Jeremy recently sat down with Callan Harrington, CEO of Flashgrowth and host of ‘That Worked,’ to discuss their experiences growing with start-ups. Check out the podcast here to get all the details of Jeremy’s decision to build a company that supported outsourced sales teams, and catch a few highlights below!
The Idea for Bandalier
Jeremy’s idea for Bandalier came from personal experience. After working with a 1,200-person company in Singapore, he returned to New York City to explore start-up culture. He jumped into a fintech start-up as their second employee. He started with door-to-door sales, proving out their sales process before shifting his focus toward building an inside sales team. Soon, it was time to scale up. As Jeremy and Callan describe it,
“There’s a significant challenge to build large sales teams – it’s hard to decipher who’s a good candidate because of the training and experience they have coming in.”
Working with outsourced teams was a natural choice – but Jeremy noticed a gap. He could easily connect with overseas talent through a number of high-quality vendors. But U.S.-based outsourced sales representatives were tough to connect with.
“It felt off to me – these companies only existed in high-cost markets with a ton of talent competition. They weren’t tapping small-town talent that could be great fits for these roles.”
Before long, he left Bond Street to build his own business.
Building Bandalier
“What was unique about this idea was that there was a real need, and there was an opportunity to help solve a problem that I felt was important. There’s this growing gap that I saw between where talent was, and where it was situated, and where companies were actually hiring. It felt like there was an opportunity to make a dent in this pretty significant societal issue while building a business that I thought would have customers and could make money.”
First, Jeremy had to find the right place to start. After considering a lot of cities, he chose Binghamton, NY. Thanks to the robust network of talent connected to SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Broome, and the local community, there were plenty of talented folks to join the growing team.
At first, it was just Jeremy, proving out his idea by acting as a fractional sales representative for Bandalier’s first client. He wanted to fully understand the experience Bandalier would provice to future clients and team members. With that understanding, he started to scale. Bandalier grew quickly and faced a common challenge: meeting the diverse needs of our early clients.
“You get so excited in the early days that you aren’t disqualifying many deals. You’re taking on anything you can to build a business, so you end up with clients who are very different from one another – which means each of your team members is having different experiences, and you’re trying to bring some consistency to those team members while meeting your client’s needs. When every client is different, it’s hard to build processes that work for all of them.”
What’s Next for Bandalier?
Over time, we’ve built flexible processes that help our adaptable team members quickly shift gears. Jeremy credits this growth to our constant commitment to kaizen. Our focus on incremental improvement unites our team in spite of those diverse client experiences. As he describes it,
“We need to have team members coming in, having a consistent experience, and helping us advance that culture. Creating that strong, central sense of identity was important in our early days. It’s even more important now that we’re remote – when you aren’t seeing people, it’s harder to enforce unspoken culture norms.”
Looking toward the future, Jeremy sees even more opportunities for the Bandalier team to grow:
“It’s horizontal and vertical – broadening the number of roles we can do that across, and then getting even better at our ability to execute in the roles that we’re already in.”
We’re excited to keep growing our team in new ways! We’re hard at work behind the scenes to develop new initiatives to help our team members and clients grow together. Reach out to us if you’re ready to learn more about how Bandalier builds stellar outsourced teams!
