Kevin LeSage / SearchLight

If there’s an entrepreneur to watch right now, it’s Kevin LeSage. He’s the founder of Searchlight, an analytics platform bringing a clear, unbiased view to return on ad spend and showing contractors which leads actually turn into booked jobs. He’s taken a different path to get here, choosing to learn inside other businesses before building his own. From marketing and corporate sales to business development and a family business foundation, Kevin brings a wide-angle view to what it takes to grow something that lasts. No matter your industry or stage, this episode is a reminder to stay close to the work, trust the data, and keep building with an expert team.

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Transcript

Nicole Eaton 0:00
Welcome to Start Here, a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. I’m Nicole Eaton,

David Bradbury 0:08
and I’m Dave Bradbury. So, let’s get to the show

Nicole Eaton 0:11
Today we sit down with Kevin LeSage, CEO of Searchlight, an Inc 5000 digital marketing analytics company, changing how home service contractors measure ROI. Kevin, thank you so much for coming here on this beautiful sunny winter day.

Kevin LeSage 0:30
Weather’s turning in Vermont right now. I’m gonna fingers crossed. Sales are growing, spring is happening. Bring it on.

David Bradbury 0:39
what is Searchlight? What’s this? A real tough question, hard-hitting.

Kevin LeSage 0:44
Yeah, to be very blunt, Searchlight is an analytics platform that provides an unbiased view of return on ad spend, ROI. Historically, looking at Google Analytics reports, you’re finding things like cost per click, cost per lead, impressions, things like that, all of which are pretty easy to manipulate if you’re good at digital marketing, but I like to say you can’t fake revenue. So, Searchlight is taking it that step farther, and we’re uncovering that. Yeah, you’re generating leads, but only 35% of those leads are actually booking a job, and only 20% are actually buying a service. So, if 80% of your leads don’t buy anything from you. We need a better way to define success. Yeah, and we’re really changing the game there.

David Bradbury 1:27
Wow, so like smarter spending decisions by company owners or 200%. Okay. Awesome. How many people do you have? Where’s the company?

Kevin LeSage 1:36
Yeah, the company is located right in Williston, Vermont. I’ve been up here now about 18 years. Started at Champlain. We just crossed, I think we have 2021 employees, full time, all US-based. That’s a half are in the half are in Vermont area, and half are across the United States, Colorado, California, Georgia, etc.

Nicole Eaton 1:55
Wow, that’s awesome.

Kevin LeSage 1:57
Appreciate it. Yeah,

David Bradbury 1:58
right, isn’t that cool?

Nicole Eaton 1:59
Yeah, in Williston, I mean, you’re right across the street from Rigorous, like I feel like it’s just such an awesome area to be in.

Kevin LeSage 2:05
Well, the coolest thing is our first client when I was really starting helping out local businesses was SD Ireland,

Nicole Eaton 2:12
wow

Kevin LeSage 2:12
One of the largest. Big name up here, but now they built the building in Williston, and I was driving by and I was like, I think I could fit a basketball court and an office in there, so I reached out to our first client, and I said, “Hey, what do you guys think? And we basically hand shook the deal and made it work. So it’s been an awesome experience.

Nicole Eaton 2:30
That’s great.

Kevin LeSage 2:30
Yeah,

Nicole Eaton 2:31
Before we dive deeper into exactly that, of like how you’re growing this business, I want to, I want to just go back to your childhood. I know that your father was a plumber and really shaped the way that you and one of your brothers built this company. So, can you just explain kind of the genesis of what this is?

Kevin LeSage 2:49
Every day really added up to how I got here. I like to say, and this is true, like my brother and I would drive to our little league baseball games in the back of my dad’s plumbing van, and we would fight over who got to sit in the five gallon buckets, because there was only one seat up front with a seat belt. So, my dad dragged us to the job sites. He did side work all the time to keep everything afloat in our family. So, he’s a very hard worker, and I’d sit there and clean copper fittings for him, and do nail plates around the house, but he always told me, I want you to learn to work with your mind, not your hands. So, I’ve just been blessed to be inspired by my dad, who’s a really hard worker. He still owns a plumbing business, but I have two other brothers, one works with me at Searchlight, the other works with my dad at Les Plumbing in Connecticut. So it’s table talk dinner for us, and it’s just really cool to see the two worlds come together.

