Ryan McManus - Founder and CEO of SHARE Mobility: Rebounding from Losing 96% of Revenue, Getting Your Customers to Think Differently, and Upskilling as CEO

Ryan McManus  00:00

All right, I've got to make this work. I've cut the cord. Now I have to learn everything I need to learn very, very quickly.

Callan Harrington  00:07

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to a another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Ryan McManus. Ryan is the founder and CEO of SHARE Mobility. SHARE Mobility empowers businesses, municipalities, and mobility organizations with software and solutions that equip workforces and communities with reliable transportation options. Ryan is a two time founder. Previous to starting SHARE Mobility, he founded ContentVia to help tech startups with all things marketing. And let me tell you, Ryan has a story to tell. We talked about upscaling as a CEO, the benefits of taking venture capital, you know, oftentimes you hear, be careful on taking venture capital, and Ryan really painted a different picture on this one, I thought it was really interesting, and how to get your customers to think differently. He gave such a good example of this. And if you're familiar with The Challenger Sale, I know I've brought this up quite a bit on the podcast and other interviews, because it's by far my favorite sales methodology. The example he gave is one of the best used cases of that in action. Now, Ryan and SHARE Mobility have rebounded from losing 96% of revenue. It's not a stretch to say that very few companies bounce back from that. And he didn't spare any detail on what this was like, how it impacted everybody, and also how they pulled it off. One thing is beyond clear, he is passionate about the problem they're solving. So when you hear the full story, it's hard to be surprised that they pulled that off, as crazy as that sounds. So with that, let's jump into the show. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan McManus  02:35

Hey, Callan, what's up? Morning.

Callan Harrington  02:36

I'm excited to be here.We're at the Idea Foundry in Columbus. So for our listeners outside of Columbus, this means nothing to you. If you're in Columbus, and you haven't been down here, I highly recommend checking it out. This is so cool. I appreciate you giving me the tour.

Ryan McManus  02:49

This place is really, really important to me and my own entrepreneurial journey. I'm really glad to have SHARE Mobility back in this building and glad we could record here. It's such a great facility. There's so much innovation happening here. And it was the place I started my first business.

Callan Harrington  03:03

Which I'm excited to dive into this would be a great place to start a business. So like to paint the picture. There's tons of room, there's- it's kind of like an old factory, but on the first floor, this is what's so interesting is- I found this super interesting- there's like lathes, and saws, and all sorts of woodworking equipment that I had no idea, because as somebody that's like, considering trying some of these things, like okay, I could take a class to learn this instead of sawing my hand off.

Ryan McManus  03:30

Yeah, the Idea Foundry is a makerspace. And Alex Bandar started it, whatever it was probably early 2010s. And as I'm aware, it was a group of people with tools that were sharing a small garage, and then it just grew and grew and grew. And now if you want to learn woodworking or welding, or you want to learn how to use a lathe or any type of tool, you can come in take classes, become a member, and then rent the tools to make stuff. And there's people downstairs that are building their business by using these tools. And I found this to be a great place, because I could meet makers that needed help with marketing.

Callan Harrington  04:08

That's interesting. So tell us a little bit about about SHARE Mobility.

Ryan McManus  04:12

SHARE Mobility started in 2016. And they just wanted to be a part of the automotive industry's evolution from motors to mobility. And I saw how carsharing, electrification, and autonomy were going to change the way we move. And I wanted to be a part of that. We got a concept investment from Jaguar Land Rover in the beginning that allowed us to explore what is the biggest opportunity for us where we could win in Columbus, Ohio. Fast forward through the pandemic, we found that frontline workers can't get to work, and transportation is the biggest barrier to employment today. And so SHARE Mobility is focused on helping companies provide transportation as an employee benefit.

Callan Harrington  04:56

So, to circle back real quick, when you say concept funding, what do you mean by that specifically?

Ryan McManus  05:02

It was a pure idea that wasn't incorporated yet when we received our first investment.

Callan Harrington  05:06

So they invested in you to say, hey, this is a pretty interesting idea. We want you guys to flesh this out a little bit more.

Ryan McManus  05:12

I think it was, this is an interesting team. And we want to make a bet to see can this team work in our incubator and come up with something interesting and valuable?

