
Sam Caucci: As a Founder, you have only one point of view on your business and its overall opportunity, and sometimes investors don’t share that same opinion. The biggest challenge in any fundraising process is to find investors that share a little bit of your worldview.
I would spend more money faster. I would double down my investment in marketing and customer acquisition. The currency of a successful business is not always cash, runway, or sales. It can also be time. As a startup that wants to grow, we had to get time on our side. Once you know what moves the needle through the business, you should go all out on it. Once you find the one or two metrics that give you insight into how fast you can grow, you should spend aggressively on it, not carefully. I believe it is riskier to grow slower than it is to overgrow.
Sam Caucci: Our goal is to triple our user base and triple our ARR. Today, the gameplay is off the charts for us, so we feel like we’re in a really good position to continue to focus on the things that we can control. The COVID-19 crisis has changed the way the world looks today, especially in the startup community, and has created some new challenges for startups as they think about where they’re actually going to end up on their goals for 2020 versus what their budgets were. So with that in mind, our focus continues to be
in the areas that we can control, and those areas include user growth, gameplay, and ARR.
Sam Caucci: We already have clients across the globe, including South Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Our international growth strategy is to essentially not enter a new market cold, but instead, continue to expand through the customers that we have here in North America by using their global network. For example, we have customers in retail that have locations across the globe, including Asia and South America.
Sam Caucci: They think that their message that works in one region can’t work in every region. The fact of the matter is that expanding globally is something that overall requires a lot of time and research as it ultimately deals with people all over the world. The way we learned to expand internationally was by going there first and looking at the market with a fresh set of eyes, instead of looking at that market from halfway across the globe sitting in my office in Newark, NJ.
Sam Caucci: When you start a company, you are committing to putting other people ahead of yourself. While being an entrepreneur might sound like some individual action, the ones that are the most successful at it are the ones that want to grow other people, be selfless, and are okay with putting themselves second consistently in all aspects of their life. Anyone who starts a business must be okay with the fact that they are now responsible for employees, partners, and customers, and you are also still responsible for your family and friends, which is a very lonely and tough burden. The rewards of being a successful entrepreneur are many. Still, the rewards are only great if you are willing to wake up every day and recognize that a part of your job is doing one extra phone call to check in with somebody on your team when they just need a little more love right now. If your choice is to watch another Netflix episode instead of doing that, then stay at your 9-5 job.
Sam Caucci: Run through the line. I received it when I was 14 by a high school football coach, where part of our practice had to do with conditioning, which included running a full football field. It is really easy just to quit when you reach 118 yards of that 120-yard long football field, and I was lucky enough to have coaches and mentors that would not let me. So, I ran through the line. They instilled this concept of “running through the line” into me so much that to this day in everything that I do, whether it is working on a project that seems to have no end or working until the sun comes up. I have the choice to either not finish and say it is good enough, or I run through the line.
Advice: Work harder.
Sam Caucci: I would say that one of the things I would do is I would have asked more questions to my mentors and leaders. When you are in the middle of building your own company, sometimes you are acting so confident that you forget to ask questions and learn. I know now to ask a lot of questions, but if I were to go back, I would ask even more.
You can follow Sam Caucci here.
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