David Bradbury 3:40
How important is digital marketing now to plumbers and other home services companies?

Kevin LeSage 3:49
COVID changed at all. I mean, during COVID, private equity and investors were looking for a safe place to put money.

Nicole Eaton 3:56
Yeah,

Kevin LeSage 3:56
and when you find a plumbing business that’s been around for 40 years doing 20 million, and they don’t even have a website, like some basic digital marketing principles, but they’re still very successful. Private equity raced in, right? So every day we hear about a new plumbing HVAC business that is sold to a roll-up of private equity that is putting together a portfolio of home service contractors, but yeah, at the end of the day, the secret’s out. These businesses are the core to America. They’re recession proof, they’re COVID proof. Heating and plumbing is like necessity for human life. So, when you look at, you know, where to invest your money moving forward, if you can find these underserved businesses with marketing and digital strategy that are already doing really well, and they have a huge customer database that’s like an untapped gold mine.

David Bradbury 4:45
I didn’t know that they had to advertise, right? It’s always been like, I can’t get a plumber, like, because they were always Vermont. Yes, okay, yes,

Kevin LeSage 4:53
Yeah, there’s a whole story behind that, but it’s funny. Even my wife’s involved with the plumbing HVAC business up here now. Just to get more invested in it, and she’ll tell us, you know, when you go into the house, people will say, “I can’t get anyone here, like that, you know, no one’s picking up the phones, and when I tried to get my gutters replaced, it was just a voicemail that said, “Call back in September. You know, this was May. So, yeah, there’s a lot of demand up here for home services, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people to serve that demand.

Nicole Eaton 5:20
Wow, would you say being placed in Vermont? I mean, I know you grew up here. Like, was that a reason why you’re here as well, or does it just happen to be you’re in a state that has this problem?

Kevin LeSage 5:30
No, I mean, I’m only here because my grandfather was one of 12, born and raised in Winooski, and when he passed away, I was like, just in high school, and I went down Church Street for the first time, and I was like, “Where’s the nearest college? Like, I was like, “Oh, this is it, like this is the vibe, the lake, the mountains, the skiing. I ski, I skied every day when I was younger. So someone said Champlain’s the closest school, that’s where I went for four years. Then I got lucky, I graduated Champlain, and Dealer.com was like right across the street, literally making noise in town, and half 80% of my friends ended up going from Champlain to Dealer.com and growing our careers together. It’s been a great experience.

David Bradbury 6:11
Wow, so you have a degree marketing PR, right? But then I don’t know if anybody’s noticed yet, you seem like you’re a natural biz dev sales person, like, how did you make that jump, or what was it? Did Jeff make a trade-off between sort of talking with people or pushing content toward people?

Kevin LeSage 6:31
So, my story is, I mean, I was just so fortunate to get into Dealer.com early on out of college, I would have taken any job, but I was early on, I was finding cities to target for SEO, and this was like, as boring as it gets. I won’t even tell you what that really involved, but I had the opportunity to go from like SEO to an SEO analyst and kind of take that SEO path. But I really enjoyed talking to customers, so I went into account management, and I ended up selling so much that the sales team associated with my accounts were basically hitting their quota without selling themselves. I was doing a lot of it. I ended up going to Sales dealer.com having a lot of great success there, being a top sales producer, but everyone was asking why, and I was like, well, I just use the analytics, like I’m not a theory guy. I go in and I’m like, this is working, this isn’t, you can do more of this, you just got to pay me five grand to do it, and logically it made sense, so people would sign up, and that was great. There is, I was able to transition from a sales experience to now they were like, “We want you to run our analytics product team. So that was the best thing that happened in my career, was transitioning from that, taking all of that client information and learning how to sell and understand their needs to now running three scrum teams that are building analytics tools, and I was just the voice of the customer for that. Those teams, and we built one of the largest analytics products used across automotive today. 20,000 plus dealers are using this every day, and it’s a great experience, but I think everyone should be involved in sales one way or another. You got to learn how to talk.