Callan Harrington  05:22

 That's super interesting. How- okay, so if somebody's out there right now, how would they even go about doing this? I think because I've heard a number of these stories that are similar, I actually had no idea that that's how SHARE Mobility was created. How did you find that?

Ryan McManus  05:36

Well, let's step back first. So there's a couple of different ways to start a business. Some entrepreneurs are inventors, and they create a thing first, and then they go out and try to find ways to market that and find a customer for their thing. That's not the type of entrepreneurship that I do. The other side is to look at a problem and say, I'm going to build a business around this specific problem, and you're a problem-first company, or you could be an industry-first company where you say, alright, I'm going to build on the industry, I'm going to look to find problems in this industry, and then I'm going to build around that. And so we were an industry-first company, where we first picked mobility as our industry. And then we spent about a year in stealth mode, trying to find the biggest opportunity for us to pursue.

Callan Harrington  06:22

That's interesting. So you guys, you liked the industry, and you felt that there are some areas that you can kind of explore in this area. Is that correct?

Ryan McManus  06:29

I thought it was going to be as big as the internet in the 1990s.

Callan Harrington  06:34

Yeah.

Ryan McManus  06:34

And I still do.

Callan Harrington  06:35

What was the passion behind that? What drove that?

Ryan McManus  06:37

So I really like cars. I really like transportation. I started car sharing a Tesla early in 2016. And so I got this firsthand experience about how you can take a really expensive asset, share it with other people, and basically get use of it for free. But I saw that a lot of the innovation in the automotive industry was designed for the affluent, you know how like plasma TVs were super expensive, and now, a flat screen TV is super cheap. A lot of times the innovation starts out, and it's really only for the affluent. And that's what I was seeing. Things like scooters, they're not for somebody who can't afford a car. A scooter is a real privilege. It's fun to have, I think it's a great addition to mobility, but it's not for somebody that can't afford a car today. And I wanted to build a business for the people that didn't have reliable transportation.

Callan Harrington  07:26

Really interesting. So I want to circle back to this. But where did your career start? Just in general.

Ryan McManus  07:33

My very first job I was, I wore a costume around a Kroger store. And I was like in-store marketing. That was my very first job. But what you're really asking is like, where did my professional career start?

Callan Harrington  07:42

I don't know, I might be asking this specifically.

Ryan McManus  07:44

I was a Keebler elf, was a banana, was an apple. My brother and I did it. We were like fourteen. We got our first jobs working at a Kroger store as characters. So I guess I've always been in marketing. My first professional job at a college was at a Swiss company, Kern, the US headquarters in Columbus, and I was their first marketing intern and I kind of worked my way up doing various marketing and sales roles. And I got to see the mailing industry as it declined. And my mentor at Kern taught me about glide path businesses. And I watched from 2007 to 2012, as the industry this company was in started to decline. And I saw how competitors were evolving. I saw how our company was evolving. And I saw this pattern of glide path businesses.

Callan Harrington  08:38

What's that mean? When you say glide path businesses? What does that mean specifically?

Ryan McManus  08:41

So think about office printers? Right? If your Xerox or Canon one of those-

Callan Harrington  08:47

Rico, or...

Ryan McManus  08:47

Rico, yeah. You're trying to maximize profits out of that line of business as fewer and fewer people are needing it. Right. And so what you try to do is maximize revenue without investing in new products, maybe find new products to move your company into. But what you're trying to do is extend the life of that business as far as possible as it goes away inevitably.

Callan Harrington  09:10

Interesting. Do you think a lot of those companies are using more? Are you familiar with like the McKinsey horizons?

Ryan McManus  09:16

Not firsthand, but tell me more about it.

Callan Harrington  09:18

Yeah, absolutely. The McKinsey horizons are where you essentially have horizon one, horizon two, horizon three . Horizon one, core business, horizon two is emerging business. So this is a business that has been pretty well incubated and maybe had the first couple of customers on it, and will be additive, will eventually move into the core business. And then horizon three is looking five, ten years plus down the line, where it's an idea stage, we're incubating this, we're even seeing if there's even something here. But the whole purpose of this is, is that these three horizons are constantly moving, and you're building these different business units as a result of it. Did you see any of that going on? Or was it really just, we know what's going on, the ship's too big to turn at this point, so we're just going to ride this thing out.

