Victor Cheng, CEO Coach at SaasCEO.com

Victor Cheng is a CEO coach for founders of SaaS companies, and author of Extreme Revenue Growth. He explains his background and skillset, and the methodologies he uses applies in leading the Coaching Groups. He also explains what members can expect from joining a group, and how they will benefit.

I’ve worked in strategy, product management, product marketing, finance and growth strategy. I’ve done a lot of operating roles, I’ve done a lot of strategy roles, and I’ve also served as a board member to various SaaS companies. My perspective on all this is to really help founders and CEOs achieve the outcomes they want and do it in a way where it’s very achievable. I can take all this complexity and sophistication and just make it really easy to use and to get results.

A lot of the things I teach you can probably learn elsewhere. My ability, personally, is to get people to do it — to make it easy enough where they’re not intimidated, it seems very doable, and then they actually do it and they’re successful.

That’s the secret sauce, combined with bringing in smart, capable people together as part of these groups. You learn an awful lot by being with people that are very smart and more experienced than you or having different experiences than you.

My focus has been taking all those things that an institutional investor will do after they invest in a business to make it more valuable, take that expertise, and move it earlier in the process so that the founder can capture that value they’ve created for their business.

Sometimes people ask, “What makes this CEO group different?”

First, we’re very SaaS-specific. We’re focused on technology companies, specifically software, or service companies where they have a technology enablement component. That’s very different than a lot of the larger CEO groups out there.
And we are very focused not just on having a CEO peer group, but specifically on building a business that is ready to do a transaction, or an exit-ready business, or an institutional capital-ready business. And that is a very different focus.

Our focus is on SaaS companies and technology-enabled services companies that really want to either raise capital from an outside institutional investor, or to sell to an institutional investor, or a strategic investor, or buyer.

That’s very different than running a business just to take money from a salary every year. There’s a divide there, and we specialize in those businesses that want to achieve that outcome.

I take things that are very complex and make them very simple and actionable. It’s this huge world of all these things you need to know to build a company to be able to sell it. And it’s very confusing and overwhelming. I focus on what is the one action you need to take right now at this stage to get you to the next level.

One of the things we do in our group is we invite a lot of guest speakers. We’ve had M&A attorneys join, we’ve had folks that are executive recruiters that hire professional CEOs, CTOs, and CMOs, and we’ve had other types of consultants who’ve joined in.

Our goal is to bring all the resources in the entire private equity, strategic equity ecosystem needed to get a company to a very high level. We bring all those resources to bear before there’s a transaction so the founder can realize the benefits of increasing the company’s value so they can capture it for themselves, as opposed to selling the business and the new investors then do all these things so that they benefit.

If a Founder CEO is looking to join a group, there are a couple reasons why they’d want to consider joining my group, rather than the others that are available out there.

The industry focus. There are very, very few groups that are really focused on technology, or SaaS companies specifically, or technology-enabled services companies. Recurring revenue is a very different animal, financially and operationally, from selling a service or selling a widget. The challenges, the headaches, the best practices, it’s just very, very different in a subscription business versus another one.
The focus we have around achieving a particular outcome. Our group focus is not just to make the business bigger and better, it is specifically to make it bigger and better in a specific way that’s compatible with raising capital from or selling a business to institutional capital or a strategic buyer.
My special skill, my superpower, is to take those very advanced sophisticated things that are on Wall Street, for example, and make it very doable for the average founder and CEO.