What is Growth as a Service?

Meet Host, Mary Grothe

Mary Grothe is a former #1 MidMarket B2B Sales Rep who after selling millions and breaking multiple records, formed House of Revenue®, a Denver-based firm of fractional Revenue Leaders who currently lead the marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps departments for 10 companies nationwide. In the past year, they've helped multiple 2nd stage growth companies between $5M - $20M, on average, double their MRR within 10 months, resulting in an average ROI of 1,454% and an average annual revenue growth eclipsing $3.2 million.

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Hey, Revenue Radio®. I'm Mary Grothe. Today, we're talking about a new term. I'm so excited about this. Our CMO, Sabrina, brought this to me a couple of weeks ago and said, “Hey, I think I found something. It describes House of Revenue® well. It's something that we should dig into.”

Today, we’re talking about Growth as a Service. We're big on acronyms here. If anybody knows the House of Revenue® acronym, that's already quite questionable. Now, we have GaaS as another acronym, also quite questionable. Our team had a good chuckle over it, but how do you pronounce Growth as a Service? I think you have to go with “gas.” So, we are a GaaS and excited about Growth as a Service.

Let me tell you more about why this stood out to us and something that we're going to be passionate about, attempting to rank for. From a thought leadership standpoint, we're going all in with our content and thought leadership on Growth as a Service. I'm excited to bring it to you today with my interpretation of why it's relevant and how we're going to embrace it in this next season of growth for us.

A quick update, first and foremost, before we jump into the topic of House of Revenue®. If you follow me, Mary Grothe, on LinkedIn, you'll see that I recently posted a photo. I'm very excited about our new team members who have come on board. As we continue our growth journey, we made the decision a couple of months ago that it was not realistic for our revenue teams, that's, a CRO and CMO pairing, to have three clients.

It's a lot. It's too much. We've had that model since 2020. The demands of our clients are just continuing to increase. The work that we're doing is becoming more complex. News Flash: It's a little bit harder to grow revenue, and you've got a rocky economic climate. So, time and attention need to be poured into the clients.

We made the decision to go from three clients each to two clients each. We had to add two revenue teams to serve the same number of clients. We've added some people to our team here at House of Revenue® that we're very excited about. We did change the profile a little bit for CROs. I'm so pleased to say that we have brought on three CROs, all former CEOs who have scaled companies and exited, some of them multiple times.

They've joined us as fractional CROs. This is such a dream come true for us to have people sitting in the seat who has been a CEO and have scaled the company from that perspective. It's just tremendous. Not to mention that they're just lovely people. We are having a lot of fun here at House of Revenue®, a breath of fresh air.

We just had our quarterly meeting last week. It was incredible to have everybody in town, so we are going to be having them on Revenue Radio®. You'll get to hear from them in future episodes. I cannot wait for you to hear directly from them and all their incredible knowledge and how they will give back to this revenue community through our podcast here.

That's exciting, so find my post on LinkedIn. See who these people are and connect with them. You can stay tuned as we continue to share some good news rolling out from House of Revenue®. So, let's talk about Growth as a Service. Growth as a service. Here's what I love about this, in our model, that's what you're buying.

We go on contract to help you scale your company. We're not an agency. You don't rent anything from us. We build it all inside of your company. It's your asset. It's as if you truly hired a CEO and a Head of Marketing. We sit in the seats and build out your infrastructure, systems, processes, team, tech stack, and strategy.

We implement everything, and we do the work. Now that each revenue team only serves two clients each, they're split 50-50. In the world of fractional is rare. Most fractional are supporting three, four, or five six clients. It puts them more in the consultant seat versus in the actual sitting in the seat and doing the work, which is what we believe in.

When we look at Growth as a Service, typically, a company with a shortage of internal resources to get the growth, that's where they would work with a company that offers Growth as a Service. That related to me when Sabrina brought this to me and said, “Hey, we go to work for companies who have plateaued in revenue, and typically that's due to a shortage of internal resources.

They don't have a CRO. They don't have a Head of Marketing. Or maybe they have some people internally who have a tremendous job done to get that company through a startup scale. But in the second stage of growth, it will take a different team of players, strategies, and infrastructure. So, you need fresh people in those roles and in those seats.

Ultimately, when we're looking at Growth as a Service, defined as, “Hey, you should partner with a Growth as a Service company,” you yourself lack the internal resources to produce those outcomes on your own. That's a great first step and how we could describe it. But the other thing, I also like to look at velocity and bring velocity into an organization that wants to grow or scale. FYI, those are two different things. You can read more about that on our website or listen to a past podcast. I've recorded on this topic multiple times.