Ryan McManus  10:06

It was that this ship is going down eventually, and let's keep it afloat as long as possible.

Callan Harrington  10:11

How did that impact kind of your viewpoint just in general?

Ryan McManus  10:15

I saw it happening in the automotive industry. I saw that the automakers were trying to extend the life of their investments in factories and gasoline vehicles. But they saw that new technologies were disrupting their existing business.

Callan Harrington  10:32

Do you think that you would have started this business that you did today? If you didn't have that experience?

Ryan McManus  10:36

No, not a chance. The understanding of glide paths and evolving industries led me to the automotive industry.

Callan Harrington  10:43

Gotcha. Very interesting. So was it after Kern that you started your first company?

Ryan McManus  10:47

Yeah, I left there in February of 2012. And I had already started building a marketing agency. And so I went from being a marketing director into my own marketing agency, which was called ContentVia and all we did was help founders go from idea to first customer.

Callan Harrington  11:08

What kind of led you to founding that company? What was the spark in that one?

Ryan McManus  11:11

I worked for someone who believed that anything you came up with was his property. And so I could not build a product based company, I had to start with a services based company that had no value to them. I had to take my knowledge and move into a different industry, where there was nothing that they may have wanted.

Callan Harrington  11:33

Interesting. So the problem you were having wasn't even so much the problem of I see this, you may have seen the opportunity, but it wasn't a problem you were- because you know, oftentimes, as you had mentioned, people experience a problem. And then they go into starting that company. For you, your problem was that you couldn't do what you wanted at that point. So you had to do this in a different way. But you knew you wanted to found something. And this was kind of your opportunity to do that. Is that right?

Ryan McManus  11:56

Yeah, absolutely. I always knew as an entrepreneur, I wanted to build a high growth technology business. But that was not something that could be my first business.

Callan Harrington  12:04

Interesting. How did you come to that decision? Just in general.

Ryan McManus  12:09

I watched another employee who, their invention was taken away from them, I saw it happen. And this was somebody that I talked about ideas with on the side. And I saw how his idea was taken away from him. And he got nothing. And I said, one, this is not something that I want to be a part of, and two, I need to make a clean break, or else I could end up in the same fate as him.

Callan Harrington  12:36

Interesting. So you founded your company? Did you have clients going into that? Or did you just was just from day one, we're just going to figure this out?

Ryan McManus  12:44

No, I had clients already. Okay. And so I started using Elance at the time to find marketing clients. And I found clients all across the country. And within about two months, I had signed up enough clients to replace my income, waited for that annual bonus check to clear and then I put in my two weeks notice.

Callan Harrington  13:04

What was the feeling on day one of your in this full time?

Ryan McManus  13:09

I wish I would have planned more. You know, you think you're ready. And then you make the leap. And you're like, there's so much I still need to learn. In hindsight, had that prevented me from doing it, I may still be an employee somewhere. So I think it was more like, alright, I've got to make this work. I've cut the cord. Now I have to learn everything I need to learn very, very quickly.

Callan Harrington  13:30

How did you go about doing that?

Ryan McManus  13:31

I started networking. I mean, that's how I ended up here at The Idea Foundry. I was getting an MBA at Ohio State. I learned about venture capital. Someone from NCT Ventures came in to talk about venture capital. Dr. Camp helped introduce me to other entrepreneurs, and I started to learn from them.

Callan Harrington  13:51

When you think of that first company, what was the would you say is probably the most important thing that you had to learn?

Ryan McManus  13:57

How to replace yourself so that you can scale. And so I started building the business solo, where I was doing all of the functions. And I didn't start with an idea of how I would replace myself in that business. And ultimately, it made it so that my first company was not saleable. It was a pure services business. I wish I would have learned more about building processes, delegating, hiring people, maybe as contractors first and not full time employees, and to build a business that runs without you.