David Bradbury 8:02
It’s a skill, and it’s terrifying, right? We see that with our students and our classes, or even like some faculty that are like, you know, making vaccines and doing all sorts of notable research, but selling, you know, our hack was, you know, the flea market down off of the Waterbury exit, we used to send people down there just to learn how to barter. 20 bucks and go buy wrenches and trinkets, and just, just get used to that back and forth. And it’s sort of low stakes learning,

Kevin LeSage 8:31
I think. It all starts with sales. Like, if I started a business today, the first thing I would do is just go get a, go get a customer. I’d sell a customer on the vision, and I’d listen, and we’d iterate, but you’re not going to find me spinning my gears focused on market research and learning and understanding. I’m a go, I’m just going to put my feet to the ground and start figuring it out.

Nicole Eaton 8:49
Yeah, so what was the transition like from Dealer to now doing startups? And what would you say to people listening? Like, would you recommend that type of transition? Would you recommend you just said kind of having that corporate experience, but yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Kevin LeSage 9:08
Yeah, I mean, I was.. yeah, I think it’s critical to learn on someone else’s dime, right? Early on, I spent 12 years working for Dealer.com and Cox, and I was fortunate enough to serve in multiple different roles, like I was talking about, from SEO, account management, you know, product management, and engineering to sales. So, if anyone listening, my advice is like, learn everything you can when you start a business. It’s not, you’re not in a silo, like I was in a sales silo@deal.com and Cox for a long time. When I started Searchlight, I’m in support, customer service, sales, you name it, everything right,

David Bradbury 9:44
IT, HR, everything

Kevin LeSage 9:47
Right, but I mean, at the same time, you got to learn to love that, but you can’t, that’s my early on, don’t stay siloed in one role, they all intertwine and overlap in different ways, and the better, the more you understand that, I think the better you’ll have. That creating your own startup, one day.

David Bradbury 10:04
You talk about Searchlight being sort of, it’s for the people, how’s that mean? What’s that mean? Like, is it like the different profiles of your customers, or is it people within the company?

Kevin LeSage 10:16
Both, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s for the people in our customers, because we are their trust, what they’re leaning against when they have doubts. Or, hey, I’ve been with this agency for years, Kevin, spending millions of dollars. I don’t have the confidence I once had. Well, I come in and I don’t sell you advertising, I just show you what I think is working well and what’s not, with 15 years experience doing this at high levels. So, it’s very easy for me to earn that trust, because there’s no sale behind it, outside of our data, right. So I am that agnostic control point that can really come in and provide that unique insight, where unless you’re searchlight, you’re always having a secondary thing you’re trying to sell, or some motive. And then when I look at our team, we’re very selective on who we bring in. Every single employee has real equity in the business. This is a collaborative environment. I am not sitting here as the CEO saying we’re going to do this next quarter. I’m asking questions and I’m challenging different people, but I’m always.. I think I’m getting much better as a CEO now of really understanding both sides of the coin, right? If you want to be a good CEO, you have to learn how to argue against yourself and your own perspective sometimes, and provide those different views, and then let your team do what you hired them to do, and step out of the way, right? And that’s kind of my philosophy.

Nicole Eaton 11:36
I have so many questions about that. I think, yeah…

David Bradbury 11:40
Don’t hold back, Nicole.

Kevin LeSage 11:45
Yeah, I’ll share.

Nicole Eaton 11:46
Yeah, I just want to hear more about that, because I think a lot of people think when they’re in the CEO position they have to be the decision maker, they have to see like they have to be the sound mind and be that person kind of controlling everything, and while I think sometimes that’s true, I think your perspective is also true, because you do need to argue against yourself and be able to just like stretch and challenge your mind, so that you’re not siloing yourself in a way. So, could you just explain how you got to that mentality, and what that looks like on the day to day?