You might have the right internal resources for a company that wants to grow or scale. However, if you want to add power to it, fuel it, and have the different velocities to achieve those outcomes, that's where you could partner with a company that offers Growth as a Service. There's the ability to combine two teams worth of effort and to get to outcomes much quicker.
When you look at a Growth as a Service company, typically, you would say, “Hey, that's not overhead, long-term full-time positions inside of our company.”

Some organizations would look at House of Revenue® and say, “Hey, we already have a CRO. We already have a CMO. Or we already have these things in place, but we would like to double down. We would like to have someone of this caliber or hire a partner with our current internal team to ensure we have the right strategy. We have enough hands on deck to get us through this season where we're looking for fast implementation and not getting slowed down in doing this only by ourselves.”

In fact, in the last two weeks, we've had two people come to us that are CROs, and they said, “Hey, we read what you do, but would you work in partnership with me so that we can accomplish the speed to market that we're looking to achieve?” In both instances, they very humbly admitted, “I can't do this by myself. Well, I can, but it's going to take a lot longer.”

I would like to make an argument for, “Hey, let's double down on the expense of this seat for a year so that we can achieve 2x, 3x the results that a single CRO would be able to do on their own. It has legs. When I started having this conversation with the first CRO, I realized maybe we don't market this as well as we should.
Do existing CROs that are looking for the opportunity to work in partnership with a fractional CRO and CMO to be able to supercharge what they're doing? It's always better when you have more people working in collaboration. Of course, if they're qualified, experienced, and able to do the work. I've always been such a lone wolf when doing work.

I've been very independent in my own work. I've talked about this in the past. I was that sales unicorn and a top sales rep when I was selling. I just wanted to do everything by myself. I had partners that I could work with when selling ancillary products. I even had a sales engineer. Whereas I did leverage him from time to time when needed for more complex situations.

I just did everything by myself. I didn't even want my sales manager in on my calls. I want to be independent. I'm a control freak. I want to do everything on my own. I had this mentality that it was better for me to work alone because other people would slow me down. That happens when you're not surrounding yourself with the right people.

\It wasn't until earlier this year, when Sabrina, our CMO, stepped into that CMO position and took over for a former COO, that I stepped into partnership with somebody and realized, “Wait a second. When you have the right person you're working with, you can double down and do twice as much, you know, if not more. Some of that you're able to get multiplication from it.”

If you're able to do some of the heavy lift components at a front end, at a faster pace, could you not get some of that multiplication in the lagging indicators because you had the velocity? There is something to be said about redundancy in working in partnership with somebody on a single role.

If you are looking at speeding up the result of having a better-quality result, if you have the right person in that seat, I can tell you from experience the power of the conversation in collaboration. It's hard when you only have one brain, one filter, and one lens. You can task yourself with doing a lot of research, meeting with people in the team, and collaborating.

Usually, if you're sitting in that CRO or revenue leader seat, anyone you're collaborating with may not be a peer. That could be your downline. Those team members most likely aren't at the stage you are in your career. So, are you getting the right level of collaboration? Do they have the right level of knowledge, the right maturity, and experience to be able to augment that conversation?

That was fun for me. I just had one of those conversations this morning and was so enthused talking to a VP of Marketing who said, “Hey, look, I want to potentially step into a CRO role while they're asking me to. But I'm not fully equipped to do that. I was looking for Fractional CROs and came across you and thought, “Hey, if I could do this in partnership with somebody, I think it would be a lot more successful, and we would get way better results.”

It is so cool to say that and even to open your mind to say it. Sometimes we have pride. Sometimes can be a lot [laughing]. Revenue leaders, I know. I've fallen into that bucket. I have such a fear of disappointing people. I want to be a knowledge expert. I get so nervous when I don't know the answer to something.

I work so hard to be as knowledgeable as possible and prepared in all situations so that I can be of value to the person I'm interacting with. I haven't asked for help many times in my career. That has held me back because I wasn't excited about being humble and saying, “Hey! I might be better if I partnered with somebody on this.”

I thought that that would devalue me as a person sitting in the seat. That's just rooted in pride. In the last two weeks, we've got two unbelievable revenue leaders raising their hands and saying, “I'm being tasked with this role, and I want to do it right. So, I'm going to ask for some support.”

I'd thought, “Man, I have much to learn from these people. I haven't always been eager to partner with somebody or ask for help. It was neat to see that modeled, and it made me excited. This is my very high-level introduction to Growth as a Service. As you know, I'm a founder and CEO and a CRO at heart.

So, I look at this from a 30,000-foot view. We will bring more thought leadership forward on Growth as a Service. From my seat, I'm looking at it from a business model and who the right entities are to partner with somebody who is selling Growth as a Service. I hope today's topic was fun for you to listen to.

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