Callan Harrington  14:33

So there's a couple of things I'd love to dive into there. So when you say it's not salable, is that is it because it was too reliant on you. So somebody had to, if somebody did buy it, that means that you got to come with, you're pretty much there for, you may have a very long earn out if you're going to do that, and it doesn't make it as attractive. Is that what you mean by that specifically?

Ryan McManus  14:54

Yeah, there's a lot of things. I mean, there wasn't recurring revenue that would make it attractive, but I was very dependent in the job for serving the customers and delivering the services.

Callan Harrington  15:05

Gotcha. And one thing I want to hit on in particular is when you say salaried versus contractors and starting with contractors, why is that important? I'll tell you on my side, like one, I think I just found that you can find really, really good contractors. And with the service business, it takes a while before you have predictability. Did you find something similar? What did that look like for you?

Ryan McManus  15:31

What I found is that because I went the salaried route, I had to constantly go and sell new customers to ensure that I had enough to cover the salaried employees. And in the type of business we chose to start, we really needed to be pickier. And as we added more and more salaried employees, we had to say yes to companies that maybe we didn't believe in, or we weren't excited about.

Callan Harrington  16:00

Yeah, so the power of kind of narrowing your focus on your ideal customer profile. Because if I'm hearing you correctly, because we immediately had people that had salaries, we couldn't really resource plan for a specific project, we had to get new sales in no matter what. And unless you've got a big pipeline, and people are coming to you pretty consistently, that can become really challenging, because you just like, it's either sell the next deal or miss payroll, is that correct?

Ryan McManus  16:29

Correct.

Callan Harrington  16:29

Gotcha, which probably, I got to assume that put a ton of stress on you specifically.

Ryan McManus  16:34

And it's stress that could have been avoided, if I just built a network of contractors that could have worked the jobs.

Callan Harrington  16:40

Yeah. One of the things I've heard-  I'm curious how, you know, kind of given your experience how you'd approach this now, but one of the couple of things I really liked was, I heard two pieces of advice on this, I thought were excellent. One, when you're thinking about full time employees, just in general, in a service business, specifically, take a look at you know, what is our pipeline. And when you close the deal, you hire into the backlog. So I've got a good backlog of projects, I know I can sustain the people that I brought on. And two, probably the one I love the most, and these aren't mutually exclusive, is your full time employees are essentially make up the bare minimum that you're going to be able to do at all times, right? And that bare minimum as you grow. And as you naturally get more referrals and your sales process becomes more predictable that floor grows. But essentially, you use contractors for the peaks. And of course, in the beginning, it's all peaks and valleys. So you're using contractors for those peaks, because you have no idea what that floor is, what did you learn in kind of how you could go about that? Like, if you were to do that, again, in a service business? How would you do that differently?

Ryan McManus  17:43

So if I were to go and do this, again, I would build a team of individuals who saw themselves as running their own business, where we were a group going out to find customers together.

Callan Harrington  17:55

Yeah.

Ryan McManus  17:55

We may have our own projects, we may come together for a project. And I think that gives the individuals working on the project, more ownership of it.

Callan Harrington  18:05

Gotcha. So in your eyes, it's more, we're all going out, in especially in the early stages, we're all going out, we're all selling, and we may have our different functions internally, but everybody's responsible for getting out there being in the field. Do you think, you know, in a situation like that, I'm actually just kind of curious to get your opinion, are those all, you know, partners in some level within the business in those early stages?

Ryan McManus  18:30

They could be. I probably wouldn't have done it that way. I would have just viewed it as like friends who are working together on projects.

Callan Harrington  18:36

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So you did this for about three years. Is that right?

Ryan McManus  18:41

Yeah, we three or four years.

Callan Harrington  18:43

Gotcha. And then from there, that's when you started SHARE Mobility. Is that correct?

Ryan McManus  18:48

Yeah, I like to say that ContentVia incubated the early ideas of SHARE Mobility. And the first team members of SHARE came from ContentVia.

Callan Harrington  18:59

Tell us about that a little bit. What did that process look like? Was this something that you just couldn't put down? Right? Like, you just couldn't put this idea off? And you just kind of had to do it? What did that look like?

Ryan McManus  19:09

The opportunity to pitch an idea to the Jaguar Land Rover incubator was really the driving force behind this starting. Had that not been there, had there not been the seed funding,? I don't know that I would have pursued it because it was so ambitious.