Kevin LeSage 12:18
Yeah, I mean, at a fault of being too honest here, like, I just know I’m not the smartest one in our company, right? Like, I’ve hired people that I have immense respect for, and I know I can share a vision. Today, I went into work a little concerned about a directive, I pulled together our VP of product, and I shared my concern, and he was like, “I’ve already thought this through, check this out. You had the whole process map, you had all the details, and I was just like relieved, right? Like, we’re good, like this is why you’re here, and I don’t need to get involved in this, right? But I do need to challenge every employee and just provide a different perspective. But it is really a collaborative environment at Searchlight. You’re not going to find one person that’s owning any one direction, and I think that’s our advantage. We have four founders, I have multiple other executives I’ve brought in, and when we sit in a room with six people with 20 plus years experience individually, the outcome is different than any one person would have came in that room with.

Nicole Eaton 13:15
Yeah

David Bradbury 13:16
Wow, family businesses can be tricky, right? And you, you said you brought your brother in. You guys act as co-founders and stuff. Like, give us the dirt, man. Like, what are the good, the bad trade-offs? And would you recommend family businesses to others?

Kevin LeSage 13:38
My younger brother, dropped out of college to work with me@dealer.com and he worked with Eric Mayhew. Sorry, right? Got involved. Love Eric. Thank God it was the best thing, better than any college degree would have ever brought to him. But he worked on that team with Eric. He ended up finding great success in dealer.com and then he saw me get successful in sales, and he’s like, well, I gotta learn sales, right? So when it came time early on with Searchlight with SD Ireland, my wife worked there. It was like, hey, I can help you run ads. Neil’s going to do, my brother’s going to do that. I’ll manage the clients. And when we kind of started getting real motion, like real traction, my brother couldn’t keep up, right? So the story is, we were 5050 owners, and I had to go to him and say, you’re out, which is, as with a brother, really hard to do. And I gave him a chance, but he didn’t, you know, he was, he’s a very money-motivated person. He was in a great role, and he’s like, I can’t commit to this, right? So I had to call somebody else, and we had to completely shift around the ownership of the business. He watched it grow, he watched the success, and I was lucky. He always, we always wanted to figure it out. I’d say about two and a half years ago, he made the commitment, came over full time. It’s been the best thing for us. We haven’t had a single argument over anything. He is the kind of guy that I can just be like, “Dude, I need help here, and that’s it. I don’t have to follow up, I don’t have to, you know, he’s he’s like. Best partner possible. I love my brother.

David Bradbury 15:03
I was hoping it was a happy ending.

Kevin LeSage 15:05
He knows. Yeah

Nicole Eaton 15:08
I love that.

Kevin LeSage 15:09
Very cool.

Nicole Eaton 15:10
Yeah. Now, so you talked about half of your team is remote, the other is in Burlington. How does that work out with having people in person, and then also remote. How do you keep the team gelled and working together?

Kevin LeSage 15:26
Think it starts with providing the incentives people want, right? So, if you want to move to Vermont, guess what? I hope you do that. But if you’re happy with your family in California and Palo Alto, and you’re a phenomenal engineer that graduated from Stanford with AI background, we’re gonna make this, we’re gonna make this work, and that’s just the reality, is like we’re gonna hire the people that are best at what they’re doing, whether they’re here or somewhere else. And I just really fundamentally believe, like, a job isn’t something to change your life around unless you want that, right? I’m trying to get as much experience from these hires as possible and provide a lift in their life along the way. Yeah, right. So, whatever they want, I’m going to help them do that’s really at the end of the day. It’s a simple philosophy.

David Bradbury 16:11
Can we get John Tory back to Vermont?

Kevin LeSage 16:14
Oh that’s probably a different one, because he just got married and his wife’s at a hospital. Yeah, yeah, right.

