Tapping away on laptops in the million-dollar home they're house sitting on the French Riviera, Laura McGregor, Ryan Mattock and Alistair Robinson have bet it all on an ambitious dream: to turn their online platform into the key matchmaker between commission-only sales agents and companies that need their help.
Many freelance sales pros have major companies as clients--but as "independent lifestylists" like the freedom that comes with being self-employed, says McGregor, the company's CEO. This trio of digital nomads aim to make it easier for them to find new business through CommissionCrowd, a matchmaking site that helps companies that need sales help to find them.
The site, which launched in May 2015, has attracted more than 1,100 sales agents in 99 countries, says McGregor, the company's CEO. The majority are in the U.S. (25%) and the U.K. (55%) but there are substantial numbers in Canada, Australia, Germany, France and India. Agents can manage their deal flow and activity using the site's software and tap into its proprietary integrated customer relationship management solution.
So far, 242 companies have signed up, seeding the site with $7.6 million worth of deals, she says. The company has 600 pending applications from other companies but is vetting them carefully to make sure they are offering attractive opportunities for the sales agents, says McGregor. The deal value a company offers must be more than $5,000 for one-time projects, or $500 a month for recurring deals, so the commission-only work is rewarding enough for the sales agents, says McGregor.
"A lot of companies think, `Oh it’s free labor,'" says McGregor. "Actually you’re working with a true professional who has an existing network of contacts. The strategy should be for the company to align themselves to the same target market as the sales agent."
Rebecca
ComissionCrowd founders (L to R ) Alistair Robinson, Laura McGregor and Ryan Mattock in Nice, France... [+]
CommissionCrowd makes money by selling annual memberships to businesses. The memberships go for the equivalent of about $553 per year in U.S. dollars. The site takes an administration fee of 5% to 15% of each commission payment, depending on the situation, from clients, but it is free for sales agents to use.
Some companies are using the site to find sales reps in distant markets they want to break into, says McGregor. The individual sales agents on the site often sell a variety of non-competing product lines and services, ranging from professional contracts to government to gym equipment, she says.
McGregor, 39, who previously worked in finance and then an administrative role in sales and marketing, got the entrepreneurial bug while helping her sister, a hypnotherapist in British Columbia, Canada, promote her business, working from Edinburgh, Scotland. "I was working full-time but realized I was staying up to 4 a.m, working on this project with my sister," she recalls. "It was everything to me." What she loved about entrepreneurship, she says, was that "it's really driving your own future."
McGregor, Mattock, 34, and Robinson, 43, worked together previously, running the U.K. branch of an American digital marketing company. It was there that they realized there was an untapped need in the marketplace for a site like CommissionCrowd.
"It came about because we were looking to work with agents of this nature for our own business, and it was very difficult," says McGregor. "It was hard to find them. Once you did find them it was very hard to manage them." They soon decided to focus all of their attention on building CommissionCrowd.
So far they have bootstrapped the site. "We're proud of that," McGregor says. To date, CommissionCrowd has brought in about $125,000 in revenue and is already attracting interest from investors, according to McGregor. Robinson, the chief technology officer, built the platform. Mattock is the chief marketing officer.
The co-founders have kept their personal overhead down by living together in a variety of house-sitting situations, though often far less luxurious than the one they have now. At one point, all three shared a 90-square-foot home in Normandy. "We wanted to live as light as possible so we could really focus as much attention as we could on CommissionCrowd," says McGregor.
Toughing it out through minor inconveniences has given the trio the financial freedom to launch the platform using their own money.
"We feel if you are an entrepreneur, you must be prepared to take risks," McGregor says. "You have to put everything aside that is preventing you from doing that."