Callan Harrington  19:20

How did you find them? Or did they find you? Or what did that look like?

Ryan McManus  19:23

My friend Rob Coons connected me. He was a classmate from Ohio Dominican. And he connected me with somebody that was working in the incubator, and helped get our application in and read.

Callan Harrington  19:35

Interesting. And so just kind of a random connection from a friend ,got in there, got it. Was it an easy decision for you to say, we need to go after this, or was that really challenging? What did that look like, that kind of evaluation process?

Ryan McManus  19:51

I didn't really overthink it at the time. My wife tells the story really good where you know, in May I came home and was like, hey, I pitched this idea. It probably isn't going to go anywhere. And then the next week, I was like, well I talked to them, they actually like it. And then the next week, it was like, we might need to move to Portland in a month. And it all happened really quickly. But it was the next step that I wanted to take as an entrepreneur to go from a service business to a product business. And it felt like the best opportunity I had.

Callan Harrington  20:21

So it was like it was a Derek Severs hell yes or no, like this was a hell yes, for you.

Ryan McManus  20:26

Absolutely. Yeah, it was not a hard decision on whether I should do it or not.

Callan Harrington  20:30

Okay, so you go into this, you've now we're getting into the venture capital space, how is that different than what you'd experienced at the previous company that you founded?

Ryan McManus  20:41

Yeah, I mean, it's still people serving a problem, you have to capitalize the business. The biggest difference, I think, is that when you're running your own company, you can choose how to make revenue in any type of way. When you go down the path of a venture capital based business, you're presenting a specific type of business, and you're getting them to back a specific type of future that you're trying to create. And so it's not okay to just make any type of revenue, you have to build a specific type of revenue, because that's the commitment you've made to the investors.

Callan Harrington  21:15

So the difference is, when you don't have investors, it's, we can grow iterate this however we choose, which there's pros and cons to that. And then when you're raising money, whether that's venture capital or angel, really just taking on outside investors, just in general, it's: we have a purpose, we have to optimize towards this purpose, because we're really beginning with the end in mind. Because we're looking at what this market is and everything else. Is that essentially correct?

Ryan McManus  21:42

Yeah, very much so. And now you have an external partner who's helping you set timelines and goals. And it gives you an an outside guide point that I think is really helpful as a solo entrepreneur, sometimes you don't have that guidance and input.

Callan Harrington  21:57

What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced as you're growing this? And I love to say, in the early stages, the first couple years of doing this, what were those, those kind of initial challenges?

Ryan McManus  22:07

One of the biggest challenges we had was external failures that impacted the impressions of our business. So when we first started, we competed with a company called Ford Chariot. And they were viewed as like the biggest, they were part of Ford. And then, after the first year of competing, they shut down.

Callan Harrington  22:27

How come? What happened?

Ryan McManus  22:28

Oh, there's a lot behind it. We'll just say that it was competing interests with an automaker, that you can't compete with your own customer. And if you have a services business, doing transportation, and you sell vans to companies doing transportation, you're competing with your own customer. And that's probably why they didn't continue it. But they did a huge PR campaign about why that business did not work. And so we ended up having to spend a lot of time early on explain why we're not doing what the ride sharing companies were, how we could build a profitable business, how we were going to make something work, when a major company like Ford couldn't make it work.

Callan Harrington  23:04

How did that impact- I'm actually curious about two things. How did that impact getting new customers? How did that impact the employees internally?

Ryan McManus  23:12

I don't think it impacted the employees internally at all. I don't think they had a lot of awareness to those external companies. And I don't think a lot of the negative perceptions were aimed at them in any way. So I don't think it affected them. If anything, it was probably like fuel, like, yeah, let's get fired up. We can do this. If they can't do it, we can do this. It did affect the customers, because we were always, one ,explaining how we're different. Because there was a trust factor that we had to get them to overcome. And why we were going to be able to make something work when a large company couldn't.

Callan Harrington  23:44

Interesting. So what did you guys do from there?

Ryan McManus  23:47

We just kept winning deals. I think in the first year, we maybe only lost one account to Chariot. And just by consistently winning deals, we were able to prove that we had the right solution.