David Bradbury 16:20
John was a VCET associated intern, and he went to work with Hearforward. When we start, we started that company with Sean Hurley and Jeff Frank back in the day, and the dealer bought it. Yep. And then, you know, John sort of worked

Kevin LeSage 16:33
I worked with John for years. Yeah,

David Bradbury 16:34
I think he’s the one that always kept me in touch with what he was doing with Searchlight, and I didn’t quite understand it, but

Kevin LeSage 16:41
He’s one of the founders. I mean, early on, I knew to call John. He’s an absolute killer for the company, goes deep, completely motivated for all the right reasons. And yeah, lucky to have him.

David Bradbury 16:53
John, you’re not guilty. I’m sorry to call you out. You’re really happy for you and your family.

Kevin LeSage 16:58
Yes, exactly. And that’s what that’s what matters.

David Bradbury 17:01
That’s totally what matters, right?

Nicole Eaton 17:03
Yeah, so I recently read that you reached, maybe it’s increased, but over 1500 accounts,

Kevin LeSage 17:12
2000

Nicole Eaton 17:12
2000 now that’s incredible. I’m curious, how, how did you get to this point in terms of reaching these? That’s my first question. And then the second is, like you said at the beginning, there’s these plumbers, there’s these, these other trade workers who are so successful and don’t necessarily need this stuff, or I should say, in quotes, they don’t think they need it.

Kevin LeSage 17:36
There you go.

Nicole Eaton 17:36
So, how do you, how do you, I guess, sell them this product, or what does it take to get to that point?

Kevin LeSage 17:45
They’ve been looking for this product for the last 20 years. right. This isn’t – we didn’t invent this idea of attribution. I like to say, you know, we just figured out how to pull the sword out of the stone. It’s been there for a long time. When I think about how we got to this point, our business is split direct to contractor relationships, and we sell through a lot of agencies, so every month we bring on 100 customers that we never speak to, right? Our customer acquisition cost is near zero. We have agencies that are backing up their performance with our data, right. So, historically, marketing, you know, without going too deep here, marketing is looking at leads, and then they book, they buy whatever it is, and marketing always gets the blame at the end of the month if something goes wrong. What Searchlight has done a good job at is highlighting that no operations and for home services, you go in the home, not the marketing agency, right? Like, you send a technician in the home, not your marketing director from the agency, and who does the follow up on those estimates afterwards? It’s the contracting, it’s not the agency, right. So we’ve really done a good job of creating accountability both ways. I’d say that’s the core of Searchlight. Is where’s the fault? Is it in the agency generating quality leads, or is it in the home service, the home service business, managing those leads properly and providing a good experience in the home, and if you can pinpoint that problem, the agency will love you, and the contractor is going to love you, because now they know where the issue lies, and that’s exactly what Searchlight does, automated.

David Bradbury 19:18
Do you think those first couple of 100 or maybe even currently customers like, if you didn’t walk in with your origin story, like, would you just look like a just, you’re selling digital vaporware?

Kevin LeSage 19:30
Yeah man. Oh, I think you know, I came into this like I’m a good sales rep, just give me the phone, you know, this would be no problem. And I went, like, oh, for 100 on cold calls, right? I’m like, okay, we need a different approach here, you know, a plumber selling to a plumber, and again, I’m lucky because I’ve been programmed by one my whole life, but they’re just very black and white. right, like my dad, is it working, is it not, so when I would call it, these get a hold of these people, you’re just another salesman selling more snake oil, right, I’ve seen this. Before, but when we transitioned our business to being the accountability data partner, we’re like, I know how you feel, I know your pain points, I’m going to make this easy for you, right? Like, if you think marketing’s not working, I’m going to tell you what part of marketing is not working, some part is, we’re going to identify what is, and we’re going to scale that, and we’re going to pull back elsewhere, or like, how much I’m in, right?

David Bradbury 20:20
So cool, can we talk about your building your team? Yeah, right. You made reference to, you know, trying to find people and that are aligned or finding alignment with them, like, you know, are you are you hiring for sort of their personality soft skills or as for hard skills, like you train up? Like, what? Just really curious, your perspective on that.