Callan Harrington  23:59

How did that feel?

Ryan McManus  24:01

Every time you sell it feels good. You know, there's nothing better than selling. And it's the kind of validation we seek as entrepreneurs that your idea works.

Callan Harrington  24:09

So you've got some good traction closing deals, you're going against a pretty serious headwind, and then there's a PR campaign as to why, yes, it's why this company didn't work. But really, it's why these companies can't work, is the message if I'm understanding that correctly. So you've got all these headwinds that you're going into, getting traction, COVID hits. Tell us that story.

Ryan McManus  24:32

March 18th, we lost 96% of revenue in one day. And prior to COVID, we worked with schools, senior communities, companies, and cities. We had way too many customer types, but within a couple of days, all of them shut down. And we had to step back and say, how long is this gonna last? We thought it'd only be a couple of weeks. And do we still have the business that we thought we had, because clearly product market fit was gone. And we needed to decide, do we continue with all of the unknowns? Or is this the right time to shut it down? I was and still am in love with this business and the need for it to exist. And so despite that hardship, we rallied the team and said, we've got to find what business we can serve in this current world. And let's assume it never goes back to the normal that we knew. Let's assume nobody ever goes into the office again, let's assume that people are going to continue to social distance. Who's still moving in April of 2020? And what we saw that there were people going to do cleaning of buildings, they needed rides, the bus wasn't available for them anymore. And we saw people going to manufacturing and logistics at the height of the pandemic, when no one else had to go to work. If you were working a production line to build auto parts, or you were involved in boxing up packages for e-commerce, there was a huge need for people. And we found that SHARE Mobility actually helps your company fill jobs. And then we had a bunch of value propositions. And it was because of COVID, that we learned that our value proposition was that we help companies fill jobs. And if you can offer transportation, instead of saying it's on you, everybody has to have their own transportation, if you can say we have transportation for you, there is a huge pool of people that can become your employees.

Callan Harrington  26:31

Super interesting. So if I could just recap that real quick, what I'm hearing is, lost 96% of revenue.  And what what actually ended up happening was, you know, when you kind of took a step back and said, all right, do we shut this down? Do we do this? If we're going to do this, who needs mobility? Who needs to get from point A to point B right now? Really interesting, considering I wouldn't- The one in particular, I think that you mentioned, the cleaning supplies, like that one- Or like cleaning jobs, like that makes total sense. I guess what I wouldn't have considered was the e-commerce. And being in some of these, you know, these factories, these distribution centers and things like that. And if I'm hearing you it is, they live in areas that aren't necessarily the easiest to get to. The company's saying, if you can get here, we'd love to have you. And what you're saying is, we're going to flip this a little bit and say, we're going to provide you with a service that's going to expand your recruiting pool, and your ability to be able to pull skilled workers, talented workers in is that correct?

Ryan McManus  27:34

Yep.

Callan Harrington  27:35

What was that roller coaster like, right? This roller coaster from we lost the 96% of our revenue, and now we've found this gap, we've really narrowed, our focus, kind of it was narrowed for you. What did that feel like?

Ryan McManus  27:43

Yep.  Well, it felt very good to find product market fit in a difficult environment. And we felt like there was going to be that need for a long period of time. And then we found this research about called the sansdemic. And it talked about the impact of baby boomers retiring, the decline in birth rates over the last twenty or thirty years, and young people's desire for time and experiences over things. And all of this added up to a long term problem for companies that have frontline workers, and that if they don't offer transportation, they are going to completely lose their workforce.

Callan Harrington  27:48

What's the link between that?

Ryan McManus  27:49

So one, if you're earning between fifteen and twenty dollars an hour, and you're working full time, it's likely that you're spending somewhere between twenty five and thirty five per cent of your income on transportation. Becomes a huge percentage of your expense, your household expense. Now, put that person in a job that's thirty minutes or more away from where you live. You can look outside of Columbus, all of the surrounding counties, there are a ton of manufacturing logistics companies where their employees have to cross the county line to get to work. There is no public transit that follows that. Now they're working on some legislation that's going to make it easier for public transit agencies to share costs. But right now, public transit, nowhere in the country really crosses a county line. And so the companies are being placed in tax abated areas where the workforce doesn't live. And they have to go find urban areas where there is the density of people that can take those jobs.

Callan Harrington  29:33

Really interesting. So okay, so now you guys kind of hit this pocket. What changed within the company? Did you have to realign to this? Did everything that you were doing before kind of fall in line? Or what did that look like?

Ryan McManus  29:46

Well, you know, we were down to bare bones during COVID. So we had to kind of build our team back up. We hired an awesome CTO, Adeel Syed, who helped us build our product. We had to go and prove that there were customers outside of just Ohio. You know, at the time, we were only in Ohio. So we had to go prove that this wasn't an Ohio problem. And we had to figure out how to operate in other markets. And so from '20 to '21, we learned how to expand without having to buy more vehicles and how to operate other states. And then in 2020, we really focused on our ICP of manufacturing logistics and other frontline workers and tried to land and expand with the existing customers. So to take somebody that had one site and see how many new sites could we get them to open up?

Callan Harrington  30:35

Which is a totally different go-to-market strategy, correct?

Ryan McManus  30:38

 A little bit. Yeah, we had to build our sales organization, so that we could have a deep pipeline of companies across the country. So you know, we built the performance marketing function, we figured out how to do lead generation and email marketing. And then we learned that the biggest thing we have to do is educate HR. Because even though we know they have this problem, their executives aren't aware of this problem. And they're not going to spend the money for our solution unless they really understand that this is a problem that that we can solve.

Callan Harrington  31:08

How did you guys do that? How did you change your messaging in order to accomplish that goal?

Ryan McManus  31:12

So we built this product called a commuter analysis, and it allows us to take in a spreadsheet of an employer's list of employee home addresses. And so by intaking that data, we're able to predict which employees need transportation. Who could ride public transit, how much are they spending on the commute, and really quantify the cost of transportation to a company. And we found that for every open job, companies are losing somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars a month. And we found companies that had 100, 200 open jobs, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, because they couldn't fill those positions.

Callan Harrington  31:51

So they had no idea about this?

Ryan McManus  31:53

They anecdotally knew.

Callan Harrington  31:54

Okay.

Ryan McManus  31:55

They knew like, hey, sometimes people don't show up because they have car trouble. They didn't know if it's an excuse or not. They knew that like, yeah, people don't travel that far. But they didn't really understand the cost of it. And one of the reasons is because they're not allowed to know anything about their transportation. Every company uses on their job description or job application, it says, do you have reliable transportation, and companies are not legally allowed to ask if you own a car. So that means that they're not even asking if they can help you. And they just put that off on the individual. They collected no data on it. So they really didn't even understand the scope of the problem.

Callan Harrington  32:29

Are you familiar Challenger Sale?

Ryan McManus  32:30

I love Challenger Sale. It's a great book.

Callan Harrington  32:32

It seems like the absolute perfect use case. It's my favorite sales methodology.

Ryan McManus  32:36

I think it's the best. Yeah.

Callan Harrington  32:37

Well, for that. And to clarify, it's the best for something like this. So for our listeners that are unfamiliar, The Challenger Sale is you're essentially- the easiest way I could say it is, instead of when you're going in and talking with somebody and asking questions and them saying, oh, yeah, no, you really understand our problem. You present it in a way, and you teach them something where they sit back and say, ah, man, I never thought about it like that. I have to assume you got a lot of those. Was it a lot of "I never thought about it like that," when you started showing this data? Is that fair to say?

Ryan McManus  33:09

Absolutely. I mean, I was blown away, how every time we show someone a map of where their employees live, they say to us, we've never looked at the data this way. We've never considered that we're asking our employees to spend 30% of what we pay them just to get here.

Callan Harrington  33:26

So interesting. And when you can do that successfully, your deal sizes go way up, because now you're talking about a- you're talking about something that's more transformational than it is an incremental gain. So I think that's pretty amazing. How did you have to evolve as a CEO, as you've kind of grown now to this next stage?

Ryan McManus  33:49

I think the biggest learning was probably going from pre to post Series A.

Callan Harrington  33:54

Why is that?