Kevin LeSage 20:43
I have no rubric for that. Again, I’m going to lean on my team based on the role, right? If it’s an engineer, I don’t. I’m going to let the engineers, my CTO, hire for that. What I look for is the soft skills, the little things, the eye contact, you know your mannerisms, things that are scalable across product, sales, account management, support. What type of person are you? And we’ve just been so lucky. I think we’ve had one person, actually, that we hired that quickly last because of some other dream job, but our team states they’re motivated, they have ownership in the business. If you even at a low level, you are doing critical work for our company, right? Even entry level, it’s not just like you’re doing data entry, like you’re immediately put in to a critical, critical variable to our success.

David Bradbury 21:33
Well, I know Jacob Freeman’s been stoked, and like he’s been there maybe a year or so. Yeah, he was a Middlebury student of ours, and Treeline Terrains, they sold that, so that taking the call, right?

Kevin LeSage 21:44
Yeah but he’s started a business and he sold it, and he thinks differently than his, his average age, right? So, I mean, he’s an example of someone who came in, and I’m just like, do you, man, I don’t even need, you don’t even need the training, like, you get it, he’s in the 1% already in a year of digital marketers,

David Bradbury 22:02
really,

Kevin LeSage 22:02
I’d say, even, yeah, like he is, yeah, he, he’s a digital marketing expert.

David Bradbury 22:08
Well, I mean, that’s that’s really interesting about the whatever skills, personality traits, sort of hustle that he has, because you know, he was making custom wood, you know, maps and gifts, right? Really neat, you know, technology now in digital marketing sales. So, like, didn’t see that coming. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin LeSage 22:27
No, I mean, he’s gonna be is already instrumental this to the success of our business.

Nicole Eaton 22:36
Wow, I know this is a very general question, but what’s next for Searchlight?

David Bradbury 22:40
Like, how many years do you want to be on the Inc. 5000?

Kevin LeSage 22:45
20 years from now…. No, honestly, we, and this is something I recommend for everyone, is we’ve been very intentional staying niche focused. Yeah, right, it’s tough, and we’ve made mistakes where we’ve tried to say, hey, we can take on restoration, it’s like home services, right, or lawn care, it’s like home services, and then what happens is you have to stretch the product and it doesn’t quite fit right, but those were very small mistakes. If we had tried to be an analytics platform for everyone early on, we would, we would have failed, but because we stayed HVAC, plumbing, electric home service focused, we were able to learn and make tweaks and find efficiencies that we will eventually look to scale and bring in other industries, legal, elective medical, real estate, automotive, these are all lead gen industries where people are spending millions of dollars to generate leads, they’re addicted to that next lead, but what percent of those leads are buying? Go ask the agencies or the largest lawyer firms in the US, they can’t answer that question. My favorite quote is from John Wanamaker. It’s over 100 years old. Half of my, the problem I have in my business is half of my advertising is not working. The problem is I don’t know what half right, and with Searchlights data we see 60% 50 60% on average of those leads aren’t even quality, so we can tell you what half is working and what half isn’t, and that’s valuable far beyond home services.

David Bradbury 24:20
How is AI impacting your, your business? Do you view yourself as an AI native company at this point?

Kevin LeSage 24:26
We have to,

David Bradbury 24:27
yeah,

Kevin LeSage 24:28
yeah. I mean, you’re it’s sink or swim, right? I mean, you can look at the biggest companies that are getting public now, saying, saying this, but where we’re lucky is one of the best use cases for AI is data analysis. Totally, it’s not a art, it’s a science. Yeah, right. So we are now.. I mean, it’s funny, like, as of recently, we are generating reports for AI agents, not for humans, and we are heavily looking at.. like, I can take a screenshot of my report, dump that into Claude, and say I’m a marketing manager struggling with. X helped me, and the output of that is stronger than anything I’ve seen in my 15 year career from any employee. So, the future of data understanding is not hiring these 20 years; it is just going to AI with your problem, but you need a clean data set for that answer. If you try to do that off of pulling random data together into your own warehouse without any of the schema lining up, AI will hallucinate and give you wrong answers. So, Searchlight is very fortunate that we have an accurate platform already built. We layer AI on top of that, and now we have this joke, but I mean, I can make any chicken an eagle at that point, right? You might not be an expert in marketing, but if you know how to ask AI the question, we have the data, and now you’re an expert. That’ll happen within five minutes instead of doing audits and blah blah blah.