Ryan McManus  33:55

Well, the scale of a business is so much more having to build a really great leadership team and having to be comfortable doing less and leading more. You know, I was very hands on, early on. And for the business to scale, I have to operate differently.

Callan Harrington  34:10

What are some of the things that- How have you went about doing that? What are some things that you've kind of implemented, or read, or resources that you've used in order to apply to upskill yourself as a CEO and founder?

Ryan McManus  34:21

So I've got myself a an executive coach, that helps a lot, giving me guidance on you know, how to manage a board of directors, how to think about communications to your investors and your team. I've talked to a lot of other founders that have gotten to a later stage, and they've kind of explained to me their own evolutions, when to know to take a break. You know, there's a lot of times that you can, like feel a certain way about the business, but it's really you just need to take a break. You need to take like half a day off and go away from the business for a little bit.

Callan Harrington  34:55

So, it's so true, founders, executives, CEOs, pretty much like you feel like you never can take that break. And then the worst thing that you could do is take the break, and then be connected 24/7, because you're not getting the benefits of that break. What I love that you said is, you just said a half day, it doesn't have to be a two week, you don't have to go on a retreat. I'm not saying don't do that, if you have the capabilities to do it, and the business is able to do it, great. Do it. But like, just a half day can be enough to- because you're probably thinking about this 24/7 is my guess. Is that fair to say?

Ryan McManus  35:28

Of course, of course.

Callan Harrington  35:31

So, you know, as you're building this, what's next, what do you see next for SHARE Mobility?

Ryan McManus  35:37

I want to make transportation as an employee benefit as common as health insurance. And one of the big next steps for us is getting legislation passed for Ohio, that's going to create an incentive for companies that provide employee transportation. Right now, there is no state that incentivizes companies to pay for employee transportation. In Brazil, companies are legally required to provide employee transportation. Google has been doing this for a decade with the Google bus where they provide transportation. For us to go from the early adopters to a less innovative portion of the market, we need to get a subsidy that's going to incentivize the companies to get started. By having the subsidy we'll be able to get enough companies on that our scale will reduce the costs greater than the tax incentive that we have. And my goal is to get HR departments to be offering employee transportation of any type. I want them offering the bus, I want them offering carpooling, and I absolutely want them to have SHARE Mobility, when those other options are not available. But if we could get every company to offer commuter benefits, within five years, every employee would be introduced to a different way to commute. That's about the average turnover of all of our workforce. So if we got every company in Ohio to put into the new hire packet, here are options that are alternatives to driving, within five years, we could make a massive impact on the workforce. I love it. That's so interesting. Last question. If you could have a conversation with your younger self, age totally up to you, what would that conversation be? What advice would you give them? So I would go back and talk to the college Ryan. As I'm starting, my first company was called Ohio Noise Booking, and we did band bookings,.I would tell myself to go meet other entrepreneurs sooner. I read the books, I watched the videos, I didn't go meet the people. And I I wanted to be an entrepreneur until the day that I met entrepreneurs who gave me the blueprint. And if twenty-year-old Ryan, when I was at Ohio Dominican, would have gone out and met other entrepreneurs, I would have been able to start on that path almost a decade sooner. And one of the things I try to do is go to the universitiess to go meet people who want to be entrepreneurs. So I could be that for them. Because I've had a ton of people that did that for me. And I hope I can help other entrepreneurs start earlier. What we need to do for the next generation of entrepreneurs is challenge them to build businesses that matter. You can look at the last twenty years of innovation. And we've had a lot of great minds work on things that don't matter all of that much. They can consume our attention with clicks, but it doesn't make our world better. I think this generation that's coming up now that's in college, and will be in college, my kids. I think they have an opportunity to innovate in a really meaningful way and build technologies and companies that change the way we live in a positive way. And I'm really excited about what this generation is going to do. I love it. Ryan, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks, Callan. I appreciate the conversation.

Callan Harrington  39:00

I hope you enjoyed Ryan and I's conversation. I loved hearing all the stories about the rebound that they had. And it is so clear how passionate he is about the problem that they're solving. If you want to learn more about Ryan, you could find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, and I'll see everybody next week.