Nicole Eaton 25:52
Yeah,

David Bradbury 25:54
pretty exciting, right?

Nicole Eaton 25:56
I’m really excited for you guys. Yeah, yeah, I really am.

David Bradbury 25:59
All I wanted to do was go there and shoot hoops at your basketball court.

Nicole Eaton 26:03
Do you actually have a basketball court?

Kevin LeSage 26:05
Yeah, we do. Yeah, we mounted a professional hoop.

David Bradbury 26:08
like 40 foot ceilings, right? Yeah, yeah, we

Kevin LeSage 26:10
We welded a professional hoop right on the I beam, because I have kids and we’re in Vermont, and I was like, we were looking at a place to rent and the gyms are taken up and everything, and I was like, wait, I think we can literally bring these two things together, so I have indoor pickleball, basketball,

David Bradbury 26:24
Is this like a Dealer holdover, right?

Kevin LeSage 26:26
I have been clearly influenced by Dealer.com Yes, I have my own little mini fun zone, but I have my son’s friends asking to have their seventh birthday parties at the office, so when you talk about culture and you talk about team like that, is you’re gonna have pizza parties there on Sunday, and that merch madness brings some founders, like a game or pickup

Nicole Eaton 26:47
Can we do a pickup league? Like a founders pickup league?

Kevin LeSage 26:50
We can do anything.

David Bradbury 26:50
Nicole is a basketball star.

Kevin LeSage 26:51
okay, okay. My wife’s dad was our basketball coach for like 30 years at our high school.

Nicole Eaton 26:58
I love that.

Kevin LeSage 26:58
So it’s in our, yeah, it’s in, it’s in our family.

David Bradbury 27:01
Yeah, we were at time. Nicole.

Nicole Eaton 27:03
We’ll take this basketball conversation off camera. Last question, what founder or leader, past or present, would you like to chat with, and why?

Kevin LeSage 27:15
The cool thing is, I already am. Mike Lane, Matt Murray, Brian McVeigh, the guys that came before me@dealer.com I was telling you earlier, I’m just.. I got.. I was in there at, like, you know, right out of college at 20 years old, 21 whatever that is, and they were just inspiring to kind of like follow suit of.. so, yeah, I’m just lucky I can call them right now, and if I could choose from any CEO, it would literally be those guys. I mean, I can reach out to Brian for breakfast at any point. Matt is working with us a little bit now. Mike Lane, Mike Matt, or Mark Bunfigley, all those guys that were just really inspiring over the years. My first day at dealer.com

David Bradbury 27:57
Tell us.

Kevin LeSage 28:00
Well, they had a KB Theater in the back, so I don’t know if you’re familiar, it was like you could put like a couple 100 people in one room and someone was talking about product or marketing, and I’m kind of like in the back just first day, and then to end it, and Mark’s like, “Hold on, and he gets up in front of the whole room, and he puts on any given Sunday speech about, like, it’s a game of inches, right, with Al Pacino, everyone’s, I mean, I was like the sports guy in me, like I was ready to run through,

David Bradbury 28:25
that’s a hype,

Kevin LeSage 28:25
right? Literally, so like my first day in the job, and I’m like walking out of the door, like hitting it like a locker room up top, and I was just like, this is it, I mean, this is the place. So, yeah, I mean, go full circle, create a fun environment for people to work, get inspired, and create a cool, tight-knit community, which Vermont does a really good job of.

David Bradbury 28:43
Well, thank you for doing it here in Vermont, and hiring here first, and building a great company. We can’t wait to see your journey, and look forward to sharing this with our listeners. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today. This is going to start here, a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. This series is brought to you by the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies. Now let’s get back to work.